ABSTRACT

The aim of this chapter is to offer a contrast to the previous chapter and show how research paradigms established within different fields of research – for example, linguistics and anthropology – can provide teachers and other professionals with useful insights into young children’s experiences of learning and being. We have chosen ethnography as an approach that provides for contrast and comparison with the multilevel modelling approach outlined in the previous chapter. This choice is not intended to challenge; rather, the intention is to demonstrate how a different approach to research can provide the means to look at the world in a different, socially orientated way, with a view to seeing different things, or to seeing things differently; in short, to seeing the same things but in different ways.