Children’s bodily positioning in accounts of naptime in early childhood education and care : a Foucauldian perspective

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Children’s bodily positioning in accounts of naptime in early childhood education and care : a Foucauldian perspective © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published version Kuukka, Anu; Salonen, Eija; Sevon, Eija Kuukka, A., Salonen, E., & Sevon, E. (2024). Children’s bodily positioning in accounts of naptime in early childhood education and care : a Foucauldian perspective. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, Early online. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293x.2024.2412127 2024 European Early Childhood Education Research Journal ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/recr20 Children’s bodily positioning in accounts of naptime in early childhood education and care: a Foucauldian perspective Anu Kuukka, Eija Salonen & Eija Sevon To cite this article: Anu Kuukka, Eija Salonen & Eija Sevon (10 Oct 2024): Children’s bodily positioning in accounts of naptime in early childhood education and care: a Foucauldian perspective, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, DOI: 10.1080/1350293X.2024.2412127 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2024.2412127 © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 10 Oct 2024. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=recr20 Children’s bodily positioning in accounts of naptime in early childhood education and care: a Foucauldian perspective Anu Kuukka a , Eija Salonen b and Eija Sevon c a School of Educational Sciences and Psychology, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland; b Department of Education, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; c Department of Education, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland ABSTRACT Naptime practices of early childhood education and care (ECEC) have been found to place children’s bodies under adult governance, leaving children few possibilities for agency and influence (e.g. Kuukka 2015; Nothard et al. 2015). In this study, we explore children’s (aged five to seven) accounts of naptime in ECEC, asking how children’s bodily positioning is manifested in them. We analysed two data sets: (1) ethnographic conversations and interviews with children in ECEC, and (2) children’s imaginative narratives on naptime in ECEC. The children’s accounts manifested three bodily positionings: docile, demurring, and rebellious bodies. The findings indicate children have limited possibilities for agency and control over their bodies in this context, although, according to the UNCRC, they have a right to have an influence in matters affecting them (UNICEF 1989). The study highlights the significance of considering naptime anew from the perspective of diminishing adult governance of children’s bodies in ECEC. KEYWORDS Bodily positioning; Children’s agency; Early childhood education and care; Foucault; Governance; Naptime Introduction Internationally, early childhood education and care (ECEC) occupies a central role in the lives of many children below school age. The daily rhythm in ECEC is regulated, and many of the routines affect children’s bodies on a daily basis (Kuukka 2015; Salonen et al. 2022). These routines, which both target a child’s individual body and also call for a collective manner of bodily existence and behaviour, include naptime (Alasuutari 2015; Kuukka 2015; Nothard et al. 2015). Despite its role in ECEC, extant research has found mixed results related to daytime napping on children’s sleep quality and thus, on their general wellbeing (Staton, Smith, and Thorpe 2015). From the perspective of children’s agency in their everyday lives, naptime in ECEC has been found to be under adult control, leaving children without the possibility of influencing whether they sleep or not (Gehret et al. 2021; Nothard et al. 2015; Staton, Smith, and Thorpe 2015). Naptime practices also place children’s bodies strongly under the governance of © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. CONTACT Anu Kuukka [email protected] School of Educational Sciences and Psychology, Philosophical Faculty, University of Eastern Finland, Yliopistokatu 7, Futura, P.O. Box 111, Joensuu FI-80101, Finland EUROPEAN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION RESEARCH JOURNAL https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2024.2412127 the ECEC institution (Kuukka 2015). However, children’s own accounts of naptime in ECEC have rarely been studied from the bodily perspective. Therefore, this study explores how children themselves discuss naptime in ECEC. We ask how children’s bodily positioning – either real or imaginary – is manifested in their accounts of ECEC naptime. The data are drawn from two research projects in Finland. The first embodies ethnographic conversations and interviews with 20 children in ECEC, and the second involves nine children’s imaginative narratives on naptime in ECEC. Naptime in ECEC as a contested institutional practice ECEC