Orchestrating professional development for baby room practitioners: Raising the stakes in new dialogic encounters

Kathleen Goouch and Sacha Powell

Canterbury Christ Church University, UK

In Journal of Early Childhood Research 11(1) 78-92, 2012

Resumo

Este artigo surgiu de um projeto de pesquisa e desenvolvimento, The Baby Room, que foi projetado para investigar como os bebés são cuidados em creches. No projeto foi criada uma forma de desenvolvimento profissional que designou um espaço central de encontro dialógico, que possibilitou aos profissionais que participaram do projeto, a teorização da sua prática. Os resultados indicam que aqueles que trabalham com bebés sentem-se frequentemente isolados e negligenciados em relação à sua prática, que os profissionais têm um sentimento de autovalorização muito baixo em relação ao seu trabalho, baixa autoconfiança e uma incapacidade ou relutância para articular os próprios entendimentos da sua prática. Significativamente, também descobrimos que muitos dos profissionais não conversavam rotineira, acidental ou intuitivamente com os bebés sob os seus cuidados, nem estavam cientes da importância de fazê-lo. Embora seja difícil fornecer evidências de pesquisa robustas para demonstrar quaisquer conexões causais próximas entre a falta de conversa profissional, o evidente baixo valor próprio dos profissionais e as experiências de conversa com bebés , o estudo indica que pode haver conexões entre os conhecimento e compreensão profissional, a sua confiança, as  oportunidades de experiência de diálogo profissional e suas percepções da necessidade de desenvolver momentos de conversação com bebés. Este artigo descreve os antecedentes e a justificativa para o trabalho do projeto, abrange algumas questões-chave em relação à conversa e a importância dos encontros dialógicos profissionais para aqueles que trabalham com bebés, e indica o potencial que isso pode ter para resultados positivos na prática. 

Abstract

This article has emerged from a research and development project, The Baby Room, which was designed to examine how babies are cared for in daycare settings. Within the project, a form of professional development was created which designated a central space for dialogic encounter, primarily to enable the baby room practitioners who participated in the project to begin to theorize their practice. Findings indicate that those working with babies frequently feel isolated and neglected in relation to support for their practice, that the practitioners had a very low sense of self-worth in relation to their work, low self-confidence and an inability or a reluctance to articulate their own understandings of their practice. Significantly we also found that many of the practitioners were not routinely, incidentally or intuitively talking to the babies in their care, nor were they aware of the importance of doing so. While it is difficult to provide robust research evidence to demonstrate any close causal connections between the lack of professional talk, the evident low self-worth of the practitioners and talk experiences with babies, the study does indicate that there may be distinct connections between practitioners’ professional knowledge and understanding, their confidence, opportunities for professional talk experience and their perceptions of the need to develop talk encounters with babies. This article describes the background and rationale for the project work, ranges over some key issues in relation to talk, and the importance of professional dialogic encounters for those working with babies, and it indicates the rich potential this may have for positive talk outcomes in baby room practice.

Introduction: The background

As families’ economic situations are shifting with employment downturns in Britain and elsewhere in the world and with the subsequent need to adjust working arrangements for parents and other family members, it is difficult to identify clear data to demonstrate exactly how many children are in looked after contexts outside of their homes. However, relatively recent statistical data (DCSF, 2008; OECD, 2006) indicate that more than 40 percent of babies and children under two years of age in the UK are being cared for by people who are not members of their families. There is evi­dence to show that families are increasingly using formal childcare. Although this increase is marked amongst higher income families, 31 percent of families with an annual income under £10,000 are also reported to use formal childcare (Bryson et al., 2006). It is not completely clear from statistics currently available exactly what proportion of this percentage are babies, or how many are in the care of childminders. However, The Baby Room Project, which looked at the care of some 370 babies, contributes to a developing body of evidence indicating that some babies, including some as young as six weeks of age, are looked after in daycare settings for up to 45 hours per week. Given this information, The Baby Room Project has been attempting to respond to an urgent need for information about what is actually happening in baby rooms: who cares for babies and what is the nature of the environments, interactions and resources in place to support babies’ development and learning. The project began in 2009 and is continuing. Thirty-seven settings were recruited and, of these, twenty-five settings, and twenty-five practitioners, formed a core project research group. Additionally, 16 Local Authority advisers joined the project to collect case study data to inform the work and to further their own professional development in relation to the centre-based care of babies. A mosaic approach to research practice was employed to gather qualitative research data, with a range of methods used, including interview, observations (and video), field notes and the practitioners’ use of the ‘NING’ (a protected social networking site).

