Teachers And Children's Physical Interaction In Daycare Settings

Introduction

An ongoing discussion about the way teachers and children interact in daycare settings has been a topic of interest for many people who work and study in the field of early childhood psychology. Starting on June 10, 2013 and continuing through June 14, 2013, I conducted ethnographic field research about the most current ways daycare employees and children seem to interact on a daily basis. The research I was most interested with took place during times of play. Specifically, I wanted to examine how many times teachers and daycare students came into friendly physical contact on an average basis. To collect more information for this study, I entered the realm of childhood daycare via my local Childcare Network facility in my hometown of Chatsworth, GA. I

I felt it would be beneficial to get an idea of how much physical interaction goes on during actual daycare moments. By my measures, I concluded that the specific teachers assigned to watch the six and seven year old kids had a moderate amount of physical contact with their students. That seemed to be the norm for the daycare class I observed. However, the amount of physical contact did slightly vary by day. It was also less than I had originally estimated. Not surprisingly, girls and their teachers had the most amount of physical contact with each other. Girls would hug their teachers at times and often teachers would braid girls’ hair. With boys there was less contact – as was also expected – but most of their contact was granted due to some type of achievement. It mostly took the forms of high fives and “fist bumps”. I also did not observe any hostile advances made between teachers and students that included physical contact such as pushing or shoving during this research. Such behavior would not qualify for this study and would raise many