naptime is an institutional practice regulated by diverse rules, norms, and bodily dimensions (Alasuutari 2015; Kuukka 2015; Nothard et al. 2015). In Finland, the National Core Curriculum for ECEC (Finnish National Agency for Education [EDUFI] 2022) highlights rest as an essential part of the child’s day and pedagogical work, as an educational and instructive situation that promotes children’s health and well-being, and as important for children to learn to take care of themselves and manage daily life. Children’s rest time is after lunch in Finland. Children change into appropriate clothes for rest and move to a separate nap room with individual beds. Prior to sleeping, they usually listen to a story or music. The nap-room setting is aimed at creating a calming atmosphere (e.g. through dimness, coolness, and decoration) that will contribute to children’s rest and sleep (Kuukka 2015). Similar, yet somewhat varying, practices have been identified in the Australian context (Nothard et al. 2015). Importantly, these established practices have been found to strongly limit children’s autonomy: children have few opportunities to influence the rules of naptime, including whether to sleep or not (Kuukka 2015; Nothard et al. 2015). Naptime is justified by normative claims about what is considered good for young children: the benefits of sleep and rest for their health, growth, wellbeing, development, and psychological state (see also Alasuutari 2015; Cooke et al. 2023; Horton and Kraftl 2010). Accordingly, a child who has slept well is seen as a happy and healthy child capable of realising their true potential (Williams, Lowe, and Griffiths 2007, 10). Research, however, shows mixed results concerning the benefits of naptime. On the one hand, sleep is a physiological fact, biological need, and necessary condition for children’s wellbeing, development, and learning (Staton, Smith, and Thorpe 2015). On the other hand, research shows that beyond the age of three, there are discrepancies between children’s actual sleep needs and the prevailing ECEC practices of naptime (see also Gehret et al. 2021; Staton, Smith, and Thorpe 2015; Staton et al. 2021). Staton, Smith, and Thorpe (2015) argue that around age four, children’s sleep rhythms evolve from multiple sleeps to a monophasic pattern of a single nighttime sleep. Napping during the day may thus impair the quality and length of their sleep at night (Staton et al. 2015). These findings indicate a need for reforming and providing alternatives to such naptime practices. Still, in ECEC in Finland and other countries, naptime has remained a mandatory practice for a long time (Gehret et al. 2021; Nothard et al. 2015; Staton et al. 2015; Staton, Smith, and Thorpe 2015). Cooke et al. (2023) show ECEC professionals in Australia relying on contradictory dominant discourses of ‘investment and outcomes’ and ‘children’s rights’ when talking about children’s rest. In Finland, children’s rest is discussed by parents and ECEC professionals in relation to the obligatory child’s individual 2 A. KUUKKA ET AL. ECEC plan (Alasuutari 2015). However, instead of listening to parents’ ideas and wishes related to their child’s sleep, children’s napping is naturalised in these discussions, and children who do not sleep are defined as ‘being difficult’ or ‘having difficulties’ (Alasuutari 2015, 226–227; see also Sinclair et al. 2016). Theoretical thinking tools for considering naptime as bodily practice and governance In this article, we will utilise Foucault’s (1980) poststructuralist thinking of the governance of the body and disciplinary power as an aid to examine the bodily practices related to children’s naptime (see also Kallio 2009; Tamboukou and Ball 2003, 1–2). Disciplinary power functions at the level of the body by replacing visible, direct power with invisible coercion that targets the body and, through careful training, shapes the body to produce new skills, habits, and gestures (Gore 1998). Discipline works as a micropower in pedagogical practices through various techniques, such as distribution, surveillance, regulation, and normalisation (Foucault 1980; Turner 2008, 498, 1997, xi–xii). As a disciplinary technique, for example, distribution refers to the division of bodies in space (e.g. by partitions), the division of individuals into smaller groups and into their designated places in space, the establishment of bodily orders (e.g. queues or seating arrangements), and the possibility of being isolated from others (Foucault 1980). Surveillance refers to watching and the assumption of being watched (Gore 1998, 235– 236). Surveillance can, for example, be an observing gaze directed by adults towards children but also an observing gaze directed by children towards other children (Gore 1998). Regulation orders bodies by time through rules and norms (Foucault 1980). Normalisation, in turn, seeks to bring individuals up to normal standards of behaviour through reward, ranking, comparison, differentiation, evaluation, punishment, or exclusion alongside the abovementioned observing gaze (Foucault 1980). Disciplinary