Dialogical experiences in practice – Research with Danish daycare: Moving from abstract to concrete generalizations

Some introducing remarks on ontologies and epistemologies

Ontologies are enquiries about the ultimate nature of the object of interests, which in the case of psychology is the meaning-making relation between human and their environment. In relation hereto, epistemologies concern the nature of knowledge (about these objects) and its justification. The history of psychology has been a battlefield between different ontological and epistemological positions. Although it is often said to be the natural state of a young science as psychology is, such claim is no more helpful than when developmental psychology explains children’s behaviour by their young-ness. Tautological explanations provide little insight in the nature of the problem at hand and even less of how to overcome it.

Historically, Aristotle the father of ontology as philosophical discipline, introduced the logic of static ontology, formulated in the ‘Law of the excluded middle’, which argues that things are what they are, and are not what they are not. The fundamental logic can be formulated as ‘A or non-A’. This ‘either-or’ credo is widespread today, including the social and humanistic fields such as education and psychology. Such ontology naturally leads to an epistemology that can differentiate one true category from another and thus occupies itself with what is the difference between different entities.

For a science to which meaning-making (where ‘making’ refer to generative processes) is ontologically foundational, a static ontology is indeed challenging. Moreover, and confusing the picture; in the struggle of becoming a respectable, reliable and useful science, the fact that psychologists’ epistemic achievements concerns the human epistemology (psychologists make sense of how people make sense) has led to an unfortunate confusion of ontology and epistemology. This confusion is far beyond the problem of psychology’s age and constitutes the genuine problem of psychology’s ontological and epistemological miseries.

The argument of the overwhelming complexity of the phenomenon at hand together with the researchers’ awkward entanglement with the phenomenon under investigation leads to the treating of the human psyche as an object within the natural science (see Jovanović, 2010 for an account of this historical development). ‘Psychology wants to be a natural science about non-natural phenomena’, Vygotsky wrote (Vygotsky in Valsiner, 2012, p. 159); at distance, in small doses, under controlled conditions. In psychology, a static epistemology examines observable behavioural reactions in a causal fashion, and based on that makes statistical inferences. It tends to produce standards of normality based on the average measurement as a representation of what is the true behaviour or state of the phenomenon. The foundational question of how such tiny elements relate to the overall human psyche in its being and becoming becomes an irrelevant and nonsensical issue.

Processual ontologies on the other hand, such as dialectics and dialogism, hold that the object of interest is of a historical nature; that its essence is the historical movement and change, becoming and remaining. This processual logic can be formulated as ‘a relation between A and non-A’. A processual epistemologically thus studies interdependent, evolving processes and rather than asking ‘what is A?’ the question is: ‘how did A come into being?’ and ‘how will A move and towards what’? Of course, such an ontological position requires another epistemology, which not only differentiates the world into different categories, but also conceptualizes how these categories relate to each other as being part of the same phenomenon. A processual epistemology thus seeks to illuminate general processes at work behind, e.g. children’s various ways of experiencing and acting and tends to produce theory and conceptualizations, by which to analyse single cases (Hviid & Villadsen, 2018). This epistemic position thus seeks to understand the underlying principles behind the variation, rather than classifying the variation into categories. These problems might seem abstract and distant to concrete development of practices but they were always present in our dialogues and at the centre of our attention during the full period of collaboration. When a pedagogue claim:

Pedagogue: Yes, it would be fantastic if we could include children’s perspectives, and take into consideration what they … feel like, what their actual needs are but but but … Researchers and experts have already decided what children need and feel like, “At this stage, the child must be able to do this and this and this. If they cannot, something is wrong.” (Hviid & Plotnikof, 2012b, p. 413)

Commissioned to intervene in public organization and administration, pedagogical practice and children’s life and development in order to co-produce a more sustainable managerial practice, we took the processual axioms of the object of interest as a foundation from which to develop our research methodology. A research methodology forms, based on the nature of the object of interest and the epistemological question, an argument for the choice of methods, analysis and conclusion.

The research methodology gained a developing character; it evolved through dialogues with the participating parties and their ways of making sense of our introduction of familiar (e.g. interviews) and new methods, invented along the way of encountering specific problems while aiming for a dialogical managerial practice.

These processes are elsewhere described as processes of ‘rising to the concrete’ (Lave, 2011, p. 115) where the generalization not only allows for new ways of solving problems, but also includes an expansion of action possibilities. Lave (2011) describes the ‘rising to the concrete’ as acknowledging ‘(…) the historical, relational character of changing social life, and hence the need for efforts to craft historical, relational understandings that are once empirical and theoretical’ (p. 115).

In our case, this rising to the concrete concerned the active transformation of abstract practices in education, administration and management into tools, by means of which practitioners could potentially develop their everyday practice. The process entailed both a destabilizing of static epistemological practices and concepts as well as invitations to readdress the issue at hand in a dialogical fashion.

For example, when we included children’s voices in the dialogue of the ‘good daycare’, it turned out that they regarded what adults considered as ‘security’ partly as boring because it tended to exclude the possibility of doing ‘exciting, dangerous stuff’. In other words, the dialogue destabilized the existing category of ‘practicing security’, deducted in part from child psychology into a much more dynamic conceptualization of ‘exploration and security’ (Bowlby, 1988).

The ontological, epistemological and methodological perspectives of dialogue are not identical; my attempt in this section has been to explain their relations in the work that will be presented in the following.

Danish daycare (ECEC) and NPM

The number of children enrolled in Danish ECECs has increased over time from approximately 20% in the 1950s to 50% in the 1960s and 90% in the 1990s (Villadsen & Hviid, 2016). This increase reflects the mothers’ partaking in the labour market. Today, approximately 93% of children from 1 to 5 years of age attend ECEC. Danish children hold the world record in time spent in ECECs, on average 7.5 hours per day. Thus, ECECs have major societal importance as they involve the far majority of this generation.

The Danish history of ECEC is presented in detail elsewhere (see, e.g. Villadsen & Hviid, 2016). Generally, it shows a movement from locally planned and organized ‘kindergartens’ to globally planned and centrally organized ‘preschools’. Despite the variations that followed the lack of centralization, I believe it is fair to say that the Danish daycare up until the launch of the State Curriculum of ECECs in 2004 (Retsinformation, 2004) was dominated by children’s play, self-organized activities, care and teacher-organized activities.

With the State Curriculum, ECECs were reconsidered as assets in the global market economy. A focus on their preparatory function for (higher) achievements in school came to dominate practice and a new era of importing and applying evidence-based educational programmes and tests in order to achieve this began. As the evidence-based programmes promised to work irrespectively of any specific environment, any specific situation and any specific children, children’s voices became less relevant in the organization and conduct of pedagogy. As a tendency preschool practices became manualized according to global golden standards (Jensen, Brostrøm, & Hansen, 2010). Changes and improvements had to be measured and systematized, and NPM swept over the daycare sector.

NPM rose around 30 years ago as a critique of the – at the time – management system. The old system was diagnosed as being overgrown, bureaucratic and poorly oriented towards the users of the sector, and NPM was a solution. Put briefly, NPM builds on two logics. One concerns the transferal of principles from the private to the public sector as seen in, e.g. entrepreneurship, strategic management, goal governance combined with, e.g. financial management systems. The other relates to a liberal marketization and streamlining through privatizing, outsourcing and contract management with key-premises such as accountability, comparability (through access to results) and strategic governance from top to bottom. Taken together, the controlled decentralization through strategic management and accountability causes the system to be rather tight. On the one hand, employees within the system must solve present tasks in various creative and effective ways. On the other hand, they must document their actions and effects rigorously and to be able to demonstrate and validate how these activities align with the overall goals or contracts. Making the documentations and evaluations accessible to the users is considered to spur incitements to perform even better in competition with others.

Whereas it holds some truth that the rise of evaluating social practices has supported professional reflexivity and highlighted users’ point of view, the problems with NPM today are considerable. Recently, Hood and Dixon (2015) published ‘A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less?’ analysing three decades of NPM in the UK. ³ Their conclusion was that NPM has failed in its efforts to create more effectivity and quality; on the contrary, the operating costs have risen and dissatisfaction has grown continuously.

