Perezhivanie and the silent phenomenon in infant care: Rethinking socioculturally informed infant pedagogy

Abstract

Caring for infants is a significant cultural activity, yet the subjective nature of this work has received little attention in socioculturally informed infant pedagogies. This article presents an alternative way of conceptualising the subjective and affective nature of infant care, and critiques the ‘downward’ sociological focus applied by many who advocate sociocultural approaches. The argument is made that Vygotsky’s theoretical concept of perezhivanie allows for the presence of subjective and affective phenomena in sociocultural pedagogies, and extends understanding of the role of adult emotion in infant caregiving. Capturing teachers’ subjective affect, however, creates methodological difficulties. Challenges are discussed in light of others’ studies investigating the impacts of internal phenomena in infant caregiving. The concept of ‘absent’ yet significant data is introduced and the validity of exploring ‘silent phenomena’ discussed. This article extends on discussion and issues raised in ‘Perezhivanie: What have we missed about infant care?’, published in Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood in 2014.

Introduction

Caring for infants is a significant cultural activity. However, its subjective nature has received little attention in socioculturally informed infant pedagogies. This article aims to present an alternative way of conceptualising the subjective and affective nature of infant care, and critiques the ‘downward’ sociological focus applied by many who advocate sociocultural approaches (Carr et al., 2009; Edwards, 2006, 2007; Moran et al., 2007; New Zealand Ministry of Education, 1996; Ritchie, 2010; Wood, 2014). The argument is made that sociologically oriented interpretations of sociocultural theory and pedagogies often seen in early childhood education offer teachers little guidance as to how to understand intrapersonal phenomena such as subjective experience and, in doing so, overlook the vital role that ‘personal’ emotions play in adult–infant relationships. The discussion and debate draw on literature in the field and the methodological challenges I faced when using a sociocultural framework to explore early childhood teachers’ personal experiences of caring for infants.

Sociocultural theory, perezhivanie and subjectivity

Socioculturally informed pedagogies rest on the premise that the sociological will create and shape the psychological (Brennan, 2005, 2007, 2014), with behaviour being understood from the social structure ‘downwards’ rather than from the individual’s personal experience ‘upwards’ (Neale and Flowerdew, 2003). Yet prominent socioculturalists (Cole, 1995, 1996, 1999; Valsiner, 1999; Wertsch, 1993) have challenged externalist interpretations of sociocultural theory and queried whether they will ever adequately portray the role of psychological phenomena such as emotions in shaping thought and behaviour. Holodynski (2013) has more recently argued that although activity theory assigns a key role to emotion, there remain limited studies on emotions within the domain of cultural-historical activity theory. However, the significance of emotion in determining caregiving behaviour is clearly evident in research citing adult–infant attachments as dependent on adults’ ongoing emotional engagement with infants (Adshead, 2010; Bowlby, 2007; Fox, 2012; McCain et al., 2007; Parfitt et al., 2013; Shanker, 2008, 2012). Research indicates that caregivers’ subjective experiences shape their interpretation of infants’ behaviour and will determine the extent to which they become emotionally attuned to the infants in their care (Coyne et al., 2007). I would argue that although research points to the influence of adults’ internal states on caregiving behaviour, the dominant sociocultural discourse in early childhood education has limited exploration of the impact of subjectivity in caregiving. Perezhivanie, a Vygotskian concept, however, highlights the importance of affective subjectivity on thought and behaviour, and addresses a theoretical gap in macro-sociological interpretations of sociocultural theory (Blunden, 2010; Brennan, 2014; Ferholt, 2009; Garratt, 2012).

Perezhivanie as a sociocultural construct urges exploration of each person’s subjective and unique experience of the environment in order to more fully understand behaviour (Blunden, 2010; Ferholt, 2009; Garratt, 2012). Perezhivanie as a theoretical concept unites emotion and cognition, emphasising the embodied and affective nature of all mental activity and validating the inclusion of subjective affect in socioculturally informed infant pedagogies. This concept is not new in early childhood research, yet others’ studies have tended to focus on the child’s experience or perezhivanie rather than the adult’s (Alcock, 2005; Ferholt, 2009; Quinone and Fleer, 2011; White, 2011). Yet ‘examination of the teacher’s perezhivanie asks the researcher to recognise then pay attention to subjective experience in order to understand caregiving behaviour’ (Brennan, 2014: 288). The teacher’s subjective experience becomes the reference point, and challenges the current sociological orientation of sociocultural theory in infant pedagogies (Brennan, 2014). Furthermore, exploring the teacher’s personal experience from the perspective of the teacher invites affect and subjectivity into professional discourses, as understanding can only be accessed through the teacher herself. Mindful of this latter point, my study asks: What is the teacher’s personal and emotional experience of infant care?

Affect and subjectivity in infant care

Others’ studies have explored links between the teacher’s personal experience, caregiving practice and secure attachment, concluding that caregivers’ (both parents and teachers) subjective and affective states will determine their ability to attune and respond to infants (Bouchard et al., 2008; Brownlee and Berthelsen, 2006; Brownlee et al., 2008; Coyne et al., 2007; Degotardi and Davis, 2008; Elfer, 2012; Elfer and Dearnley, 2007; Fonagy et al., 2007). Fonagy et al.’s (2007) ‘reflective function’, Meins et al.’s (2003) ‘mind-mindedness’ and Degotardi’s (2010) ‘interpretative complexity’, for example, all link secure attachment with the caregiver’s awareness and capacity to respond to mental states in oneself as well as the infant (Bouchard et al., 2008). Reflective functioning concerns the mother’s capacity to contain her own emotional state in order to consider and respond to her infant’s state of mind (Degotardi and Davis, 2008; Fonagy et al., 2007; Grienenberger et al., 2005; Koren-Karie et al., 2002; Meins et al., 2003). The related construct of ‘maternal mind-mindedness’ is the proclivity for mothers to perceive their infant as a person with an intentional ‘mind’, and to actively look for behavioural cues that will provide them with insight into their infants’ desires, intentions and emotions (Lok and McMahon, 2006; Meins et al., 2003). Studies indicate that mothers who are able to identify and describe their emotions are more likely to engage in mind-mindedness and are generally more aware of the impact of their own emotional states on their infant (Coyne et al., 2007; Meins et al., 2003).

Similarly, Degotardi’s (2010) ‘interpretive complexity’ describes early childhood teachers’ ability to attune and respond to infants’ internal states. High interpretive complexity is characterised by teachers’ explicit awareness of their own and the infant’s psychological states, and how this impacts on their interactions with the infant (Degotardi, 2010; Degotardi and Davis, 2008). Elfer’s (2012) studies draw attention to the emotional demands placed on teachers and conclude that teachers will use strategies such as ‘detachment’ to contain stressful or overwhelming situations and maintain a more manageable psychological ‘position’. Yet Elfer cautions that this can come at the cost of making adults less emotionally available to the infants in their care (Elfer, 2012; Elfer and Dearnley, 2007).

Brownlee et al.’s (2004, 2008) work both supports and elaborates on Elfer’s findings, maintaining that teachers’ subjective experiences filter practical and theoretical knowledge to influence their pedagogy and practice. The researchers found that teachers’ knowledge construction and personal epistemologies are borne out of each person’s experience (Brownlee et al., 2004; Butler et al., 2007), yet can be complicated in professional situations by teachers’ self-regulatory efforts to determine which emotions are expressed or even acknowledged (Brownlee et al., 2004, 2008). Brownlee et al. (2004, 2008) argue that learning is an emotional activity, and emotions are the tools by which people ‘appraise experience and prepare to act on situations’ (Cole et al., 2004: 319). Their findings resonate with Vygotsky’s concept of perezhivanie in concluding that cognitive and affective dimensions cannot be separated.

From this body of work some common themes emerge (Brownlee et al., 2004, 2008; Coyne et al., 2007; Degotardi, 2010; Degotardi and Davis, 2008; Elfer, 2012; Elfer and Dearnley, 2007; Fonagy et al., 2007; Grienenberger et al., 2005; Koren-Karie et al., 2002; Meins et al., 2003). Caregivers’ insight into their own and infants’ internal states influences the nature of adult–infant relationships. Secure attachment is linked with caregivers’ insight and sensitivity to the infant’s mental state, but, interestingly, also their own (Bouchard et al., 2008). Adults will interpret infant affect in the context of their own emotions. Of particular relevance to my area of research are findings indicating that the adult’s ability to identify, contain and regulate their own affective state will influence their responsiveness to infants in their care (Bouchard et al., 2008; Grienenberger et al., 2005; Koren-Karie et al., 2002).

This work resonates with perezhivanie in pointing to the inseparable nature of affect and intellect. Perezhivanie sees cognitive processes such as containment, self-regulation and reflectiveness as informed by emotion, suggesting that if we are to understand caregiving behaviour, then we must first try to understand the affective states underlying these psychological processes (Brennan, 2014; González Rey, 2009, 2011). Teachers’ subjective affect is acknowledged within the discussed constructs (reflective function, mind-mindedness and interpretative complexity), yet perezhivanie extends current sociocultural understanding of the orienting function and highly subjective nature of emotion in determining caregiving behaviour (Brennan, 2014). Subjective affect influences adults’ interpretive tendencies and the extent to which they become emotionally attuned to infants (Degotardi and Davis, 2008). The reviewed studies confirm the need for exploration of the place of teacher subjectivity in infant pedagogies, and reiterate the significance of adult affect in adult–infant relationships.

Accessing subjective affect and methodological challenges

Research indicates that teachers’ subjective and affective internal states warrant exploration, yet sociocultural theory and methodologies tend to avoid the role of agentic emotion in behaviour, perhaps because it is a difficult concept to explain within a framework that promotes the self as sociological in formation and nature (Brennan, 2005, 2007; Ratner, 1997, 2000). Ethnography and interpretative phenomenology offer alternative methodological approaches to explore teachers’ personal and emotional experiences of infant care from the ‘inside out’ and the teacher’s perspective (Neale and Flowerdew, 2003). Ethnographic studies research small communities to produce detailed descriptions and commentaries about the members’ lives. A strength of ‘ethnographic research is its capacity to tap into “ordinary” life, describe it in depth and detail, and develop an understanding from within’ (De Jong et al., 2013: 170; see also Pietkiewicz and Smith, 2012). Making the practice ‘strange’ is a technique used by ethnographers to detach from familiar and ‘known’ knowledge in order to make it unknown and to be considered anew. Guided by perezhivanie, I used the ethnographic technique of making the practice ‘strange’ to detach from professional knowledge and dominant sociocultural discourses in order to explore teachers’ personal experiences of infant care from their own perspective.

Forefronting perezhivanie, I focused specifically on the personal meaning awarded to infant care by the teachers, viewing the teacher’s perspective as an essential component of subjectivity. However, accessing subjectivity and teachers’ internal states proved a challenge. I had intended to use observational and interview methods, but reviewed this decision, as perezhivanie suggests that internal phenomena cannot be accessed through my observation of others’ behaviour. I could observe how the teacher expressed an emotion, but this may differ from what she or he was feeling and experiencing. Additionally, Choy’s (2009) study discusses the potential for the researcher to be misled when the participant’s ‘expressed’ emotion and ‘felt’ emotion do not match, and terms this ‘emotional dissemblance’. Choy says that this incongruence occurs when the person’s internal state does not match what others are seeing. Researchers, therefore, cannot accept the participant’s expression of emotion as indicative of how it is being felt by the person (Choy, 2009). This point seemed an important one in light of my research focus. I questioned whether observation as a method of data collection could yield relevant data or, in fact, even address the research question. I concluded that subjective affect could not be observed, but only accessed through the person concerned. I would therefore need to rely on participants’ self-report of their own caregiving experiences. Yet this method also presented challenges, which are discussed in the following section.

Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) examines how individuals make meaning of their life experiences, usually by the researcher seeking detailed personal accounts of a phenomenon (Pietkiewicz and Smith, 2012). An overarching aim of phenomenology is to identify the essential components of phenomena or experiences which make this particular phenomenon unique from others. In IPA terms, it requires the researcher to maintain both an emic and an etic perspective (De Jong et al., 2013; Pietkiewicz and Smith, 2012). The etic perspective promotes the use of a psychological lens to help the researcher detach from data in order to understand the phenomena, while the emic perspective protects against psychological reductionism by always keeping the person in view. In IPA, the individual’s story is told, but the researcher moves between personal accounts and an etic perspective by using a technique called ‘bracketing’. ‘Bracketing’ forefronts the personal and subjective while using theory to interrogate data (Pietkiewicz and Smith, 2012). My data collection subsequently took the form of interviews with teachers and relied on the participants’ own accounts of the personal and emotional aspects of infant caregiving. As a researcher, I attempted to suspend my own understanding and knowledge of infant caregiving during data collection in order to listen carefully to the teachers’ perceptions and experiences of this activity.

During data collection, in spite of others’ studies confirming adult emotion as central, I became increasingly aware of the absence of the ‘personal’ and the ‘emotional’ in the teachers’ accounts. I was unsure if professional discourses had mediated how teachers recalled their personal accounts of infant caregiving, discouraging them from voicing the affective and personal nature of their work, or if the silence was due to methodological and paradigmatic challenges in accessing intrapersonal phenomena. I used the IPA ‘bracketing’ technique to encourage teachers’ elaboration of personal experiences and to address the potentially limiting effects of dominant professional discourses. At these times, I would explain the concept of perezhivanie to move accounts beyond ‘professional speak’ and prompt engagement with the personal and affective aspects of the work. Interestingly, the difficulty I experienced in getting teachers to talk about the emotive aspects of caregiving resonates with Lofdahl and Folke-Fichtelius’s (2015) findings. These researchers also found that teachers rarely talk about the ‘care’ aspects of their work and often have difficulty describing what care means to them. Their findings concluded that teachers reframe affective elements of their work within professional discourses to reconceptualise ‘care’ as ‘learning and knowledge’.

Self-report as a method of data collection may also explain the absence of adult affect in the data. Self-report supports avoidance of the personal, as recalled accounts of feelings are not limited to the person’s current emotions. People often describe their emotions differently to how they actually experienced them, influenced by social beliefs about the affect and how it should be expressed in professional situations. In recalling emotional situations, people tend to access beliefs about the emotions elicited in a particular situation (situation-specific belief), rather than the affect itself (Napa Scollon et al., 2011; Robinson and Clore, 2002). Napa Scollon et al. (2011) use the term ‘online reports’ to distinguish between the participant’s reports of ‘current feelings’ and ‘memory-based feelings’, reminding researchers that they will only ever have access to memory-based reports. This point also seemed an important one for my study and supported an initial concern that early childhood teachers’ recall of emotion may be edited within professional discourses. Self-report allows the teachers to focus on what they should feel, rather than what they did feel. Moreover, delay between an emotional experience and its report will inevitably mean a loss and reframing of information. Yet Napa Scollon et al. (2011) conclude that self-reports are nevertheless a generally reliable and valid method of data collection. Additionally, perezhivanie increased my awareness that asking teachers to recall the feeling also asks them to cognise the feeling, which may lead to a reframing of affect within professional discourses and avoidance of agentic emotion in their accounts.

Subjective affect: the ‘silent phenomenon’

Using IPA bracketing and ethnographic detachment techniques alerted me to the possibility of invisible and silent, yet significant data, and created uncertainty as to what counts as sources of knowledge and data. This led to epistemological questions such as: How I do recognise internal phenomena? Does the silence mean the phenomenon does not exist or that it is just not recognised (by me and/or the participant)? And if others’ work is pointing to the significance of adults’ subjective emotion in infant caregiving, then why is it absent in these teachers’ accounts? These epistemological ruminations evolved into the following overarching question: If I am unable to see or hear a phenomenon, does this mean it is not real or valid in terms of addressing the research question? I suspended data collection to grapple with epistemological concerns, as I sensed the teachers’ silence may be an important finding in and of itself.

Although giving life to silent data is a validity nightmare, I entertained the possibility that what teachers said was important, but ‘what was not said’ may be significant. I realise that empirically it is a slippery slope giving life to an absent phenomenon, so looked for reasons for its absence, not discounting the possibility that the teachers’ perezhivanie is present in their accounts and that I am just not seeing it. Regardless, a key message from the research is that relationship-based infant pedagogies require adults who have the skills, ability and emotional awareness to attune and respond to infants (Dalli et al., 2011). In sum, empirically and theoretically we know that the teacher’s personal and emotional investment in relationships with infants is essential. For these reasons, I termed subjective affect the ‘silent phenomenon’, treating the teachers’ silence as data, while continuing to explore explanations (methodological, theoretical and pedagogical) for its absence.

As previously mentioned, an obvious explanation for the teachers’ silence is the methodological difficulty of how to capture subjective emotion. Emotion is a personal experience that is always happening in the present. It is immediate and internal. Emotion’s micro-momentary character relies on the participant’s recall of the situation or experience. Even if the researcher is present at the moment of expression, she can only report the observable expression of emotion rather than how the participant is experiencing it, leaving her with only the participant’s recall of the emotion experienced. Furthermore, the participant’s cognition of the feeling will always be mediated by language and, for teachers, filtered through professional discourses (Boyer and Wertsch, 2009; Draaisma, 2004; Neale and Flowerdew, 2003).

Bouchard et al.’s (2008) study offers another explanation for the teachers’ silence, stating that people move through various stages of awareness of personal affect. The first stage, ‘impulsion’, signals a person’s unawareness of their own affect (feeling) or its significance in influencing behaviour. The next stage, ‘externalisation’, is when an affect is recognised but disowned by the person, and understood as the cause of external factors rather than part of the person’s own private thoughts or feeling states. ‘Appropriation’ is when an affect is both felt and owned by the person as an internal, private, subjective experience, yet its meaning is not fully understood in terms of its effect on actions and behaviour. A final stage is when the person both owns and understands the subjective experience and its impact on their actions (Bouchard et al., 2008). Elfer’s (2012) findings support Bouchard et al.’s notion of the stages of complexities people move through when discussing personal emotions. Elfer (2012) found that teachers are not always aware of an affect or its impact, particularly if it is upsetting or anxiety-provoking. Additionally, Holstein and Gubrium

observe that the meaning of our experiences is artfully constructed, constantly emerging, yet circumstantially shaped. … [The person] emerges in, or out of the semiotic streams of social and personal determinations that always traverse and guide the person. Through life, as people learn from experience, and master complex cultural systems, their modes of distancing become also more deliberate, complex, or abstract. (Holstein and Gubrium, 2000, cited in Neale and Flowerdew, 2003: 197)

Bouchard et al.’s (2008) and Elfer’s (2012) findings offer methodological and theoretical explanations for the teachers’ silence. Nevertheless, ontologically privileging phenomena that are accessible and observable may limit understanding of how adults’ internal states impact on caregiving behaviour. A silent phenomenon creates empirical problems for the researcher as, in this case, emotion is inaccessible. Furthermore, the recall of emotion itself is not necessarily congruent with how emotion was experienced by the person.