The project’s research aims have been to interrogate baby room practices; to explore and record practitioners’ knowledge and understanding; and to identify any changes resulting from the pro­ject’s activities. The core research questions were:

• what happens to babies in baby rooms?

• who looks after babies in baby rooms?

• what are these practitioners’ qualifications, experience, knowledge and understanding?

• what are the influences on their practice?

In addition, a key element was the intention to employ the use of original research to enable the provision of bespoke professional development sessions, offering opportunities for practitioners working with babies to reflect on their knowledge, to consider how this relates to their practice, and to extend their knowledge and understanding through discussion and reflection.

Who works in baby rooms?

In the UK the practitioners who work with babies in daycare are frequently the least experienced and the least qualified amongst the staff group and in our project the practitioners’ ages mostly ranged from 16 to 25. During recent years it has been clear that UK government initiatives have been directed towards improved qualifications for those working with young children. However, the focus of much of the attention, and the funding, has been on the creation of a graduate-led and managed workforce rather than the professional development of the core workforce in nurseries.

It is also important to note that the use of the term ‘qualified’ to describe practitioners here in the UK refers to the requirement for a nationally recognized competence-based qualification, although an independent review of early years and childcare qualifications (Nutbrown, 2012) had com­menced at the time of writing. In other countries, in New Zealand for example, the term ‘qualified’ refers to those who have graduated through a degree programme.

The responsibility of working with babies in daycare is considerable and is growing, with new calls to undertake early interventions to ensure later academic success. A ‘policy paradox’ is evi­dent in some countries, including England – that is ‘low-schooled workers’ (Peeters, 2008) are expected to deliver ‘quality’ outcomes in their practice with babies and very young children. There is international research evidence to demonstrate that ‘early intervention contributes significantly to putting children from low-income families on the path to development and success in school’ (OECD, 2006: 35). Indeed ‘early intervention’ has now become a key slogan in national policy. However, the same research also claims that ‘the majority’ of staff in child care services may have only a ‘one year post-16 vocational qualification, or are composed of women with no qualification in this field, employed at low wage levels and with poor working conditions’. Additionally, a sur­vey by the Adult Learning Inspectorate, Early Years: It’s Not All Child’s Play (2006), found that more than two-thirds of the early years advanced apprentices failed to gain their full award of NVQ Level 3. Although enormous responsibility is placed upon those working with babies, it seems that high-quality initial training, in service support and continuing professional development is not generally experienced by practitioners to support any attempts by them at early intervention strate­gies, whatever form these might ultimately take. Recent investment and initiatives by a former British (New Labour) government sought to address some of these issues but their initiatives had tended to be weighted towards collaboration between agencies, the development of lead profes­sionals in early years settings and training for the new graduate level Early Years Professional Status, rather than the training, support and development of basic level or auxiliary staff. The Early Years Foundation Stage in England (DCSF, 2008), which is a statutory framework for those work­ing with children from birth to five, has been reviewed. The review (Tickell, 2011) has recom­mended the provision of a ‘professional, well supported workforce’ for the early years of education and care with a strong recommendation to the UK government to ‘upskill the workforce’ through ensuring high standards of new entry qualifications of the equivalent status of the NNEB qualifica­tion. Additionally in this report, there is a recommendation that the quality of the content of exist­ing training and development should be reviewed.

In general terms then, and through informally gathered information, there seems to be broad acknowledgement of the fact that those working with the youngest children in centre-based day­care in England are traditionally those practitioners who are the least qualified and the least expe­rienced of the staff employed in nurseries; essentially this phase of the workforce comprises young women. The most experienced and more highly qualified practitioners tend to be employed with the older children in nurseries, those children nearer in age to school (OECD, 2006). There is no reason to suppose that this may change with the government’s concern with ‘readiness for school’. However, there has been little or no statistical information gathered (or published) relating to this situation (with the exception of OECD, 2006) and a general acceptance of this way of deploying staff is commonplace; that is, the highest qualified and experienced staff work with the oldest chil­dren in nurseries. While nursery staff, as a group compared with school staff, are frequently referred to as the ‘Cinderellas’ in the field, with baby rooms staff perceiving themselves as the least fortu­nate in this group, for economic reasons there has been little appetite amongst private companies and policy-makers to address the issue.

