Surrender as a Prosocial Behavior

• In Event: Reimagining Early Childhood Education Research Using Video-Cued Ethnography

Abstract

Over the past decade “grit” has been considered a popular panacea for academic success. Grit is tenacity combined with an ability to overcome adversity. It’s a personality trait that includes emotional regulation. (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007). It is rooted in ideas of American exceptionalism, but it is prevalent in discourses about achievement and success worldwide (He et al., 2021; Park, Kwak, & Kim, 2020). One of the problems with grit is that it is inherently racist and classist, focusing on personality as an obstacle to achievement while overlooking systemic problems. My research in Indonesia offers an alternative to “grit” as a pathway to achievement. Asmi, an Indonesian kindergarten student, helped me think through the concept of “surrender” as a form of agency where children use emotional restraint to shift their focus from conflict onto more productive or pleasurable pursuits.

I interwove components of ethnography, video microanalysis, and video cued interviews and focus groups. I spent Ramadan in an Indonesian village. I used video and observational field notes to record the daily activities of the village kindergarten. I drew from the work of Tobin, Wu, and Davidson (1989) and edited the video recordings to a series of vignettes which I then showed to Indonesian educators and parents. I then did a frame-by-frame microanalysis of the vignettes, which highlighted embodied performances of prosocial behavior (Hayashi, 2019).

I was informed by what Comaroff and Comaroff (2015) refer to as “Theory from the South,” which draws on the use of non-western and non-northern theories to understand phenomena outside of the global north/west. I used Video Cued Ethnography (VCE) to incorporate the voices of Indonesian scholars and academics in the interpretation and analysis of children’s classroom behaviors. This method in combination with Gadamer’s approach to Philosophical hermeneutics allowed me to focus my analysis on a variety of traditions and histories as they arise in the post-colonial institutional environment of the rural Indonesian kindergarten (Gadamer, 1960/1989). These histories and traditions are an amalgam of different cultural practices and performance, recognized and acknowledged globally and locally.

In this presentation I focus on one vignette, it’s of a young girl, Asmi, playing with blocks. As she plays other children literally and figuratively dance in and out of her space. Sometimes the other children help her, sometimes they hinder her. She displays aggression toward some children who hinder her but not all. Eventually she reaches a tipping point and puts away her blocks. I showed this scene to over 100 Indonesian educators, parents, and members of Asmi’s village community. There was a consensus: Asmi should have stopped playing sooner. The fact that she kept playing despite the conflict was a sign of emotional immaturity. There are multiple interpretations of why this was the unanimous response to this vignette, and the one I focus on in this presentation is a skill that we generally do not prioritize in the global north/west; refusing to participate is an act of agency and power.

Author

• Francesca Pase, University of Georgia - Athens