Pilot study

After I initially completed my research design, I did pilot studies with the purpose of practising my research skills and revealing deficiencies in the research design and the proposed methods. I undertook two pilot studies; one was in England when I was on a placement at a reception class of a local primary school; and the other was in one private kindergarten in China. These pilot studies were undertaken before carrying out the fieldwork of the main study in another kindergarten in the same city.

3.2.1.1 Pilot in England

The first pilot study was conducted between October 2010 and March 2011 in a Reception (Foundation Stage two) class of a local primary school in a large Northern city with children of both British origin and ethnic minority backgrounds. The class where I conducted my research had one lead teacher, one teaching assistant and 28 children aged between four to five years, having daily sessions from 9am – 3:30pm. I was undertaking my placement as a University student at

in an assistant role working with individuals and small groups of children i.e. reading stories. I conducted observations with the children and had an interview with a parent, research activities which were designed for providing in-depth

accounts of perspectives on young children’s school lives from children’s and

parental viewpoints.

The approaches employed in collecting data in this pilot study were non- participant observation and semi-structured interview. As a university research student, I was not involved much in teaching but conducted non-participant observation for most of the time. Field-notes were primarily employed as my key strategy to record data obtained from observations. Also, photography was used as a supplementary tool to record different activities indoors and outdoors. In Tobin, Hsueh and Karasawa’s study (2009), observations were undertaken to effectively record specific times of the day during the typical daily routine of the programme of the early years settings with the purpose of representing and

sampling the typical routine activities and events of children’s school life. I

accordingly observed, made notes and took photos for what the participants did and said, especially for the children’s behaviour, facial expressions and other non-verbal expressions in different activities indoors and outdoors, such as whole class teaching and learning activities, play in areas of provision and small group activities.

I also did a semi-structured interview with one parent during this pilot study. She was a mother of one British-born Chinese girl in the class. The mother had been living in England for 12 years and worked in a company as an accountant. I initially chatted to the mother when she sent or picked up her daughter. We

gradually became familiar with each other. I introduced myself and my research to the mother and she was enthusiastic and interested in my research and agreed to be my interviewee. The interview was conducted in the classroom and lasted 20 minutes with nine structured questions and one open-ended

question with an explicit focus on exploring the mother’s point of view on her daughter’s life at school. A digital voice recorder was used to record the interview.

3.2.1.2 Pilot in China

I did the second pilot study in the city where I conducted the main study (see Section 3.1.3.1) between mid-November 2011 and mid-January 2012. It was a private kindergarten in the eastern area of the city. The residents were mainly Chinese residents, with some Muslim Chinese who were relocated households and some Chinese migrants who had bought commercial residential apartments in the community and worked in the central area of the city. The families of the community were mainly middle-income residents.

I was introduced to the headteacher (gatekeeper) through my professorial network. Before meeting the headteacher, I emailed her my CV and the information sheet for my pilot study. After obtaining her oral consent, we had a meeting in her office at the kindergarten and I explained more detail of my personal background and research information. Then, the headteacher formally agreed to sign the consent form. Also, she introduced general information about the kindergarten including the mixed-models (MI, Montessori and Orff musical) of curriculum and pedagogy. Afterwards, she took me to visit three senior classes of the kindergarten. Each class had 30 children aged five to six years

having day sessions from 7.30am to 5:30pm, from Monday to Friday. I eventually chose to research with the class where the staff, including one Chinese language lead teacher, one English language teacher (non-Chinese and part-time), one English assistant teacher and one childcare assistant, expressed strong interest in my research and looked happy to be involved. I worked in the class from 7.00am to 6:00pm Monday to Friday, the same as other staff members.

I piloted the non-participant observation for the whole class activities which were mainly led by the teachers; and I piloted participant observations by playing with children as a member of the group during the time for play in areas of provision. I also piloted several approaches to working with the children in this class. Firstly, I piloted the approach of 'Video-taking and Replaying' with the children. The kindergarten had a tradition of video-recording teachers’ class acclivities, and then replaying this to other teachers to support teacher’s self- reflection during the kindergarten’s staff training meetings. I was invited to attend the meeting by the headteacher to share and communicate my professional knowledge and skills with other teachers. I then discussed with the staff members and obtained their agreement to replay the video on a whiteboard for whole class of children to watch. Then, I invited the children to comment on what they liked/disliked in the video, and I simultaneously made notes on the comments. All children were excited to watch themselves in the video. Many children were keen to tell their comments. I highlighted the points which were different from what the teachers said during the training meeting.