The way(s) in which society constructs and frames those employed to work with babies is cen­tral to how baby room workers view themselves and are viewed by others. The label applied in contemporary discourse in England – practitioners – in its abstract nature suggests ambiguity, that is, neither teacher nor care-giver, and reflects the ambiguous nature of the role in its current defini­tions. In this study we have upheld the term ‘practitioner’ for convenience, although neither approving nor disapproving of its use. However, the Nutbrown review of qualifications (2012) has also sought to gather consensus in relation to how those working in nurseries should be described. If it is possible to ‘re-envision’ the early childhood worker (Moss, 2006) then some of the tensions existing, both in the discourse and ultimately the practice, need to be made transparent in order that they can be confronted and challenged, as well as the ‘naming’ of the role. What role(s) are society and parents expecting to be fulfilled in daycare settings? Are baby rooms in daycare simple ‘ware­houses’ in the way that care for the elderly has been described recently (Dixon, 2012), that is places where our most vulnerable are kept while economically viable citizens contribute to the national economy? Moss creates and explores categories in which early childhood worker identities are frequently placed, that of ‘substitute mother’, ‘technician’ and ‘researcher’ (see Moss, 2006; Powell and Goouch, forthcoming). In England, these debates are just beginning.

The idea that ‘Quality Costs’ is included in the title of the report by the Daycare Trust (2009). Their key recommendation for a high-quality Early Childhood Education and Care provision (as opposed to existing provision which may, by default, be described as less than ‘high quality’) is unequivocally that ‘there must be more highly qualified, better paid staff’. Using costings provided by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Daycare Trust concluded that ‘if the Government were to foot the entire bill for centre based Early Childhood Education and Care at high quality rates (i.e. with better qualified, rewarded and managed staff), it would involve expenditure of just above £9 billion a year in England (the country spends £23.4 billion a year on higher education and £30.1 billion a year on secondary schools in England)’ (Daycare Trust, 2009: 6). The dilemma seems to be that, while governments have been clearly informed of the significance of the early years of children’s lives in relation to development and learning, any changes will require major financial investment and evidence of the value of such an investment (Ben-Galim, 2011). It is questionable whether governments focused on austerity and reduction in public service funding are likely to increase spending at all or to this extent, in spite of strong arguments in favour of early intervention in chil­dren’s care and education rhetoric (‘Grasping the nettle’, C4EO, 2010) and it is with this policy and practice background that The Baby Room Project was constructed.

Professional development and project outcomes

In the early stages of the project work and towards the end of the first year, structured interviews were carried out with nursery manager/owners and the practitioners themselves on the site of nurs­eries. This enabled an early opportunity to visit baby rooms and also to gather some insight into the aims and intentions of both those managing the provision and those engaged in providing services for babies. It also provided useful evaluative data on which to base further development and sup­port. These data demonstrated that all those involved were concerned at the lack of specific devel­opment opportunities for baby care practitioners, who themselves felt that they appeared invisible in relation to training and support of their work with babies. These comments represent common views expressed during interviews:

We have a variety of training: 1st aid, food hygiene, safeguarding. . . but this is the first thing around that has been specifically about babies and it’s really interesting. It gives them [practitioners] the chance to talk to other professionals and understand what they’re doing, their perspectives, views and values. I’d love to do it myself. Can I join in? (Manager interview, September 2009). 

It’s sad that there’s so little about baby rooms.

It’s nice to feel we’re important.

There’s nothing like this out there.

(Three practitioner interviews, May 2010)

What this evidence, from a small sample set, was beginning to demonstrate was a relatively closed or hidden situation where babies and very young children are being cared for by individuals (pre­dominantly young women) who themselves felt poorly supported and in need of training beyond routine, mandatory, skills based sessions. During the project, practitioners have variously described themselves as being unimportant, invisible and, in one notable example, ‘the lowest of the low’. Of course, how those working with babies construct themselves and their roles in nursery and in soci­ety generally cannot fail to impact on their performance in those roles. Their well-being matters to the babies in their care (Elfer and Dearnley, 2007; Rockel, 2009).

Additionally, our data presented us with further information: the practitioners in baby rooms described their role, and were observed as such in role, as functional – that is, concerned to fulfil the routine requirements of the day which included feeding babies, cleaning and changing them, putting the babies to bed and tidying. As a group they are, essentially, pragmatists and defined their work as serving a social need of the moment – that is, looking after babies while their parents worked. In relation to national policy, they are generally the recipients of others’ policy information and inter­pretation, of others’ knowledge and understandings as well as recipients of their instructions in rela­tion to the babies’ care, resources and environments. The practitioners had a limited working knowledge of policy requirements which were delivered ‘second-hand’, interpreted and abbreviated rather than received by them from a primary source. Overall, there appeared to be a helplessness about the participants’ situations and significantly too, a voicelessness implicitly required of them.

