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Chapter Four: Making Visible Ordinary Groupness
Making Visible Ordinary Groupness documents what happens when a high quality childcare service adopts a group-based approach to early education. The chapter emphasises how familiar it seems – if given the opportunity – that infants enjoy themselves together, play together, have emotional responses to each other and show awareness of the social complexity which they are a part of. The chapter focuses first on how mealtimes are transformed by educators swapping stressful adult-infant spoon-feeding routines to a relaxed and naturally enjoyed time when infant highchairs are placed in circles of four or five, allowing for social time, for learning from and teaching each other, for curiosity about each other and for exploiting and subverting the routines established at the centre. The chapter describes vignettes illustrating group complexity, how infants can creatively work together, as well as illustrating group-facilitative roles for educators and alternative ways of managing infant distress. Conclusions focus on implications for policy.