Today we see a movement towards, or at least an inclusion of, principles of New Public Governance (Osborne, 2006) in the public sector – a managerial paradigm that underlines the motivation of the employees and builds on trust, partnerships and networking. However, so far we have not seen a managerial system that replaces NPM. It is rather the case that New Public Governance inspires public administration. At least in Denmark it seems easier to incorporate on smaller scale (municipalities) than on a larger scale (State) administration (Torfing, 2013). Looking back on our work in 2012, I believe it could be considered as a contribution to the New Public Governance in its development.

The development of intersubjectivity

Our work aimed to produce the conditions for achieving intersubjectivity. Thus, we followed Marková’s (1994) distinction between ‘as-if’ and ‘strived-for’ intersubjectivity, where the latter is a developmental concept. Intersubjectivity implies listening for the Other’s point of view of something and attempting to approximate the Other, as the Others point of view. Shared understanding of a phenomenon is achievable through intersubjective processes where common meanings appear. Marková (1987) shows that intersubjectivity can produce soothing recognition, variations or tensions, which bring forward novel dimensions and understandings. The following example is from a participating daycare, at the start of the project.

One of the participating daycares held the tradition of celebrating the birthday of the daycare. On these occasions, they would do something special for lunch. As they now aimed at including the children dialogically in planning this activity, they asked them: Did they want to visit the local McDonalds? The nearby Italian pizzeria? Or maybe another place of the children’s choice? The children disagreed with all suggestions, in fact with the whole logic. They reasoned that it was rude to the daycare to leave it on its birthday. They proposed to celebrate the birthday together with the daycare. The pedagogues were bewildered, not only by the specific activity, but also by their lack of insight into the children’s perspectives. They ended staying stayed at home for lunch, after a collective “dressing up” the daycare with lots of wild flowers and singing “Happy Birthday” to it. (Hviid & Plotnikof, 2012a, p. 60)

Looking across all activities, one main challenge was to postpone attempts to fix the content of dialogues in categories or to close dialogues, by deciding an order. Fixing the content happened when the content of the dialogues became understood through categories, picked from the outside of the dialogue, to explain the dialogue. This issue was present, e.g. when a difficult dialogue between children and pedagogues was explained with ‘her language is not developed’, ‘she is a bit immature’, or – with regard to dialogues between adults – as e.g. ‘the Centre-leader is new’ or ‘he is a power-person’. Such categorizations showed what Buber would characterize as I-it attitudes and they froze the dialogue. Closing attempts were done conceptually: ‘Then we all agree that e.g. attachment/documentation/outdoor activities is central … ’ before examining more closely the examples, the descriptions and the narratives presented, and if they primarily addressed ‘attachment’, etc. and how. Closing attempts were also related to structural matters, as ‘As we have talked for a long time, I now suggest that we move on by using the following scheme/timetable/procedure … ’ Such attempts were often done out of impatience with the pace and through a position of being in power. We are of course aware that I-it attitudes create order and that order is needed in any practice and organization. Our work did not attempt to prohibit order, but to postpone it.

The position-exchange Fishbowl

The Fishbowl (Fishbowl (conversation), n.d.) is a technology to focus, listen and contribute even in large groups. It is constructed by concentric circles of people, who in turn speak and listen. In the inner circle, a small group of people present and talk about their problem/issue/need. The outer circle listen and take notes but keep quiet. After a while, the inner circle are asked to be quiet, and persons in the outer circle relate to the question at hand. The inner circle take notes, without replying or explaining. The principles of the method resemble Andersen’s (1991) work on reflective teams, but have the advantage of allowing for a large number of persons to take part. Please note that the listening-period is made into an active period, far beyond ‘waiting for one’s turn’. A third circle can relate to the quality of the dialogue between the first and second circle or can act as ‘the devil’s advocate’ on their dialogue. One or two supervisors are needed along the process. We conducted fishbowls with groups between 15 and 75 persons.

