Education and Interaction in Day Care Centres

• Applicants: Dr. Morvarid Dehnavi; Professor Dr. Arnd-Michael Nohl
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 462780930

Education as the guiding concept of educational science has been marginalized in recent decades by the focus on the concepts of socialization and, later, Bildung. What has been lost sight of is that people do not just grow into life and action orientations on their own (socialization) and that their upbringing is not only exhausted in the independent development and transformation of life orientations (Bildung) but that orientations can also be imposed on people of different ages in a sustainable manner (education – Erziehung). Against this background, the project aims at the empirical analysis of educational processes and links these with a basic theoretical reflection of the concept of education. This research goal will be realized at a central object of early education, the teacher-child-interaction in day-care centers. Based on videographed interaction situations from three day-care centers, interaction structures of education are analyzed. Education is first to be theoretically and empirically distinguished from other (pedagogical) process structures such as teaching, socialization, care, and leadership, secondly its heterogeneous internal structure is to be reconstructed, and thirdly its social genesis is to be analyzed. The selection of the day-care centers and the interaction passages to be interpreted is based on the principle of theoretical sampling and thus serves the formation of types and theories. Selected passages in which interactions between teachers and children take place will be evaluated using the Documentary Method, which has been expanded in our preliminary work with recourse to conversation-analytical tools. On the one hand, the aim is to develop sense-genetic types that show how the orientations of those involved in the interaction are linked with the dynamics of interaction to form modes of interaction; on the other hand, the aim is to develop relational-process types that capture the relation and processuality of the modes of interaction and examine their significance for pedagogical processes. At the same time, the research design is designed in such a way that the maximum contrasts targeted in the sampling not only illuminate different facets of education but also, if possible, its sociogenesis. Differences between a metropolitan and a rural daycare center, between different concepts, between different age groups, and between such interaction situations that differ in their degree of structuring will be examined. The empirical results aimed at the project will be placed in a reflexive relationship to the basic concept and theory of education and these in turn will be discussed in the context of early childhood education and fundamentals of education.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants