Chris Peers

The Theory of ‘Belonging’: Defining concepts used within Belonging, Being and Becoming—The Australian Early Years Learning Framework

Abstract The implementation in 2009–10 of the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) spearheaded the efforts of the Australian Commonwealth government to institute a national curriculum. The theme of the new early childhood framework follows three guiding concepts: Belonging, Being and Becoming. In this article, we discuss these three concepts in order to provide a theoretical context to the Early Years Learning Framework and to enrich the debate surrounding its writing and implementation. In particular, we address the significance of posing Belonging in contiguity with the concepts of Being and Becoming. The authors suggest a strategy to cultivate a deeper appreciation of the dialectical relationships between sameness and difference, belonging and nothingness. Our premise is that ‘belonging’ refers essentially to different beings, and implicitly to the prospect of a ‘together-ness’ or identity according to which different beings are located, understood and associated, in order that Becoming can take effect. We offer these commentaries as a means of deepening conversation about the importance of scholarly approaches to philosophy for early childhood research, and especially with respect to curriculum and pedagogy.

The Australian Early Development Index: Reshaping Family—Child Relationships in Early Childhood Education

This article addresses the cultural significance of the Australian Early Development Index (AEDI) and discusses changes that the discourse of this instrument makes to the way in which the child is conceptualised. It analyses the technological function of the AEDI to examine how it makes the child a universal resource for human capital. The article examines messages in promotional and research literature surrounding the AEDI that represent it as a reliable statistical instrument which will promote social justice and equity for young children and their families. The scholarly discourse has so far failed to address the broader context of neo-liberal economic and social reform from which the AEDI — and its Canadian predecessor, the Early Development Instrument (EDI) — initially emerged. The article therefore interrogates the EDI and the AEDI as mechanisms for refining and expanding markets in the management and regulation of children from disadvantaged backgrounds and their accompanying vulnerability. These market expansions draw upon econometric theoretical sources, leading to conceptual changes relating to understandings of children and new concepts and practices for the early childhood education sector. Discourses surrounding the use of the AEDI are informed, in part, by perceptions about the breakdown of the family and the impact this will have for long-term sources of social and economic cohesion. The article examines the symbolism entailed by the ways in which the literature surrounding the AEDI and EDI addresses moral and civil sources of authority in modern Western civilisation.

Making art invisible: visual education and the cultural stagnation of neo-liberal rationality

The popularity of visual literacy may have resulted, in part, from some school authorities rushing the process of determining school curriculum. This article argues that the haste is reflective of pressure placed on educational discourse to conform to neo-liberal reforms of the sector, and is not the result of a careful and complex debate within the education community. In Australia, such reform has contributed to the erosion of visual art as a discrete subject in the general curriculum. The article accounts for the fact that the lack of careful debate may be due to art educators rehearsing tired arguments for retaining the place occupied by visual art, which smack of sentimentality. The author examines the conceptualisation of visual art at a cultural and theoretical level, and argues that by considering the function art has traditionally played in relation to conceptions of human subjectivity, we may disclose the marginalisation of visual art as a signal of much larger threats to political and economic structures in democratic society. The article considers whether the absorption of ‘art’ within a broader preference for visual communication, graphic design, or design and technology, is symptomatic of a long-term cultural stagnation.

Phallocratic antecedents of teaching and learning

This article examines a series of historical examples drawn from antiquity in order to describe some basic organisational parameters which have continued to inform modern concepts of teaching and learning. The author adopts an analytic method modelled on the work of the philosopher Luce Irigaray, in an effort to demonstrate how sexual difference has been routinely suppressed in the history of education. By examining the notion of citizen and the social and political conditions within which our notions of community were shaped in antiquity, it is argued that we can glimpse another perspective of teaching and learning that reveals the reliance upon public and private segmentations of social roles in the generation of educational concepts. The author seeks to disclose how certain binary relations, such as public–private, open–hidden, speech–silence have structured practices in teaching and learning throughout the Western tradition.

