Talking about the past: what do educators thing about reminiscing with girls, boys, and everyone else?

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Abstract

Research that investigates the role of reminiscing in early childhood education and care settings is needed to further understand child development and quality provision of early years education. Prior research has established that adult-child reminiscing or ‘past talk’ conversations have measurable benefits for young children. This includes development of autobiographical memories, social-emotional competencies, and language skills. Notably, within this body of literature it has been highlighted that adults display varying styles of reminiscing conversation and there is some evidence that reminiscing is a gendered practice whereby adults speak to female children differently to male children. However, currently there is a dearth of studies on early childhood educator-child reminiscing conversations and there are no known studies focussing on educator-child reminiscing and child gender. The aim of the current study is to investigate educator-child reminiscing conversation preferences to ascertain whether they vary in content and style in response to the perceived gender of children. An online quantitative survey was used to collect self-reported data from educators who currently work in Australian early childhood education and care settings. Two pre-existing questionnaires were included in the survey as well as six factorial vignettes. The objective of the questionnaires was to quantify educators’ elaboration types, perceptions of gender, and perceived purpose of reminiscing conversations. While the aim of the vignettes was to elicit participants opinion on how reminiscing scenarios would typically play out between themselves and children in their care. A statistical analysis will be undertaken to describe the relationship between participant responses and the perceived gender of children once data has been collected (currently occurring as of 27/5/22). It is hoped that the findings from this project will add to the burgeoning field of early childhood educational research on reminiscing conversations and provide further insights on the role educators play in children’s memory development.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2022
Event2022 AARE Conference: Transforming the Future of Education: The Role of Research - University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia
Duration: 27 Nov 20221 Dec 2022
https://www.aare.edu.au/news/save-the-date-aare-2022-annual-conference/

Conference

Conference2022 AARE Conference
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CityAdelaide
Period27/11/221/12/22
Internet address

Keywords

  • reminiscing
  • early childhood
  • Educators
  • gender
  • emotions

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