How to "Read" Family: Tackling Understandings through Translational Research

What do future kindergarten teachers understand by ‚families'? How do they construct or de/re-construct family relationships? What ideas of ‚family 'emerge in linguistic interaction with children?

The proposed article draws on visualizations based on an ethnographic protocol by students in a kindergarten training program in Austria. Asked to consider the importance of a child's narration, the students used it to visualize the narrated family relationships. It is the child's narrative that serves the students as a basis for their individual exploration of family relationships and their translation into a drawing. As future professionals, they should hold back their own ideas about family and turn to the narrative in its possible interpretations. The suspension of rash ‚understandings 'and identifying thinking is a necessary approach in this context.

In theorizing the insights from ethnographic data, the article will discuss selected categories of professionalization and question their dominant interpretations. In particular, the categories ‚knowledge' and ‚understanding' will be challenged to find suitable re-formulations that work with expanded narratives and diversified knowers. We will ask how dominant discourses in verbal interactions can be broken up through ‚translations' into other media, thus enabling new discourses and narratives. We can also question the role of the (hierarchical) academic knowledge production in participatory research settings.

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