techniques aim to produce a ‘docile body’ by focusing on details, timing, individual movements, and speed of movements. For Foucault (1980), discipline is based on body modification, such as the requirement of a correspondence between the body and its movements (Oksala 2010). According to Foucault (1980, X) a ‘Docile body is one that can be subjected, used, transformed, and improved. The docile body can only be achieved through strict regiment of disciplinary acts’. In Foucault’s (1980) conceptualisation, pedagogical power is a normalising power, which forces people into similarity but not into homogeneity. According to Watkins (2012) education is not only a cognitive process but also involves a bodily dimension. For young children, the bodily nature of education becomes most apparent when they enter institutional ECEC that highlights temporal and spatial rhythms and appropriate manners of behaviour (Watkins 2012). In previous studies, Foucault’s thinking has been used to some extent to examine the practices, pedagogy, and governance of educational institutions and childhood discourses (e.g. Markström 2010; Strandell 2012). In his school ethnographic study, Jenks (2001), referring to Foucault, points out that for children, especially in an institutional context, even the most essential bodily activities are scheduled and occur in a planned space within a specific curriculum. According to Holligan (2000), the Foucauldian perspective is well suited to ECEC research, as it offers a ‘subversive’ conceptual framework for exploring children’s experiences of education and its aims, as well as the extent and EUROPEAN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION RESEARCH JOURNAL 3 appearance of control. Governmentality is useful in demonstrating how children control and regulate their own behaviour in pedagogical interactions in ECEC. Schedules, daily rhythms, and teaching and learning strategies accustom the body to docility (Holligan 2000). Gehret et al. (2021), when studying naptime from the perspective of learning, argue that what children learn when adults control naptime is to conform, comply, and recognise adult regulation instead of understanding the meanings of rest and their self-regulation. Through governmentality, children’s agency is limited by their subordinate position compared to that of adults, but children are capable of resistance (Gehret et al. 2021; Moore et al. 2011; Rainio 2008). Resistance by children is quite often viewed as negative or problematic behaviour, signifying disobedience towards adults (Markström 2010; Rainio 2008), but it can also be recognised as a struggle for a voice, agency, and citizenship (Moore et al. 2011; Rainio 2008). James (2000, 33) refers to ‘as if’ activity, meaning children’s manner of presenting their bodies for view ‘as if’ they were the bodies of those who are orderly and well behaved. As an example, James illustrates a classroom in which children who want to please the teacher straighten their backs, sit still, and look straight ahead as expected. However, outside the classroom, the same children must be made to look ‘as if’ they run fast, jump high, or fight well. According to Fingerson (2009, 224), children are not usually so organised and well behaved, but they work hard to promote this image of themselves. Thus, resistance can be undertaken through subtle or hidden means of opposing the prevailing norms and rules of the environment (e.g. Gehret et al. 2021; Markström 2010). Methods The data for the present study were extracted from two studies: an ethnographic study (Kuukka 2015) and a narrative research project ‘Conflicts and power in children and young people’s close relationships – Narrated emotions and agency as facets’ (VALTAKO). The datasets from these studies include children’s ethnographic conversations and individual and pair interviews (the first study), and children’s narratives of naptime collected with the Story Magician’s Play Time method (SMPT) (the latter study). The ethnographic data collection, including the conversations and interviews, took place during one spring semester 2002. The participating ECEC group included 20 children aged five to seven years. The ethnographic approach is applied to make cultural phenomena and processes visible, along with shared cultural meanings and activities in different situations for individuals and communities (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007; Lange and Mierendorff 2009). The data analysed in this study include related conversations and interviews with the children but not observations. To obtain meaningful interview data from children, the questions should be relevant to their experiences and knowledge (Alasuutari 2009). Thus, it was important to utilise words employed by the children themselves and link the questions to the children’s everyday lives in the ECEC centre; to the practices and activities; and to the relationships between the children. Thematical interviews included topics related to children’s views about peers and activities with friends in ECEC; spaces and places in the ECEC centre (pleasant, unpleasant, indoor, outdoor, forbidden); hobbies; body condition; dressing and clothing; and health and wellbeing. The interviews lasted from 15 min to over half an hour. The total interview material comprised 141 transcribed pages. 4 A. KUUKKA ET AL. Related to the VALTAKO project, children’s narratives were collected using the SMPT method for listening to young children’s perspectives through guided storytelling and play (Koivula, Turja, and Laakso 2020). In total, 28 young children from two ECEC centres participated in individual SMPT sessions once or twice during the academic year 2020–2021 (54 sessions in all). During the sessions, the researcher asked the child to choose one of seven pictures illustrating everyday conflict situations, one of which depicted naptime in ECEC. The pictures were not explicitly named as conflicts to give room for the child’s own imagination. The researcher asked the child to tell a story about the chosen picture and prompted the narration with questions, such as: ‘What has happened in the picture?’; ‘What happens then?’; ‘How could the story end so that everyone would be happy?’ However, she was careful not to lead the storyline. After the story was told, the child was encouraged to enact it with props, such as dolls and play furniture. The child could decide on the researcher’s role and participation in the play. Sometimes, this phase led to a new narrative that differed from the one the child had told based on the picture. At the end of the session, the researcher asked if the child had been in a similar situation and what adults could learn from the story. For the present study, the narratives on naptime in ECEC were selected for analysis: 17 narratives by nine young children aged five to six years, of which 9 narratives were prompted by the picture, 4 narratives were developed during the play, and 4 were narratives of children’s own experiences. The two datasets complement each other. Ethnographic conversations and interviews can shed light on the daily situations experienced by children in ECEC. Children’s narratives, in turn, open up meanings children construct and imagine when their possibilities for influencing the real situation might be restricted. Ethics The study was conducted according to the ethical guidelines of the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (2019) and the European Early Childhood Education Research Association (Bertram et al. 2015). The VALTAKO project was approved by The Human Sciences Ethics Committee at the University of Jyväskylä (statement 06/ 2020). Prior to the data collection, written informed consent was obtained from the parents of the participating children. Furthermore, the children themselves were informed about the study and their consent was sought either verbally (ethnographic data collection) or through a playful form that was filled in by the child and the researcher together (SMPT sessions). In addition to the formal ethical procedures, an ethics-in-action approach (see Rutanen et al. 2023) was applied during both the ethnographic data collection and the SMPT sessions to build trust and maintain ongoing assent with the young children. During the ethnographic data collection, careful attention was paid to the children’s verbal and non-verbal expressions. If a child showed emotional strain towards the researcher or the data collection procedure, the researcher ended the observation. At the beginning of the SMPT sessions, the children were told they could withdraw from the study whenever they wished. During the sessions, the researcher also ensured that they continued to assent to the process. EUROPEAN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION RESEARCH JOURNAL 5 Data analysis Our analysis drew on abductive logic (Patton 2002), which enables a dialogue between theory and the empirical data. Abductive reasoning approaches what Jackson and Mazzei (2012, vii and 4) consider ‘thinking with theory’, a process in which data reading and theory thinking occur at the same time. By employing Foucault’s analytical ‘toolbox’ to read the empirical data and children’s accounts, we have used the notion of governmentality and disciplinary power as an analytical lens to illustrate how children’s bodies are put under surveillance and how children complied by conforming their bodies appropriately during naptime. We were also interested in children’s possible resistance and its forms, for example, how they used their bodies as instruments of resistance during naptime. Accordingly, we identified how children’s bodily positioning was manifested in the children’s accounts. Positioning can be detected based on the rights and duties used in positioning the self and others in narration (Harré and Moghaddam 2014). In a Foucauldian sense, the positioning of a person is based on negotiation about what is considered institutionally and culturally normal and abnormal or problematic (Foucault 1977). Here, we were interested in interpreting positioning in children’s accounts as relational and contextual, unmasking how the child’s bodily