Daycare centers as more-than-pedagogical places: Ethnographic explorations into the complex actuality of early childhood

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Christina Huf; Dr. Markus Kluge
• Subject Area: Educational Research on Socialization, Welfare and Professionalism
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 550025365

Attending a daycare center is a biographical normality in the 21st century. From the perspective of the Social Studies of Childhood, daycare centers are institutions that are constitutive for children’s live and the construction of childhood. Despite the dedicated interest of Childhood Studies in empirically understanding the complexity and relationality of children's lives, daycare centers have not yet been systematically researched from this perspective. Rather, research focusses primarily the pedagogical significance of daycare centers and their importance as an educational institution. This orientation is characterized by the rationale that daycare centers are educational institutions. Based on this premise, early childhood education research focuses on the question how practitioners can do justice to the individual child. Accordingly, child-centeredness is a central orientation. Against this background, the proposed project aims to research daycare centers in a way that 1. confronts the premise that the daycare center is only a pedagogical place with the question of how day care centres can be understood as a complex, relational actuality 2. explores the complex, relational reality of daycare centers with an ethnographic study 3. analyses processes and dynamics beyond child-centeredness. Our research interest is focused on the question of how daycare centers can be understood as 'more-than-pedagogical places'. This question is inspired by theoretical perspectives in childhood research: On the one hand, on research which examines the practices and processes of the production of pedagogical orders between children and adults beyond normative perspectives; on the other hand, on the relational ontologist approach in Childhood Studies, which is realized with the new materialist approach of Karen Barad's Agential Realism. The ethnographic field research will be carried out in four daycare centers, which have been selected with regard to the fact that they are situated in different places where different more-than-human actors are present: A farm daycare center, a Reggio-Emilia daycare center, a forest daycare center and a nursery class in an English 'infant school'.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants