Question-asking and question-exploring

The Centre of Innovation Research at Greerton Early Childhood Centre was characterised as a dispositional milieu where working theories were explored through a narrative research methodology. As the research progressed, the teachers at Greerton strengthened the way we were listening to, and watching out for young children's questions to enable them to become deeply involved in exploring the world around them. The key question for this research was: How does a 'question-asking' and a 'question-exploring' culture support children to develop working theories to shape and re-shape knowledge for a purpose? Given our work with Te Whariki (1996), we have always seen teaching and learning as being about reciprocal relationships with people, places and things and the context being crucial, and continuity as the intention of story. In this project, by combining narrative inquiry with action research in an early childhood centre in Aotearoa New Zealand, we have developed a frame of 'commitments' that go beyond those that might be for narrative inquiry on its own. Four aspects have been woven into the narrative inquiry: continuity as the 'linchpin' of our work, agency (issues of power), an innovative conceptualising of the connection with community, and the central role of affect or emotion in learning.