The Pedagogical Significance
When interacting with the toddler during play, an intentional teaching approach has been integrated into the conversation. EYLF (Outcome 4.0) Children are confident and involved learners. Infant and toddlers are constantly involved in continuous learning, through different aspects such as play, conversation with their peers and daily observations. The intentional teaching that I had scaffolded into the play found in this dialogue are purposeful and spontaneous by applying techniques of open questioning and shared thinking. The reason for this is to expand the toddlers curiosity, have better recognition, a clearer understanding of how things work and recognizing the differences, especially when relating to the topic that suits their best interests. For instance, the conversation involved the learning of colours [L L3], introducing different modes of transportation and pronunciation [L8 L2] and, also the work of a transport [L7]. According to VEYLDF (206), integrated teaching and learning approaches are effective early childhood practices used to encourage children in sustained and shared interactions, making more sense in their play and develop ideas on what they have encountered every day in both social and natural manner. Other than that, I was actively responding to the toddlers cues, showing interest in the play by paying full attention on the approximation of words and respecting his responses, [L L24], reflect on the learning with real-life observations [L3 L9] and recognizing his knowledge [L9 L2]. EYLF (Outcome 3.0) Children have a strong sense of wellbeing. DEEWR (as cited in Cheeseman, Sumsion & Press, 205, p.4) mentioned that being responsive towards children is crucial for educators in determining a childs strengths, interests, abilities and, ways of knowing and learning in order to design an appropriate teaching strategy and learning environment. Along with that, is the use of appropriate verbal tones when responding to the toddlers reply via the stressing of words on vocabularies and combining with sounds (mimicking the sound of an airplane) together with high and low pitches. EYLF (Outcome 5.0) Children are effective communicators. Infant and toddlers are active communicators, expressing their emotions through verbal and non-verbal interactions. These approaches enable toddlers to notice the emotions I am trying to convey and better recognize the importance in areas of teaching that has been pointed out, adopting a broader understanding of what they have already known. Not only does that help with an ongoing distribution of knowledge, but also to initiate a positive learning space for the toddler to enhance their self-expression, building a meaningful relationship and making play more exciting. Interactions are thus not merely sent or received language exchanges but can be thought of as emotional events that are characterized by consciousness in dialogue with one another (White, Redder & Peter, 205, p.286).
Identified Weaknesses
The main weakness for this critical analysis research is partially due to limited access to the information contained from the audio recording. I have lost a huge opportunity and exposure that is available in the video wh
ich could only be seen and not heard; also, making it difficult to provide a detailed and quality transcription to analyze and observe the learning that has taken place with the toddler. EYLF (Outcome .0) Children have a strong sense of identity. Having the ability to recognize our own and toddlers emotions, non-verbal interactions, body language, and eye contact is of utmost importance to determine the effectiveness of these pedagogical approaches, how the relationship is built, and whether attention is given between teacher – toddler during the conversation. White et al. (205) stated that eye contact plays a huge role for infants and toddlers as social participants, giving and receiving in mutual dialogues. Not only that, the emotions and actions that have been conveyed together with the toddler acts as strong support to cover up the missing gaps in the audio dialogue [L4 and L8] as it could sometimes sound misleading for others. For example, the tone heard from a recorded audio no.. in the conversation may sound like a boring respond with an unimpressed tone when it was actually a gentle respond with a smile on the toddlers face [L2 and L4]. What is more, the toddler no response during an audio recording can possibly be non-verbal cues such as smiling at each other, approaching an object, nodding/ shaking head, etc. Infant and toddlers at this age use a lot of body language to connect with their peers. Therefore, it is essential for us to recognize the actions and do the same by offering infants and toddlers a sense of trust, comfort, and attention; displaying a feeling of agency and recognition, making them feel important and valuing their participation in learning. Berthelsen and Brownlee (as cited in Degotardi & Pearson, 204) explained that involvement is broadly referred to as participatory learning and it could only be formed through the presence of educator and childs trustful, open and reciprocal communications. Not only that, it impacted my personal self-reflection as well because as I could not analyze and criticize the strengths and limitations of gestures, positioning of body or facial expressions during the face-to-face interaction with the toddler. As stated by Tobin and Xiao (208), reflecting on personal video is extremely helpful in identifying and recognizing the perceived mistakes which can then be avoided later in the future. Other than that, another weakness that has been identified is on the quality of dialogue presented. When transcribing, I have noticed on certain areas of the dialogue was just repeating after the toddlers words [L6 and L24] instead of using the words to assist myself in structuring a new approach. In this case, singing a song related to bus or extended questions such as how fast can a train go?. This mistake could eventually lead to a loss of interest and attention in the toddler, hence making the learning less meaningful. As I recalled, during that few seconds interval, I was trying to be responsive and at the same time initiate a more captivating open question to keep up with the conversation [L3 and L20]. As the conversation was meant to be spontaneous, however, it is quite challenging to form good quality dialogues in such a short period of time.