It is difficult to give epistemological visibility to phenomena if they are ontologically silenced. Privileging ‘downward’ sociocultural interpretations of behaviour may omit subjectivity, yet we know that feelings are ‘real’ and will influence infant caregiving behaviour. But how much importance should be given to the potential influence of socioculturally informed professional discourses in the sought-after phenomenon’s non-existence? Baptiste’s (2001) work suggests that we should pay attention to the silent phenomenon. Baptiste challenges research that only validates observable behaviour which is directly accessible to the researcher, arguing that early attention to paradigmatic issues is essential. Zembylas states that Foucault also reminds us that theoretical and methodological difficulties may signal insight into new knowledge, and urges the researcher to attempt to find solutions to methodological problems in order to avoid continually researching within existing theoretical frameworks – a practice that can become an exercise in knowledge confirmation rather than knowledge creation (Zembylas, 2015). Working through such issues has required a certain amount of epistemological reflexivity to move across and within methodological paradigms in order to keep a silent but potentially significant phenomenon ‘in sight’ when there is little evidence of its presence in the data. In conclusion, Colley (2006) reiterates that deployment of emotion by the teacher is, in fact, a key part of the job and deserves exploration, yet I have found that capturing another person’s affect is complex.

Implications

Starting from complexity definitely creates challenges for the researcher (Valsiner, 2014), but it does allow for theories that may explain complex phenomena which we cannot always observe or explain within dominant theoretical paradigms, yet which nevertheless affect people’s behaviour and actions. Working within a sociocultural paradigm to explore and understand infant caregiving as a significant cultural activity proved to be a complex but thought-provoking exercise. Both literature and research point to the affective and subjective nature of this activity as setting it apart from others, with the adult–infant bond characterising the core nature of infant care.

If we accept perezhivanie’s conceptualisation of affect and intellect as an inseparable unit, then Elfer’s (2012) finding that teachers engage in psychological ‘distancing’ to cope with the emotional demands of infant care is concerning (see also Ferholt, 2009). Furthermore, what happens if the uniquely subjective and affective elements of infant care that are essential for teachers to connect and relate to infants are mediated within professional and sociocultural discourses? We need to know and understand what we are asking teachers to do: Attach and detach? Be subjective but objective? Be part of culturally mediated systems and beliefs, yet retain personal awareness, intuition and judgment? To have feelings and emotions in order to attach and attend to relational aspects of their work, but then to suspend these while at work or learn how to reframe them within professional and sociocultural discourses? To pay attention to professional knowledge and beliefs, yet be ready to abandon personal understandings, intuitions and experiences when forming relationships with infants and their families?

The prevalence of infants in care (New Zealand Ministry of Education, 2015) means that we need to know more about the people who are caring for infants, their work and all it entails. Who are these people? What do they do? How do they do it? What do they need? What influences their practice? How can we support them? Employing perezhivanie as a theoretical concept to guide exploration of teachers’ personal experiences suggests that support targeted to the individual’s needs depends on, first, understanding each person’s unique experience of infant care. Yet accessing subjective experience within sociocultural frameworks is complex and requires creative approaches to data collection. Using self-report appears to be a credible way to capture, analyse and understand the teacher’s perspective and experience. Yet recall involves the past, which is always understood through the person’s perspective of the current experience and often changed understanding of the phenomenon. Methodologically speaking, data is always gathered and then analysed out of the immediacy of subjective experience, making it difficult to explore and understand the impacts of agentic emotion on infant caregiving.

Conclusion

Early childhood research, theory and pedagogy have rightfully embraced sociocultural approaches to attend to the highly contextualised nature of learning and development. Yet I have argued that the sociological orientation of caregiving pedagogies has potentially limited important exploration of the subjective and affective nature of this work within infant pedagogies. Quite simply, we need to know more about how teachers are experiencing the intensely emotional and personal work of caring for infants. In spite of the discussed methodological difficulties, we cannot limit exploration of important phenomena to stay within paradigmatic boundaries and dominant theoretical interpretations. But nor can we compromise theoretical and conceptual integrity by begging and borrowing from diverse methodologies without rigorous debate. And this is the broader challenge for early childhood researchers attempting to address gaps in theory and research. Returning to my own study, I am now wondering if the early childhood teachers’ apparent silence about the highly personal and emotional nature of their work is, in fact, a very loud finding. If so, then my next challenge is how to scrutinise and validate invisible, silent but potentially significant data in terms of extending current understandings of infant pedagogies while maintaining empirical integrity.