In view of their collective vision of their place in nursery hierarchies and their very low sense of self-worth, the all too few development sessions planned for the project term took on new sig­nificance. One of the many challenges in this project has been that of developing relationships in a relatively short space of time and during infrequent development encounters. In any professional development activity the level of trust between participants and between the participants and the tutors needs necessarily to be high, or to develop to high levels. However, the readiness of the participants to engage in the project, the generosity of their encounters in the sessions, combined with their eagerness to learn and to learn from each other quickly influenced the nature of the ses­sions. After the first meeting, when everyone behaved tentatively and each required prompting to speak, subsequent sessions have been notably different (Durrant, 2010) – from the initial buzz of talk when they arrived and greeted us and each other to the absolute engagement of all in every debate and discussion point:

We all talk too much (laughing). It’s important to talk; there’s lots of things to respond to. It’s listening to the other ladies. (Practitioner interview, 2010)

We found that the small group of practitioners with whom we worked were keen to progress in their practice, keen to try out ways of working, keen to listen to others’ opinions and keen to share ideas of their own. This willingness to continue in their professional learning may, in part, be due to the nature of the professional development sessions themselves. They were designed to be respon­sive to the expressed and observed needs of the practitioners and to provide structured and supported opportunities to engage in debate. The centrality of talk in each of the development sessions has been a planned feature of the work from the earliest project design, although it was given additional status following initial analysis of the first interviews carried out in the project’s first stage.

At the beginning of the project, the tutors/researchers described themselves as co- learners rather than as experts in the field. This way of working with adult learners, engaging in co-constructions and collaborative knowledge building has been particularly suited to this group of practitioners, acknowledging that each has a bank of valuable experience, their own values and beliefs and their individual expectations of babies and families. It acknowledges the significance of practice knowledge while also offering critical spaces for alternative ways of thinking and work­ing to be discussed and time for reflection. We have learned to value this ourselves as a model for future project and development work and are confident that it has supported our practitioners in moving beyond the physical and practical features of their practice towards theory construction and a more substantial understanding of why they work in the ways they describe. Claxton talks of ‘rumination’, which he describes as ‘seeking insight through the act of reflecting on personal expe­rience ... chewing the cud of experience in order to extract its meanings and its implications’ (Claxton, 2000: 39–40). The level of project analysis in relation to this is embryonic but is a significant development of the work with practitioners.

Professional dialogue

The development aspect of the project has been centred around some key themes: talk, environ­ments and relationships. While these three elements naturally overlap, there have been some quite separate issues in each to address. Of these three themes, talk became the central issue in two ways. First, it became clear very early on in the Project Development Sessions that the practitioners were extremely keen to talk to each other. After the first, somewhat tentative, meeting the practitioners demonstrated how hungry they were for contact with others working in the same domain for a whole range of reasons; for example in order to compare experiences, to share incidents, to compare work patterns, to compete (in terms of quality of care) and to gossip (about their job circumstances). Second, and of paramount importance, we were gathering evidence (from observations, interviews and research conversations) that talk with babies was not a central feature of baby room life.

From research we know that the centrality of talk in babies’ and young children’s development and learning has long been understood (Bruner, 1986; Vygotsky, 1986), and is no less important in relation to the professional development of those who care for and educate children. Indeed, claims that ‘as far as the brain is concerned, stimulation is provided by conversations, experiences and encounters, irrespective of material wherewithal’ (Greenfield, 2000: 63) make clear that the need for talk exchanges is fundamental to brain development and learning and, from this project, we believe that this applies to both the babies in daycare and their young carers. Additionally, interna­tional research clearly shows that ‘young children emerge with better language skills from early childhood settings staffed by well-educated personnel’ (OECD, 2006: 164). This of course corre­lates with EPPE findings (see for example, Sammons et al., 2004). In our project, there appeared to be a combination of two troubling factors: little or no talk between practitioners and babies and no opportunities for practitioners to engage in professional talk events. The project development work began to focus on professional talk, in the expectation that talking to babies would emerge from opportunities to talk about babies.

‘If you don’t have a language you can’t talk’ (Smith, 1992)

Throughout the project, we have been repeatedly told of the value to the practitioners of time to talk. We are aware that there is ample research relating to the significant effects of dialogic exchange between teaching professionals (see for example, Medwell et al., 1998) and of the acclaim received for the Reggio Emilia approach to the shared understanding of children and the pedagogy surrounding them (Rinaldi, 2005). It seems that, in spite of this knowledge, there are still many employees of nurseries who lack opportunities to improve their practice and to develop pro­fessionally. Significantly, many of these are baby room practitioners who are either not targeted for professional development programmes or who find that such programmes are not targeted at baby room practice. Yet they are arguably in one of the most responsible positions in day care. In his work defining and understanding the power of ‘thinking’, Smith claims that the ability to think ‘depends on the company we keep; it depends on the way we perceive ourselves, which depends on the way other people treat us’ (Smith, 1992: 125). This claim has gathered support through the project. Whitehead’s idea of ‘learning in companionship’ (2009), though offered in relation to young children learning, is also relevant here, as the practitioners in our study found themselves unable to access professional company through which to learn.

