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“What Would Happen if Humans Disappeared from Earth?” Tracing and Visualizing Change in a Pre-School Child’s Domain-Related Curiosities
Book chapter   Peer reviewed

“What Would Happen if Humans Disappeared from Earth?” Tracing and Visualizing Change in a Pre-School Child’s Domain-Related Curiosities

Mamta Shah, Amanda Barany and Amanda Siebert-Evenstone
Advances in Quantitative Ethnography, pp 232-247
22 Jan 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67788-6_16

Abstract

Curiosity Epistemic network analysis Parent-child interaction Quantitative ethnography Questioning Self-Ethnography
The National Research Council reports on science education have discussed how children of preschool age demonstrate readiness for science. However, what is missing is a discussion of mechanisms and practices that can promote deep curiosity over a long period. In this self and quantitative ethnography, we explore family engagement with scientific thinking and content as it unfolded for a mother-son dyad during a 10-month period. Shah and her son Mihir (pseudonym) participated in ‘A Bedtime Curiosity’ (ABC) routine (designed by Shah) wherein the latter was encouraged to express an idea he was curious about, ask a question, and then co-explore possible answers by watching a short video, followed by discussion if requested. After thematically coding the set of questions (N = 123), we used epistemic network analysis (ENA) to identify and model the connections between his curiosity over time. Thereafter, we took advantage of the self-ethnography to reevaluate the qualitative and quantitative data as well as the entire routine from the perspective of both the parent-researcher and the participating child. This body of work is positioned to extend the literature on examining parent-child interactions to support children’s curiosity- a phenomenon that is crucial to child development.

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