presence is positioned in relation to the ECEC institutional order in the context of naptime. We identified three types of bodily positionings in the children’s accounts: docile, demurring, and rebellious bodies. In docile bodies positionings, the child’s position was described through compliance portraying children’s embodied conforming to adult requests by, for example, lying down, being still, and sleeping/resting without any signs of resisting the adult order. In demurring bodies, the child’s position was described as bodily resistance which manifested in subtle or invisible ways, such as playing with their fingers, whispering, and giggling. In rebellious bodies, in turn, children’s bodily resistance was open and even assumed carnivalistic forms. The child was delineated in a bodily position of the right to oppose adult governance, although identified mainly in imaginative stories. In all accounts, the adult’s duty was to insist children stay quiet and rest, denoting governance and surveillance as an adult right. Findings In their accounts of naptime, the children described diverse norms and rules, thus denoting the institutional discipline and adult governance occurring during ECEC naptime. Many of these norms and rules focused on the child’s body, restraining their possibilities to control their body during naptime. The following three sub sections address different types of bodily positionings. Docile bodies Proper bodily behaviour, a docile body, was defined by the children as a compulsion that was under rather strict adult governance. In the ethnographic conversations, the children described that they could not move, sit, or talk during naptime without adults reminding them of the rules and telling them to lie down properly: ‘ … you have to lie down all the 6 A. KUUKKA ET AL. time … and once you move, so blah blah blah’ [imitates adult’s voice]’. Adult governance was also maintained by rewarding proper conduct by letting the child leave the nap room first to choose the best toys. The children could find lying down tedious: ‘Nap room is an awful place, when you have to lie so long in bed, just have to’. The modal verb ‘have to’, used by several children participating in the ethnographic conversations, highlights the compulsion of staying still. The children’s bodily docility was not only fostered by adults but the children themselves. Based on the ethnographic conversations and interviews, the nap room discipline had developed to children’s personal knowledge and self-regulation through which they conformed to the norms. When asked why they have to sleep or rest in ECEC, the children associated naptime with health and wellbeing and described the necessity of sleep and rest for several body parts: ‘If you don’t feel tired, then the brain and arms and everything have to rest’. Sleep and rest were also associated with getting stronger as the children mentioned that during naps ‘you grow’ and ‘get more strength’. Furthermore, the children talked about threats related to a lack of sleep: a child who does not sleep ‘won’t grow’ and ‘will die’ even. These definitions seem to follow a medical, naturalistic, and psychological agenda, focusing on the relationship between sleep and a healthy, competent body (e.g. Moran-Ellis and Venn 2007, ). Such knowledge worked to motivate children to comply with nap-room norms, making them believe that complying contributed to their future health and wellbeing, thus serving their own good. Respecting their ‘bodily needs’, therefore, became their responsibility and obligation. The narratives collected using the SMPT method manifested somewhat similar internalisation of nap-room norms. Obeying the adult request to be quiet and sleep usually led to a happy ending in narratives in which children had first resisted sleeping in either subtle or more pronounced bodily ways. This solution was often described to make both the adult and the children in the narrative feel good or happy. Some of the child participants even described sleeping to serve the narrated children’s own wishes. The following data example includes this kind of narration: Researcher: […] She [the educator] becomes happy. How? Child: When they [the children] sleep. […] Yea, because they are terribly tired and because they feel like yawning. Researcher: How would Runo and Kuura’s story end then? Child: They [the children] wanted to sleep. Researcher: They wanted to go to sleep then, did they? Child: Yea, because they were so [tired] In the example, naps were a solution that served the adult’s will (she became happy) and the children’s wishes (they wanted to sleep) and bodily needs (they were terribly tired). As in the ethnographic data, sleeping was described as serving children’s own good. However, instead of referring to future health and well-being, the desirability of sleeping was based on the children’s present feeling of tiredness. When asked what could be learned from their story, the children’s answers echoed the nap-room discipline: ‘be quiet in the nap-room’ and ‘one can sleep’. 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