Joint waking activity in early childhood education as a collaborative configuration of care

Although sleeping and waking are everyday activities and inherent parts of being human, they are rarely considered social, collaborative, or educational. In this study, we explore practices of waking young children up in institutional interaction. Taking a cultural-historical approach and using a video-observation method, we investigated how young children (1-5 years old) and adults participate in joint waking activity after nap time in early childhood education. We asked how joint waking activity creates learning opportunities for children to collaborate as valuable members of the early childhood education community. Our results show that waking activity creates opportunities for children to learn to care for each other and to become sensitive to other children's needs. Waking moments that involve encountering sleeping and just-awakened members of the community invite caring responses from co-participant children and create collaborative configurations of care. We discuss how our concept, collaborative configuration of care, offers cultural-historical theory new insights into everyday guiding and learning.