Initially, we found ourselves interested in the fact that the practitioners were more enthusiastic about opportunities to talk to each other than almost any other aspect of the project work. They had begun by simply swapping details of routines, that is, have you got a separate changing area? We start at 8, what time does your shift go from? Do you provide wipes or do parents have to bring them in? This kind of talk has evidently been valuable to them. However, as time passed, it became clear that the nature of their talk was changing and the transformative value of a bespoke professional development was evident. We found in our project that as the confidence of individu­als grew so too did their interest and competence in reflection, narration and consideration of their practice. Alongside this, evidence also emerged that the practitioners were developing a vocabu­lary, that is, during their engagement with the development sessions, within professional conver­sations, they had been busy acquiring a new language, a professional discourse, which began to serve their need to understand their professional role (Durrant, 2012). When asked in their evalu­ations what they had enjoyed about their involvement in the project, expressions such as ‘sharing practice’, ‘meeting other practitioners’, ‘talking with others who understand’ were the most fre­quent responses.

Transformative value of talk in learning

In educational research related to literacy learning there is evidence to suggest that the power of narrative as a central tool for learning is overwhelmingly strong. Smith suggests that we ‘see and think about the world in the patterns of stories . . . we learn in the form of stories . . . we construct stories to make sense of events’ (1992: 62). However, if a basic recall or retelling of events and experiences and encounters provided transformative value, then teaching and learning would be a simple affair, conducted by storytellers and received by story tellers. The case is rather more com­plex and demands a constructivist approach if story is to be thought of as central to learning and if, as Bruner claims, ‘world making [through narrative] is the principal function of mind’ (2004). In order to be able to ‘tell’ a story, it must first be drawn from our knowing experience, identified and then constructed and shaped to fit the context. As we not only learn ‘the story grammars of our society, our culture’ (Rosen, 1988: 14) but also our values in relation to experience from family, community and culture, then, through this distribution of influence, as Bruner claims ‘there is no innocent eye’ (Bruner, 2004: 19). This is all of special importance in relation to the project participantes. They are not only collecting and identifying an experience of which they have been a part, but they are interpreting it and giving value to aspects of the experience according to their own histories – of homes, families, education, schooling. How lives, and the stories of lives, are viewed, valued, constructed, interpreted and retold is central to this way of thinking about story and learn­ing, acknowledging the power of influences in the process. In Bruner’s argument for considering ‘Life as Narrative’ he claims a ‘duality of landscape’ (2004: 9), drawn from the work of Gremas, with the first a ‘landscape of action’ and the second a ‘landscape of consciousness’. These two ele­ments, ‘action’ and ‘consciousness’, are important aspects to consider in the professional develop­ment of practitioners. Both action and consciousness are also to be understood in terms of the societal and cultural influences encountered by practitioners throughout their lives and during their employment.

While routines, feeding babies, washing, changing them, providing resources for them to play and settling them to sleep, may be the recurring elements of every day of practitioners’ lives in baby rooms, how such routines are considered, enacted and played out are dependent on how babies are viewed and understood by each practitioner, by each nursery, by local and national authorities. These constructions then inform whether or not babies are recognized individually, spoken to, respected, listened to, engaged with and so on (Osgood, 2011). Frayne argues that ‘what gives the world around us form and substance is our contribution – the ways that we have devel­oped for coming at it and dealing with it’ (2006: 173) but equally that world is a shaping entity too. Within baby rooms, practitioners are both engaged in landscapes of action – of their own and oth­ers’ construction – and contributing to the event from a landscape of consciousness, born from their family and cultural heritage as well as influenced by layers of policy and instruction and training. It is difficult to conceive how practitioners could be described, with this influential layering of practice narratives to possess ‘an innocent eye’. Of course there is an inherent danger in uncritical landscapes of either the proliferation of folklore or the re-enactment and reiteration of ‘oppressive discourses’ (Yuen, 2008: 40).

