How are the priorities and practices of nursery education practitioners influenced and shaped in different national and cultural contexts? What is the impact of these priorities and practices on children’s development? Which research methods can be used for the investigation of these questions? Cross national comparisons of nursery education have shown how priorities and practices of nursery education practitioners are related to the particular values and priorities of the communities in which nursery schools are located. Penn (1997) for example, comparing nurseries in Spain, Italy and the UK, has shown the preoccupation of many UK nurseries with adult-child interactions in contrast to the emphasis on children’s peer interactions and democratic participation in the nursery schools of northern Italy (Edwardes et al 1999). A second influence on priorities and practices has been the integration of care with education aims as the industrialized countries of the West have sought to maximise women’s participation in the paid labour market (Dahlberg et al 1999; Leach 2009). A third area of research has been developing, focussing every day interactions in nurseries, the internal culture of nurseries as social organisations and how these influence and are influenced by the personal priorities and pre occupations of parents and nursery staff. This symposium will present the findings of three ethnographic research studies using psychoanalytic methods of observation developed at the Tavistock Center (London). The possible value of this conceptual approach, as complementary to existing methods of observation and organisational analysis, are seen as lying in their capacity to give meaning to the emotional communications of children and adults. This is of particular value for young children whose verbal and behavioural repertoire for expression is very limited. However, it is also of value in generating hypotheses about the ‘beneath the surface’ life of nursery organisation (Huffington et al 2004). The papers will present the ethnographic design of these research studies and address the following research questions: 1. What is the distinctive contribution of psychoanalytic methods of infant and young child observation in nursery? 2. What can we learn from these investigations about the relation between the children's experiences in nursery education, their development and the internal world of staff members? 3. What do the observations reveal about children’s transitions between home care and early education contexts? 4. What can we learn from these investigations about specific strategies to improve the quality of educational work in nurseries?

Each of the papers draws on psychoanalytic methods of observing infant and young child development in nursery (Rustin/Adamo 2001; Datler u.a. 2008; Trunkenpolz/Hover-Reisner 2008; Datler/Trunkenpolz 2009). This method involves the observer in being emotionally receptive to children’s emotional communications as well as closely attentive to the details of behaviours and contexts. What is emphasised is the endeavour of the observer to capture as rich as possible information about emotional states of mind. In conventional methods of infant observation, such emotion has been deduced from external behaviours. In psychoanalytic methods, the intention is to gain additional access to the emotional communications of the child and the emotional atmosphere of the room, as they evoke emotional responses in the observer. In essence the subjectivity of the observer, the very thing that is normally excluded rather than included as part of the data set, an important component of this data gathering method.

The papers show: Ø the particular contribution of psychoanalytic methods of observation according to the Tavistock Approach but also the challenges presented in operationalising these observations for validity and reliability; Ø the ethnographic impact of doing observation according to the Tavistock approach in the context of research; Ø the intense ‘emotional labour’ (Hochschild 1983) that nursery work can entail, especially as practitioners struggle to reconcile official demands for emotional closeness to children with personal and professional expectations to retain some emotional distance; Ø patterns and practices in three different national contexts in the ways that this emotional labour is conceptualised and managed. Ø the development of a model of intervention in nurseries to facilitate emotional well being and its initial evaluation (Elfer and Dearnley 2007).