The need to understand the child’s perspective is essential to supporting the child’s learning and development. First, we will explore why the child’s perspective is important and next discuss how to understand the child’s perspective through emergent listening, being with the child in the present moment, and discovering creativity.
Importance of the child’s perspective
Supporting children to make sense of their own experiences by attentively listening and holding space for the child to explore their thoughts, emotions and experiences creates a space in which the child feels seen, heard, and held. It’s in this space of feeling understood and held that the child becomes empowered to actively participate in their own learning — their own sense making of what they are experiencing. The supportive adult can provide gentle guidance along the way to encourage but ultimately should follow the child’s cues.
Vivian Paley, an early childhood education teacher and researcher believes that teaching and research should be a “search for the child’s point of view.” To assist in this search, Paley encourages the use of narrative story telling to help illustrate and illuminate the child’s perspective. As children narrate their stories providing insights into their experiences, adults can engage in what professor and scholar, Brownyn Davies, calls emergent listening.
Emergent Listening
“Emergent listening is to discover what is not yet said but is trying hard to be heard – this requires trust.” (Davies, 2014)
Davies discusses lines of ascent in how we communicate with children. Through emergent listening, which occurs when the listener is fully engaged in presence and attention, the listener can support children to follow lines of ascent leading to a path of further exploration, and learning. Important to note that there are also lines of descent, representing an unproductive path of misunderstanding.
Foundational to emergent listening is the use of the diffractive method. Davies explains that, “Taking up the diffractive method, I experience a shift from the desire to produce lucid documentation and analysis to the desire to listen intently to the multi-directional, minutely detailed patterns of interference” (Davies, 2014). A diffractive method is not simply a reflection — for example, listening to reflect back what the child is saying – instead diffraction is “involved in its ongoing production” (Davies, 2014) and it’s through this ongoing production, also likened to an unfolding, that meaning and insights can emerge. Because this is an intra-active process involving both the narrator and the listener, communication in this sense is alive – changing and evolving as meaning emerges.
For emergent listening to occur, we must resist “against the desire to regulate and control.” By letting go of the need to regulate and control, “Haecceity or grace can occur in moments of emergent listening” (Davies, 2014). Haecceity isn’t a word I’m familiar with so I looked it up and found that it’s a philosophical term. According to Merriam-Webster, haecceity is “the status of being an individual or a particular nature. Specifically: what makes something to be an ultimate reality different from any other. Another term that surfaced related to haecceity is thisness which is, “the quality in a thing of being here and now or such as it is : the concrete objective reality of a thing.” Therefore, through emergent listening, novel and authentic insights can occur, this then leads to enriched learning opportunities and from these insights, teachers can create pathways for children to expand their learning experience.
Emergent listening requires trust and a steadfast patience, and in this process – or perhaps better described as a learning journey – there is treasure to be found.
Being…and Becoming
To engage in emergent listening, the teacher must “Focus on the being (not the becoming only – the next step) of the child, attune and develop a trust in relationship as well as create time and space for time to listen to the child narrate their experiences” (Davies, 2014)
Listening is a direct pathway to understand the child’s being in the present moment. When understood in the present moment, this helps the child and teacher to unlock the potential of the next moment…and the next…and the next…Slowly and over time, the child is becoming more of their authentic self through the support of warm and caring attention through listening that holds the space for the child to discover and learn.
Creating
Lori Custodero (2005) says that children’s creative worlds are “characterized by a sense of wonder and ability to imagine and invent,” providing “a source of artistic genesis cited by composers, performers, psychologists, and educators” (p. 36).
Children are naturally creative and tuned into the world of imagination. Through emergent listening and the held presence of simply being in the moment, new creative insights, musings, and ideas can open up.
Nurturing creativity in early childhood sets an expansive foundation from which the child can build upon throughout life. After all, it is through imagination and creativity that new solutions are found, technologies advance, and beautiful wonders are brought to life.
Custodero, L.A. (2005). “Being With”: The Resonant Legacy of Childhood’s Creative Aesthetic. The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39(2), 36-57. doi:10.1353/jae.2005.0015.
Davies, Bronwyn. (2014). Listening to children: Being and becoming. 10.4324/9781315770390.
Paley, Vivian Gussin (2008). On listening to what the children say. In Alexandra Miletta & Maureen McCann Miletta (eds.), _Classroom Conversations: A Collection of Classics for Parents and Teachers_. The New Press.
Learning to Create. 