Mindful of Vygotsky’s work on thought and language, that is, that ‘thought and speech coincide to produce what is called verbal thought’ and his claims for ‘ingrowth’, or a final stage of inner, soundless speech (1986: 87–88), the project provided opportunities to enable this process to occur in relation to the participants’ developing understanding of their own practice. The ‘transformative’ element of the work could only be said to take place as participants began ‘to direct [their] own mental processes with the aid of words or signs [which] is an integral part of the process of concept formation’ (p. 109). The project’s practice was to facilitate practitioner development from, in Vygotskian terms, ‘signalling’ their practice to ‘signifying’ practice, from describing the ‘landscape of action’ to determining the ‘landscape of consciousness’. In acknowledging Smith’s idea that ‘thought flows in terms of stories’ (1992: 62), the value of talk through narrative constructions in the project work has been paramount. In practice, stories have been collected through individual, paired and group activities; through the annotations of drawings, narrating filmed practice and policy debates. In these ways, identifying and understanding practice has been firmly anchored, ordered and presented through the narration of experience, through talk and story.

Story telling: Baby room practitioners as the teller and the told

In recently devised models for professional development (Timperley, 2011), professionals are described throughout as ‘adaptive experts’ who can be supported through ‘iterative cycles of enquiry’ and professional learning communities. The progression from instructional professional training (for example, the Primary National Strategies in the UK from 1997) towards a rather more discursive model could be viewed as a substantial improvement, and these ideas, and those of Wenger’s ‘communities of practice’ (1998) are not unfamiliar to those engaging in professional development activities. However, they nevertheless pre-suppose a professional script with which participants should become acquainted; a script which should be rehearsed and re-performed; a pragmatist approach to policy; and an ability of participants to engage in forms of ‘reflective prac­tice’. Smith’s claim that the ability to think depends on the company we keep may also be true of professional development activities. The discourse of professional development is frequently ideo­logically, politically or pragmatically framed – with accompanying scripts. In their work to under­stand early years pedagogy, members of the British Educational Research Association Early Years Special Interest Group devoted some space to debate ‘issues of theoretical conceptualisation’ and considered the possibility that while the ‘three general views of knowing and learning. . . referred to as empiricist, rationalist and pragmatist sociohistoric. . . correspond with current behaviourist, cognitive and situative views. . . they carry basic conceptions of what good teaching should be’ (2003: 7). That is, in each there is a presumption of a shared world view with assumptions made about ‘interpersonal, managerial and performative aspects’ of teaching and learning. In profes­sional communities then, any discursive opportunity is already prefaced by the boundaried nature of the encounter, the implicit and often unspoken ‘givens’ which authoritatively surround educa­tional debates. It is within such boundaries that professionals are expected to theorize their prac­tice, although in baby room contexts neither the opportunities nor the expectations currently exist for practitioners to do so. Instead, the only influences to draw on appear to be personal experience of care and education, mythologies and folklore or direct instructions from others for practice, as mandatory provision seems only to be made for practitioners to be given instruction on health and safety, child protection and food hygiene aspects of care. There is a convincing research study which challenges the idea of ‘teller and told’ in professional development:

Hopkins (1988) documents work with a group of early years practitioners over a period of six months. The members of the group were invited to discuss their feelings and professional views about relationships with very young children. The paper describes how, encouraged by a growing experience of security and trust within the group, members shifted expressed views from very detached and impersonal descriptions of interactions with children through to increased acceptance of the importance of individual attachments. Group members reported that as their own importance to individual children became more acknowledged and accepted within the group, their work enjoyment and satisfaction increased too and staff absenteeism dropped. (BERA, 2003: 37)

This research approach and these research findings mirror the work of The Baby Room Project and further validate Vygotsky’s findings from a century ago. That is, moving from signalling to signify­ing demonstrates a significant progression in thought and conceptual understanding but this can only occur in contexts of ‘security and trust’.

In The Baby Room Project, participants have been, mostly implicitly, expected to:

• Engage in companionable social interaction
• Relate experiences (from the ‘landscape of action’)
• Determine the importance of experiences
• Respond to others’ stories
• Synthesize experiences
• Reflect (think) in the company of others
• Theorize their own and others’ practice
• Draw implications for renewed practice
• Gather implications for dissemination in their settings. 

This is a formidable list, leading participants from recalling action to conscious reflection, although tutors have consciously refrained from any instructional mode of practice, instead basing sessions on the idea that ‘self assessment and reflection and with the aid of specially developed measures for better child observation and adult observation, would lead to better practice’ (BERA, 2003) and, by implication, to improved care of babies. Through these activities, in this project, it has been possible for this sample of practitioners to tentatively begin to develop a sense of their own worth in their work and to develop a ‘voice’, later described as a professional voice.

