Constructing Early Childhood Mathematics Through Framing in Video

• In Event: Reanimating Relationships Between Movement, Meaning, and the Image: Shifting Understandings About Video Data in Qualitative Research

Abstract

Objectives
The purpose of this paper is to re-examine decisions the researcher made about when to start and stop video recording episodes around mathematics in a kindergarten classroom. The hope is that by making these decisions about framing explicit, the paper can begin to provide a language for describing decisions of framing in video-based ethnographic work, which could impact both ethics and knowledge production.

Perspective(s)
As McClure and colleagues (2010), as well as others have noted, the use of video in research is often taken as evidence of a real. However, increasingly video ethnographers have challenged this idea. This paper takes up MacDougall’s notion of the constructive camera, which “interprets its subject by breaking it down and reassembling it according to some external logic,” (MacDougall, 2005, p. 4), to examine how a real was produced through a researcher’s choices.

Modes of inquiry
The data for this study was originally generated as part of an ethnographic project (Dyson, 2013) that grew out of a seven-year relationship between the researcher and a public school. This paper draws on a three-year video project that followed children from prekindergarten to Grade 1 and sought to document children’s experiences with mathematics. The researcher visited the school once a week to video record classroom interactions and also interviewed children, teachers, and parents.

Data sources
This paper focuses its analysis on ten videos taken in the kindergarten classroom and the accompanying ethnographic fieldnotes, used to provide context for decision making about what was included in the frame. Video taken during the kindergarten year provided a rich context to examine framing through external logic because the researcher’s choices about who and what to record were shaped both by the knowledge of what had occurred during the previous year and her anticipation of what might follow in Grade 1.

Results
Video episodes often ended when the children or the teacher demonstrated strong bursts of negative emotion. In fieldnotes, reasons for halting video included both a desire to be sensitive to the children and to not alienate the teacher. One result of this framing is that the mathematical interactions portrayed on video tended to be less emotional than those that occurred in the classroom. Additionally, choices about what to record were shaped by the spaces in which the researcher expected to see mathematics (e.g., whole group lessons, calendar time, puzzles), which resulted in moments of informal mathematics occurring off camera.

Scholarly Significance
The reliance on an external logic of what mathematics instruction ought to look like shaped decisions about when to turn on and off the video camera and about where to point it. In addition, the desire to protect participants’ emotional vulnerability contributed to portrayals of the mathematics classroom as unemotional. Routinely including descriptions of framing choices in video work could challenge assumptions about video portrayals as unproblematically real and could also support researchers explicitly naming the external logic that frames their data generation.

Author

• Amy Noelle Parks, Michigan State University