A right to know : The positioning of infants as ‘knowers’ in educator-infant interactions

A core principle of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN General Assembly, Convention on the Rights of the Child. United Nations, Retrieved from https://treaties.un.org/doc/Treaties/1990/09/19900902%2003-14%20AM/C... 1989) is that children have the right to contribute to matters that concern them. The concept of agency is thus brought to the fore, affording children the right to participate in, and make meaningful contributions to, the contexts in which they live and learn. Previous research has identified how agency in infant-educator play can be collaboratively constructed through interactions which support intrinsic motivation (Degotardi, Varied perspectives on play and learning: theory and research on early years education. Information Age, Charlotte, 2013). In this chapter, this idea is extended by examining how educator-infant interactions afford even very young children the opportunities to express and obtain information (Article 13). Agency is positioned as a cognitive, as well as a motivational concept, with very young children having the right to be treated and interacted with as knowers and thinkers. This chapter takes the theoretical position that language plays a major role in the socialisation of children as knowers and thinkers, and therefore as agents who construct and contribute to their own and others’ knowledge and understandings (Halliday, Learning how to mean: explorations in the development of language. Edward Arnold, London, 1975; Nelson, Language in cognitive development: the emergence of the mediated mind. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996). Drawing on data from a large research project which investigated the language environment of infant-toddler early childhood classrooms, the chapter illustrates how, through their experience with particular forms of talk, infants and toddlers are being afforded different opportunities to share and extend their knowledge. Language is thus simultaneously positioned as a tool for learning and a source of learning as it provides rich opportunities for infants to participate fully and capably in the knowledge culture of their infant-toddler room.

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