We examined if exchanging listener-positions would contribute to moving the dialogues from I-it to I-thou dialogues. The politician was, e.g. asked to listen as-if he was a pedagogue, the manager as-if he was a parent, a consultant as if she was a child, etc., which invited them to address the problem at hand as-if they were members of another group of actors. The embodied enactment of the Other was to our understanding combined with the (naturally given) authenticity of one’s own first person perspective and his or her own voice (I am, e.g. the child/the Centre leader) and this seemed to promote a closer understanding of the other’s perspective and to generate a distance to the ‘Other as a thing’ (I-it). From time to time it was emotionally very touching, not only for the persons in question, but for all of us. The emotional aspect of this practice was perhaps related to the process behind the distinction of ‘me being me’ or ‘me being you’; there was a person in the room, taking responsibility for the creation ‘being us’, thus bridging differences.

Memory Laboratory

We conducted a Memory Laboratory in order to call for I-thou attitudes between adults and children. We suggested this, because we discovered that the children’s perspectives repeatedly vanished from the dialogue. Children’s voices were easy to discard, partly because they were not present at the late meetings, and partly because they are ‘children’ (I-it) and thus childishly unaware of global competition and the favour the Danish State did to them, by insisting on their intensified, school-preparing learning.

We asked participants to bring a photo of themselves, taken when they were young children, for the next meeting. Many considered it to be a bit ‘hippie’, but complied. At the next meeting, they pinned it on their top or shirt, so that the listeners could see the young and the old interlocutor at the same time. In groups we worked on listening to the strong engagements of these (memorized) children, what mattered to them, what they enjoyed doing, when they were five or six years of age. They narrated from this remembered child-life and maintained a first person perspective in all of this. Everyone found these narratives exceptionally engaging to tell and to listen to: Spending late hours in the street with the older children, climbing trees, building huts, fighting and sticking together, telling secrets and daring semi-forbidden things; all of which courageous and vital childhood is made of. In plenary, they told each other’s stories. Hereafter, we turned to the question of what children today might be engaged with, and how that could be examined. At that point, it seemed irrelevant to translate a good childhood (only) into early literacy, math and ‘social competences’. A politician proposed a new pedagogical (I-thou) strategy

Politician: From time to time, you (the pedagogues, ed.) could cancel all planned activities and take some good walks along the beach – or go to the forest – do something different, and maybe through these activities get access to the children’s imagination, which one gets when sitting out there looking at the ants making ant-roads. (Hviid & Plotnikof, 2014, pp. 397–398)

Play-dialogues

Whereas the memory workshop generally turned out to be an insightful activity, the play-dialogues between pedagogues and children were much more challenging. This was not only surprising to us, but also to the pedagogues, since children’s play was ranked very highly in their description of ‘a good daycare’.

The activity we proposed involved two pedagogues and four children in pairs (matched because they often played together) positioned in a room with a box of inspiring, new toys. The pedagogues played in turn with one pair of children, while the other pedagogue observed the dialogue between them. A researcher was also present as observer. After each 30-minute play period, and after the children had left the room, we discussed our insights from the episodes. We often witnessed difficulties in replacing an I-it attitude, in which the pedagogue ‘taught’ and the children ‘learned’ through a co-narrated as-if play. The pedagogues tended to ask questions in a ‘known-answer-question’ fashion (‘Can you tell me which colour the apple has?’), explained what was going on in a lecturing manner (‘the car tilts as the weight it carries is to heavy’) or related the incidences directly to the child’s life world (‘you also have a little sister, don’t you?’). Such contributions are recognizable from children’s play too, yet the redundancy of the approach is not. Moreover, the inventive what-if was in many cases almost absent.

One of the children has picked up the big crocodile, which holds its mouth wide open. She puts it on the board and leads it, slowly, towards the little baby, which is lying on a deckchair in the other corner. The pedagogue looks and asks kindly, “Do you know where crocodiles live?”. (Hviid & Plotnikof, 2012a, p. 47)

Dissatisfaction and hope – For different reasons

Dissatisfaction with the present situation as well as hope for the future were steppingstones for the project. In our initial interviews, it became clear that dissatisfactions varied amongst groups – from the increasing demands of documentation, to not being able to communicate through the ‘Rockwool-layer’, or a concern that the State would implement very costly processes of accreditation in the educational sector. ‘I have a Dream!’ the mayor proclaimed (in English), at the start-up conference.