What does a pedagogue look like? Masculinity and the repression of sexual difference in ancient education

This article traces the historicization of the “pedagogue” as a social function in Graeco-Roman antiquity. The article examines the position of the pedagogue as representative of a space or interval between the varying social authorities of the family and state, as well as the early Christian church, and asks how a pedagogue identified himself: could he bring value or desire to his duties? In asking what the pedagogue looked like, the article implicitly refers to the pedagogic gaze, and to the social and sexual boundaries through which it was constituted. The study utilizes the analytical methods of Luce Irigaray, which provide strategies for the interpretation of cultural narrative, specifically in relation to questions of sexual difference and the production of discourse. This method also enables a critical analysis of why the pedagogue was a man. The paper suggests that sex is essential to the construction of images and symbols of the pedagogue. It argues that the concept of the pedagogue referred essentially to an object which, while recognizably male, could not speak or act as a “man”, but, paradoxically, as both male and as excessive to the masculine.

What is ‘Human’ in Human Capital Theory? Marking a transition from industrial to postindustrial education

Abstract This article addresses educational practice as a site for the development of human capital theory. The article considers metaphysical constructions that are broadly typical of educational thought, and shows how they are amenable to economic analysis. Using different Marxist and feminist methods, it discusses pedagogy and the family as kinds of investment. The author questions the underlying assumptions about humanity on which both economics and education are predicated. If Western educators are certain of the historical ends to which modern Western education aims, do they also fully appreciate the implications of their own certainty and confidence for the future? As educators, are we equally confident that we question ourselves about why we uphold the value of education in the way each of us does? To engage educators in a debate about these values, the article employs poststructuralist critique to place words and concepts central to education and economics, e.g. the market, under erasure. It questions the way in which idealizations of teaching and learning are seen as forms of production and exchange. The article contests the notion of ‘humanity’ advanced within a postindustrial era, and seeks to open a more prescient account of knowledge as a form of wealth, and schooling as a form of commerce.

Freud, Plato and Irigaray: A Morpho-Logic of Teaching and Learning.

This article discusses two well‐known texts that respectively describe learning and teaching, drawn from the work of Freud and Plato. These texts are considered in psychoanalytic terms using a methodology drawn from the philosophy of Luce Irigaray. In particular the article addresses Irigarays approach to the analysis of speech and utterance as a ‘cohesion between the source of the utterance and the utterance itself’ (Hass, 2000). I apply this approach to ask whether educational tradition has fractured the relationship between pedagogy and the body of the teacher/pupil. Teaching and learning are re‐addressed in ways that challenge the gender‐neutral representation of pedagogy as a systematic technique.

The 'first' educator? rethinking the 'teacher': through Luce Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference

This article examines historical imagery of the teacher in relation to a story drawn from ancient Greece: that relating to the teacher of the mythic hero Achilles in The Iliad. The article explores the possibility that this early image of a teacher — the aging warrior Phoenix — could be a source for later representations of the teaching function. In an effort to place this historical image into a larger context of cultural symbolism relating to pedagogy, the article asks, why is this ‘first’ educator a man? By what narrative procedure was a man contrived to assume roles such as nurturing and childrearing that had always been (and continue to be) represented as feminine occupations? Using the work of Luce Irigaray, the article raises issues about the sex of the teacher in order to disrupt the seemingly obvious sex-neutrality of modern images of education, which define teaching and learning as humanistic, as social and cultural practices for which gender is irrelevant, and through which abstract disciplines such as literacy and numeracy are represented as transcending the physicality of the sexed body. It attempts to expose the constant deference modern educators unconsciously pay to patriarchal models of the pedagogical relationship, and to reveal the repression of sexual difference at the core of the mythology from which Western images of education have been generated.

A Homo-sexual ideology in the history of New South Wales art education

Abstract This article examines the history of a discourse about art education in the state of New South Wales in Australia, during the early part of the twentieth century. The object of this discourse was the promotion of art as a school subject for boys. The article examines both published and archival evidence assembled from the writings of school inspectorial authorities, as well as educational psychologists, which attempt in various ways to associate art with representations of masculinity and femininity. The author draws on the work of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, advancing an analysis that focuses on the character of these representations. It is argued that the meaning of art was produced according to a homo-sexual ideology, reproducing a desire for a form of art education that would preserve art as a masculine domain.

Policy Analysis and Document Research

This chapter discusses policy analysis and the related field of document analysis for the interest of early childhood education researchers. Early childhood research is relatively young, by comparison to other tiers of the educational community. In addition, policy writing about early childhood (by government) and the study of such policy discourse (by researchers) will express potentially disjointed historical relationships, especially given the intersection of policy discourse with other disciplines such as economics and sociology. The chapter offers a background for those researchers in early childhood seeking to begin examining policy material.