Casey Y. Myers

Edu-capitalism and the governing of early childhood education and care in Australia, New Zealand and the United States

This article examines the effects of edu-capitalism and neoliberal education policies across Australia, New Zealand and United States to disrupt hegemonic policy logic based on neutral human capital. Current frameworks, standards and assessment tools govern and control how early childhood educators see and assess children and in turn develop and implement pedagogy. Issues of gender, class and ethnicity are invisible with the assumption that all children who are offered high-quality early childhood programmes have equal opportunities to be productive and therefore successful citizens. Success can be understood through universal outcomes for children and markers of what quality teaching looks like for educators. This epistemological shutter renders race-, class- and gender-based privilege as invisible or non-existent. In doing so, dominant White Western understandings of the world drive what and who is marked as ‘success(ful)’, while non-Western knowledge continues to be seen as primitive, insignificant and in need of intervention. Through analysing policy text supported by the work of post-thinkers, the rethinking, re/imagining, and remapping of early childhood that this article performs do not offer consensus but make room for both problematizations of and possibilities within the contemporary concerns of different theoretical and geographical perspectives from Australia, New Zealand and United States.

Childhoods and time: Rethinking notions of temporality in early childhood education

Childhoods are temporal encounters that are vibrant, changing, shifting and, in some discourses, even disappearing. Childhood is a temporal encounter – an encounter with an idea that speaks to the experience of time. In early childhood education, this encounter has been progressively constructed and compartmentalized – from ideas of childhood to the seven-year childhood stretch, and now to the in-between childhood phases. With new constructions of childhoods come new ethical and pedagogical relationships. At the same time, new childhoods are constructed as timeless – childhood is a natural state both forgotten and then remembered. Notions of time and temporality can be seen to draw from multiple theoretical threads. One thread, noted in Bloch (2013), engages with new historicism, or cultural history (Popkewitz et al., 2001) and relates to the post-structural theories of language, truth, power, governmentality and technologies of the self (Foucault, 1980, 1991). Another thread traces Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of the rhizome that focuses on contingency, non-linearity, rhizomatic, unpredictable and uncertain movement, and a micropolitics of political action (Dahlberg et al., 2007; Rose, 1999). The articles in this special issue specifically focus and work with notions of time and temporality, drawing from diverse post-structural framings as opposed to a more modernist history that suggests causality, progress and linear time, from past to present – an evolutionary historical notion of time. These diverse perspectives focus on Foucault’s argument that:

Diffracting Mandates for Reflective Practices in Teacher Education and Development: Multiple Readings from Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.

ABSTRACT Despite the ubiquity of reflective practice in education, mandating reflective processes within sanctioned frameworks is inherently problematic, as it may lead to reproduction, standardization, and forced universalities, rather than the critical and innovative pedagogy they intend. This article engages with reflection through both the metaphor and method of diffraction, applying a diffractive analytical mode across three international contexts. By examining onto-epistemological openings afforded by a diffractive approach, we attend to what is being (re)produced through various mandates for preservice and in-service teacher practices of reflection and the various effects of those (re)productions, as well as posit different ways of approaching mandated reflection as a practice for educating and assessing teachers.

“What does it mean to care?” Collaborative images of care within an early years center

Posing the question, “What does it mean to care?” this visual work came about through a collaboration between teachers, children, and a local artist to render experiences of care from children’s daily lives within an early years laboratory school. Working from a perspective of material-discursive intra-activity (Barad, 2003, 2007), this inquiry explored the ways in which children’s and adults’ engagement with materials, such as paint, paper, and ink, for the purpose of collaboratively constructing images might challenge ideas about what care is in an early years setting. The resulting image-stories were displayed at a community event as a provocation for others to (re)consider how young children come to know care/caring as enmeshed within experiences of love, loss, and longing of responsibility for their classmates, of stewardship for the environment, of deep investment in daily work, and of coming to trust adults and children outside of their immediate families. While we have long recognized “care” as a fundamental curricular touchstone for teachers and young children (Noddings, 1988) and we continue to value moral orientations, such as kindness and respect, in our everyday enactments of practice, through this particular entanglement of children-adults-materials discourses, we have come to understand that “caring” emerges through multiple pathways and to multiple effects and can be articulated through multiple modalities. By presenting these images as the primary “text,” our intention is to provoke readers of this Special Issue to (re)consider both the specificity and multiplicity of care in young children’s school lives.

Becoming “babies” in real time: Temporal emergence in the classroom mangle:

Through multimodal retellings of kindergarten children’s performances of “baby,” this article aims to contribute to the emerging “posthuman conversation” within early childhood studies. Specifically, this work makes moves toward reconceptualizing children’s becomings within educational contexts by, first, interrogating the ways in which adult notions of “time” came to bear upon children’s enactments of “babies” within classroom pretend play performances and, second, exploring how posthuman conceptions of temporality—specifically Pickering’s “mangle”—can disrupt developmental analyses of children’s (un)timely performances and accommodate a more nuanced version of childhood becoming(s).

Scribbling away the Ghosts: a Bakhtinian interpretation of preschool writers and the disruption of developmental discourses

Using Mikhail Bakhtins conceptions of dialogue, monologue, and chronotope, the authors ask readers to consider how different values and actions ultimately create the teaching and learning spaces in which children are recognized as literate. Using qualitative data that focus on the relational writing practices of two preschoolers, this ethnographic work explores how authoritative monologues of development and risk commonly structure our thinking about and interaction with young writers. The article offers an alternative interpretation of children as writers engaged within a relational and dialogic writing space, wherein dominant developmental beliefs are rejected and relationships between children and teachers are reinterpreted. The authors argue for the creation of dialogic classroom spaces that afford children opportunities for multiple possible futures as whole persons.