Video ethics with infants: international perspectives and challenges.

International teams of researchers located across New Zealand, Scotland, Finland, Samoa, Cook Islands, USA, Australia and Brazil embarked on a video project last year. Their quest was to try to understand the social and emotional experience of infants as they enter into early childhood education services for the first time. Since the project draws heavily on video excerpts of key events such as arrival, departure, routine, play and interactions, each team sought ethical consent to undertake this work. This presentation outlines some of the many and diverse perspectives towards such an undertaking for each country, and, in doing so, highlights the considerable challenges facing researchers who work in this field. The research that informs this presentation is based on a current Teaching, Research and Learning Initiative that seeks to better understand the pedagogic nature of two-year-old dialogues in preschool classrooms that were initially established to support older learners. Two year-olds, their peers, and teachers were simultaneously filmed from their visual fields: the first tracking the two year-old explicitly; the second from the teachers visual standpoint; the third taking into account the wider visual field. Teachers across two different early childhood education sites were separately asked to interpret a series of dialogic events of pedagogic significance for two year-olds based on this polyphonic
footage during their staff meetings. Researchers undertook the same process in the Video Lab. Their collective insights were subsequently shared as a secondary source of visual surplus which informed subsequent phases of analysis and provided a multi-voiced polyphony of insight concerning two year-old experience, the role of teachers, peers and the wider environment in promoting (or stifling) learning. The analysis draws from Bakhtin’s dialogic methodology (1986) which posits that calls upon interlocutors and researchers alike to immerse themselves in the communicative links that grant meaning through a chorus of (plural) voices.