The difficulty of thinking: Listening to the voices of students in early childhood education

This paper addresses the question of how to conceptualise the kind of difficulties students in early childhood education encountered in articulating their thoughts and in listening to others in the initial stages of a CoI. With examples from their course diaries, we illustrate what sense it makes to consider the thinking the CoI promotes as centrally embodied, extended, embedded and enacted (4Es). We consider their difficulties, not as external obstacles to expressing their thought, but as difficulties that are internal to thinking itself, in the sense that thinking implicates the skillful participation in a shared practice that involves us as embodied human beings, enculturated in a context that carries much of the meaning of our situation, engaged in activities that are centrally social, and dependent on interaction with others, who on a fundamental level shape what it is possible for us to think.