The Work of the Eye in Infant Pedagogy: A Dialogic Encounter of ‘Seeing’ in an Education and Care Setting

• Published in: International journal of early childhood 2015-08, Vol.47 (2), p.283-299
• Main Authors: White, Elizabeth Jayne, Redder, Bridgette, Peter, Mira
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Babies; Cognitive Ability; Dialogs (Language); Early Childhood Education; Education; Eye Movements; Foreign Countries; Infants; International and Comparative Education; Interpersonal communication; Motor Reactions; New Zealand; Nonverbal Communication; Original Article; Pedagogy; Preschool Teachers; Resistance (Psychology); Teacher Student Relationship; Young Children
• ISSN: 0020-7187; 1878-4658
• DOI: 10.1007/s13158-015-0139-8

This paper examines the significance of a ‘look’ in infant–teacher dialogues in an early education and care centre in New Zealand. Drawing on Bakhtin’s principle of ‘visual surplus’ video recordings of two infants’, aged under 1 year of age, interactions with their teacher and teacher interpretations of these interactions were analysed in terms of the time it took for an infant to be ‘noticed’. The results revealed that teachers responded to infants’ initiations significantly faster when a ‘look’ accompanied verbal initiation than when it did not, while the length of the interaction did not depend on whether or not a ‘look’ was used to initiate an interaction. Different types of ‘looks’ (a gaze/glance/watch) were found to generate different responses and were given different values by teachers. Results also highlight the fact that ‘look’ initiations are often nested within language sequences that take place in a larger dialogic space of adults and peers. The findings point to the significance of the ‘work of the eye’ in understanding the complex nature of communications that occur between adults and infants in early childhood education settings.