Negotiating parental agency in daily encounters with educators

In this paper, we reflect on the relationships between parents and professionals in early childhood education, as they unfold on a daily basis when parents drop off children in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon. The paper seeks to understand how parents exert agency in such contexts, and how professionals respond to such agency by facilitating or negotiating active contributions from parents during these short encounters. We adopt a situated and interactional perspective on agency in professional practice informed by a multimodal approach to discourse and interaction, presenting an empirical research design consisting of tangible face-to-face encounters between parents and professionals through audiovisual recordings in the context of Switzerland. The paper explores a collection of four case studies extracted from a dataset comprising over a thousand video-recorded encounters between parents and professionals, and identifies various expressions of parental agency as they occur in interactions during the drop-offs and pick-ups. It also describes and elaborates how professionals respond to such expressions and contribute to a joint accomplishment of parental agency at work. The findings show that parents and educators play an active role in how these encounters unfold, in the sorts of actions, frames and participation frameworks collaboratively accomplished during drop-offs and pick-ups and in establishing rapport in interaction. The findings are discussed from the perspective of professional practice in the field of early childhood education, especially ‘transitional encounters’ related to educational practices in early childhood education.