children. I piloted the approaches of drawings and sorting pictures with the children. Usually, the children were free after dinner in the classroom when they were waiting for parents to pick them up. Thus, I was able to conduct the research activities with them. For the drawing activity, I invited the children to draw what they liked and disliked at the kindergarten. During their drawing, I chatted with them and asked them what/who were in their drawings and why they were drawing them; and simultaneously made notes on their comments. Regarding the sorting pictures activity, I took photos for different typical activities and people at the kindergarten and printed out the photographs. Then I invited two to three children each time to put the photographs under three types of facial expression card (smiling, neutral and sad) on a table in terms of their preference. During the process, I chatted with the children and made notes for their comments if there were any.

3.2.1.3 The implications of my pilot studies

These pilot studies before my main study provided me a deeper insight into how the routines and ECEC programmes were arranged in the different settings of England and China, which revealed the significant areas of curriculum and pedagogy for the focus of the main study and developed the research design of my study. I accordingly reformulated my interview questions, adjusted the data collection strategies of observation and the techniques of researching with children, and even reassessed the strategies of selecting research sites after conducting the second pilot study in China. For example, when I reviewed my first pilot study in England, I found:

 I needed to add more relevant and significant topics and critical questions to the interview questions list the main study in China, such as what and how

parents understand childhood and their children’s learning at kindergarten.

Also, I needed to revise the interview questions from the formal written style into a more conversational style, and especially avoid using specialized vocabulary.

 My observation notes were focused on assessing children from a teacher’s perspective, rather than representing children's perspectives as a researcher. This was because my thinking and philosophy of ECEC was heavily influenced by the Chinese tradition of kindergarten observation which highlights the function of assessing children’s learning and

practitioner’s teaching outcomes (Su and Xu, 2010). Moreover, undertaking ethnography requires the researcher to remain in a role of outsider in the study so as to keep objectivity and avoid "preconceived perceptions or unconscious prejudices, in order to relate the facts concerning the new culture in an unbiased way" (Crowley-Henry 2009, p41). It was originally difficult to meet such requirements because of my Chinese background. However, I had been away from China, studying and working in the UK many years. The first pilot study made me more familiar with the ECEC setting in England.

On another hand, regarding the second pilot study in China, I found:

 As an insider, I had been away from Chinese kindergartens and the education system for some time. Undertaking the second pilot study in China enabled me to orient myself back to the Chinese kindergarten education system.

 It alerted me reflect further on the connection between my literature review and research design, so as to strengthen the research methods and

approaches for the main study. This is because pilot studies benefits researchers to refine the schedule and strategies of data collection in relation to not only the content of the data but also the procedures that researchers follow (Sampson, 2004).

 For instance, from my literature review, I noticed that there is a traditional perception of considering researchers as authorities and experts in the field when researchers conduct research in schools (Bogdan and Biklen, 2003).

According to Fang’s study (2009), especially in China, school practitioners usually think doing research is for the purpose of assessing learning and teaching outcomes by researchers, educators or governmental officers who have high levels of professional knowledge. And so the researcher's role was connected with such a perception by most practitioners. In order to avoid it happening in my study, I initially explained my personal background and research in detail with an emphasis on my role of researcher and teaching assistant to the classroom staff. Then, I tried to build up trust with them by helping and sharing their work as much as I could, including preparing teaching materials and managing children within the role of teaching assistant. However, I found this made children keep a distance with me and some children even felt scared to express themselves in front of teachers including me. From what I learnt from this pilot study, I decided to spend relatively more time with the children in the main study and mainly involved myself in children's activities as a member of the group so as to gain children's trust and obtain data from children's viewpoint rather than an adult participant's (Punch, 2002; Warming, 2011). However, it also alerted me to keep a balanced and positive relationship with children and practitioners, in order to avoid practitioners being estranged from me.

 For the activities I initially invited the whole class of children to do activities together, but children became very overexcited and were noisy during the activity. I therefore had to reduce the number of children and conducted the activities with 3-4 children for each group in my main study.

 During some research activities with children, the lead teacher was involved so as to support my research. She interrupted children and questioned or

even blamed them, when the teacher thought children’s answers were not appropriate. This made children stop talking to me. This alerted me to the need to avoid this situation in the main study and so I explained to the practitioners the need to give privacy to children when they were working with me.

Reflections on the two pilot studies enabled me to improve my data collection methods and research instruments. In the following sections, a detailed account of my ethnographic fieldwork is provided.