There are two further aspects to consider. In another country, another culture, with different political imperatives, Yuen describes how participants ‘know very well the consequence of failing to ‘‘add more value’’ to themselves’ (Yuen, 2008: 39). One of the challenges of any work with practitioners from baby rooms in nurseries is in overcoming their perceptions of being ‘the lowest of the low’ in terms of practitioners’ status. In The Baby Room Project, and through the narrative-focused model, each participant has been able to overcome, to greater or lesser degrees, the sense of ‘voicelessness’ clearly felt before and outside of the project. The project work has been able to distinctly contribute towards participants ‘adding more value’ to themselves and their work through their engagement. This has been evidenced in confident workshop contributions, poster disseminations at The Baby Room conferences, intimate and informal dissemination to close work colleagues and more formal in-service presentations in their home nurseries or daycare settings. It seems that our ability to ‘make worlds’, in Bruner’s terms, to construct stories to represent experience, is paramount to the construction of identity, of who we understand ourselves to be, who we are as professionals. The project provided a level of ‘professional capital’ to take back into each professional setting. Second, although Yuen’s study involved teachers rather than nursery practitioners (the difference relating to training and levels of pay), her concern that the public, and policy-makers, create an image of teachers which relates to their technical/functional activities rather than their abilities as ‘thinking and moral persons’ can be translated into this largely unprofessionalized field of work. It seems that baby room practitioners are also caught up, if unknowingly, in the ‘perform’ or ‘profess’ debates (Yuen, 2008: 39; Powell and Goouch, forthcoming).

Talking to babies, developing a voice

Trevarthan et al.’s work to understand ‘mutual attunement’ between adults and babies (parents or care-givers) has been very important in establishing the need for babies to receive ‘consistent and close adult attention. . . and playful communication’ (Trevarthan et al., 2002: 40). The requirement that babies should enjoy the benefits of intimacy in one to one interactions in order to develop a sense of self, ‘emotional referencing’ (p. 10) and opportunities for expression – in all forms – seems to be a basic provision. However, our evidence indicates that in some baby rooms, some practitioners appear unable to offer such opportunities. A common assumption is made that young, female, practitioners will intuitively engage in ‘maternal’ interactions with babies and that the baby will benefit from the communicative and cultural modelling that this offers. That this cannot be assumed has been a surprising finding from the project. Reasons are varied but may include an embarrassment and self-consciousness, lack of understanding that as babies are unable to talk that they would need talk offered to them, or simply that practitioners themselves have no model of such practice in their own experience and so remain unaware that it may be a crucial element of practice with babies. The project foregrounded the absolute need for talk to occur. During sessions practitioners’ own video material was used to show examples of talk practices and reasons why an adult would choose not to talk to babies were discussed, with reference to the work of Liz Attenborough (2009/2010). Additionally, in questioning their roles and responsibilities, practition­ers were asked to create a visual representation of where they were physically positioned in their baby room in relation to the babies, in order to provide a focus for discussion in relation to interac­tions, including talk. In their final evaluations of their work in the project (December 2011), the practitioners responded that: 

I now spend longer time on the floor.

I now encourage my colleagues to provide time to talk to babies, and listen.

Babies do not require expensive toys, they benefit from interaction with adults, children, other babies.

I have learnt that every nursery is different but we all have the same goals to achieve, I now sit back and watch the babies more.

It’s understanding how important talking to the babies is.

These kinds of responses to professional development are not uncommon; that is, the participants responding to a central theme offered in a positive and constructive way. However, the long-term sustainability of this kind of new reflective practice is always questionable. More important than the new resolves made perhaps are the evaluative response that the participants offered in relation to their own sense of purposeful engagement in their work:

It’s made me realize how important our role is in babies’ lives.

It has reinforced my belief that I play an important role in the babies’ education and care, and this is acknowledged.

Realization of the importance of your role, how much my input into a child’s life can affect them. 

Makes you think how important our role is as prime carer when parent has left baby in our care.

By offering an opportunity for the practitioners who work in baby rooms to express themselves, to question, assert, challenge, defend, explore and examine their behaviour, motivations and practice, a professional sense of responsibility grew into their responses:

(It’s) widened my understanding by making me take a step back and think about some situations.

I now sometimes question what I do, and who it actually benefits.

I have looked around my baby room and tried to see it from a babies [sic] view, and made appropriate changes.

Sowing the seeds of opportunity for professional reflection does not necessarily ensure profes­sional growth and development, but it is a sound beginning. The new ‘voices’ of the practitioners in the project were heard and respected in the development sessions which seemed to support them in beginning to value their work with babies.