Reservation and confusion

In the interviews everyone appeared to address the same problem, although from different angles and perspectives. Initially we discovered tendencies towards blaming other groups of actors for the difficult situation. We felt invited to take a position from where to judge ‘who is right and who is wrong’. As we began the activities, confusion appeared. Participants expressed concern about whether the aim was to ‘agree on something’ or to ‘just listen’ to one and other. They wondered about the purpose of the dialogues. Many requested explicitly and repeatedly for a fixed plan with clear steps to follow and expressed reservations or resentment regarding our not having such plan. It was as if the research practices did not align with the participants’ perceived goal.

Relief in discovering benevolent visions amongst the other groups of actors and the beginning of we-experiences

More meetings were held, and we tried to improve the potentials of dialoguing. This seemed to work alongside the process in which all groups of actors (and in particular the pedagogues) developed clearer voices. During these meetings, the participants seemed to rediscover each other anew and many expressed relief that the other parties in the system meant well and were just as ambitious as they were in making great daycares. They worked together in order to understand each other and each other’s perspectives. During those meetings, sensations of collective and touching we-experience took place, which not only the researchers registered. We understand these we-experiences as kinds of generalized care for each other (Nissen & Mørck, 2019) and care for their (and our) shared engagement – the good daycare.

Lost and found, and lost again

On having these meeting, we (the researchers) felt that we all came a long way. We experienced how new bridges between people were built in front of us. We heard new understandings appearing. However, a mysterious thing happened that these novel achievements often disappeared again. Many times, we were surprised to discover that the insights, bridges and understandings we had reached at our last meeting had vanished. As a (cruel) joke, we sometimes talked about how the participants seemed to be absorbed during the meetings, but upon leaving, they shook their heads and then the spell was broken again. It was as if the new experiences could not (yet) be handled by single persons or that the ideas needed a ‘protected space’. It was as if they only existed during the dialogues and the ‘we-processes’ at the meetings. Leaving the processes made them vaporize. This was not a brief temporary period. The ‘lost and found and lost’ dominated the majority of the process. Participants were often ‘on a high’ after the meetings and almost like clean slates when we met again.

Uncertainty – Ambivalence, anger and lack of confidence

I have been thinking, “Why can’t I listen? Is it because I am afraid of losing terrain?”. (Centre leader)

It is a foundational assumption in dialogism that one must take the statement of the interlocutor as meaningful as possible in order for everyone to understand it. In this sense, intersubjectivity is already an axiomatic premise in dialogism (Rommetveit, 1974). Yet, intersubjectivity is not the same as identity, and alterity will always be present in dialogues. Diverging interests do also exist in trustful dialogues, and they contribute to making the dialogues relevant and necessary. Trust and distrust are thus important foci within dialogical research (Linell & Markova, 2014; Marková & Gillespie, 2008).

Listening to each other, in new ways, generated a developmental situation for the listeners, as they had heard something, which affected their practice. They expressed a need to act in new ways and thus risked ‘losing terrain’ as the daycare manager expressed it. Such challenges were numerous, they popped up everywhere.

Centre leader: We discovered something very strange … it happened to us, the adults; suddenly we knew: This is all wrong! We cannot work like this. We had to say: “We must do this in another way, because the children are taking part.” We could feel it was all wrong. It suddenly crept over the garden fence, and there it was. “We cannot do it this way any longer; we have to do it in a new way”. (Hviid & Plotnikof, 2012a, p. 60)

The pedagogue was deeply frustrated by her own and her colleagues’ practice. She discovered at that point, that their ‘acknowledging’ pedagogy (inspired by Honneth) was less acknowledging than believed. After such discoveries, the pedagogues were left to create a different practice, in greater alignment with their ideals. This was challenging work without manuals, which brought feelings of uncertainty. This was also experienced at the level of administration:

Administrative Manager: Today the politicians visit the daycares. It starts to get anxiety provoking for an administration, right? Not because they shouldn’t listen to the boards in the daycares, but think about what they might come to promise them? That is how we formulate it, but we’re also anxious about another issue: What do they hear? It is not because … we all do as well as we can, but so many things can affect us when we are too busy. They have started moving into the engine room of the management. That is new to me. (Hviid & Plotnikof, 2012a, p. 38)

New beginnings

For if I have ventured amiss – very well, then life helps me by its punishment. But if I have not ventured at all – who then helps me? (Kierkegaard,1849/1941, p. 35)