Conclusion

A sample group of practitioners who work in baby rooms have generously participated in this study and have helped to tell the story of baby room practice in this project. This is a group who are just beginning to find a voice, who are becoming motivated to access policy and research information and who have been supported to feel the value of their work. In this project, we are arguing that this new sense of voice could be described as a ‘professional’ voice, that is, it is developing to become informed by policy, research and reflexive approaches to practice. However, we are also aware that these are tentative beginnings and that this story is set in a national (and perhaps international) context of diminishing public funds, a prevailing political discourse of work outside the home and reduced financial support for families and new mothers, and, significantly, in a largely, and increas­ingly, marketized field of service provision for babies and very young children. Amongst this, strong political and public voices are raging in support of national, economic-focused arguments in relation to child care and education, employing harsh language and calling for early intervention into children’s and family lives – in particular, it seems, to address the challenge of ‘chaotic fami­lies’ and ‘feral’ children (Marrin, 2011). In contrast, this project story is unfolding a picture of anxious working mothers who ‘worry where [she] was to be’, who are ‘anxious about hurried handovers’ and who ‘put [their] trust in this place’ to care for ‘the most precious thing in our world’ (interviews with parents, July and August 2011).

This study has demonstrated that a professional development script needs to include talk, stories and practice narratives and to value the power of the word to create thoughtful and self-reflective spaces for developing professional identity and a sense of professional worth. However, in relation to the broader picture of the overall development of baby room practice, more needs to be achieved to ‘create political and institutional spaces in which rigorous public debate can take place’ (Sachs, 2003: 12). Although Sachs’s argument is focused, as many are, on teachers and teacher profession­alism, the thread can be justifiably carried through to nursery and baby room practitioners. Sachs claims that:

Activist teacher professionalism is essentially about a politics of transformation. Its spheres of interest are concerned with changing people’s beliefs, perspectives and opinions about the importance of teaching, the social location of teachers and the role of competent and intelligent teachers in various education institutions. A politics of transformation is not self interested; its concern is with wider issues of equity and social justice . . . The politics of transformation are rooted in everyday life and this is its strength. (Sachs, 2003: 12)

The stories told by practitioners in our study confirm Sachs’s argument that self-interest is not paramount, but also important is how those who care for babies in centre-based care are located in broader society, how they are perceived and understood, trained and supported. The contemporary version of this, perhaps internationally but certainly in a national context, needs to be reframed, in political, professional and social domains. Sachs challenges us all to ‘change taken for granted assumptions’, to ‘transform people’s self understandings’ and to ‘create cultural codes that contest the legitimacy of the dominant discourse circulating in society about education and teachers’ (2003: 12–13). Arguably, this applies even more in relation to nursery and baby room practice and practitioners who have considerably less of a professional voice or sense of professional worth in broader political and policy spaces. Osgood’s argument, that the prevailing national government discourse of practitioner professionalism places ‘emphasis on competition, performativity and rationality‘ (Osgood, 2006: 191) challenges the, predominantly female, baby room workforce to consider what is described as a ‘masculine’, ‘individualistic and entrepreneurial’ skills require­ment. While it may be hopefully less likely in baby rooms that a ‘scripted pedagogy’ (Gibson and Patrick, 2008: 26) could possibly apply, there may be a current demand for a nationally approved ‘official script’ (Daniels, 2007: 329) in relation to how babyhood is constructed and how babies are cared for which will ultimately impact on the discourse surrounding baby room practice. Such a script, or discourse, must pertain to wide-ranging, conceptual issues relating to babies, and those who are educated, trained and employed to care for them, as well as constructions of babyhood, rather than solely to the potential for and discourse surrounding crisis, damage or abuse, although these are undoubtedly also important areas for societal consideration and investment, and should engage us all – those in and outside of traditional educational discourse boundaries. 

How societies construct children and childhood, how they envision ‘structures, understandings and discourses’ (Moss, 2006: 30) and how ‘state-governed’ early childhood education and care is conceived requires ‘political and ethical choices’ (p. 39) made by a close and critical examination of the overarching aims of contemporary societies in relation to babies and very young children. Into this mix, who is trained and how, how practitioners/teachers/care-givers/pedagogues are both rewarded and supported needs to be very closely examined, made transparent and understood. Finally, in the current quest for out of home care for babies, demands are being made on young practitioners to invest emotionally in their relationships with babies and their families, which in our project story is clearly evidenced. However, the national picture accompanying this story urgently needs also to portray an image of a society politically framed to invest in this care, universally for all babies and young children, and equally then to invest in the professionals working within the system. Such an image needs urgently to be redrawn, with care given to the daily lives and wellbeing of babies as well as the daily lives and well-being of those employed to care.

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