Jennifer Skattebol

Playing boys: the body, identity and belonging in the early years

In early childhood, the body is frequently used as a pedagogical reference point to establish, affirm and stabilize children’s gendered and racialized identities. Through this naming of the body, identities are disciplined to fit the social expectations and norms that circulate in educational settings. This article uses data from a case study in an early childhood setting to show how material bodies are not only subject to disciplinary regimes but are also sites of agency for varied practices of embodiment. Embodiment, in this sense, functions as a technology of identity and social belonging rather than as a state of being. Finally, the ‘technologies of self’ used by children presented certain dilemmas to teachers who wished to collaborate with children to establish inclusive communities and to respect children’s agency.

Revisioning professionalism from the periphery

Abstract The issue of who should be included and recognised as professionals in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) service system is both contested and pressing in the current policy climate. At stake is a high-quality early childhood care and education service system that is both responsive and appropriate to the constituency it serves. A review of the history of ECEC professionalism reveals complex entanglements and debates regarding professional belonging. Services that deliver education and care to children and families living in high poverty contexts are often excluded from ECEC professionalism debates. Drawing on notions of rationality, emotionality and criticality presented in recent accounts of ECEC professionalism, we use data collected from interviews with service providers delivering services to children and families living in high poverty contexts in Australia to develop an account of criticality that is pertinent to current funding and policy contexts. We argue that these service providers’ perspectives about their own professionalism have much to offer broader debates.

Cracking with Affect: Relationality in Young People's Movements in and out of Mainstream Schooling.

This paper focusses on the schooling stories of two young women who moved from mainstream schooling into alternative learning program set up for Indigenous students and back into mainstream schooling to complete their Year 12 education. The manner in which these young women narrated their stories is understood through the prism of Indigenous notions of relatedness and affect theory and is as revealing as the actual reporting of the events and rationales in these young women’s schooling trajectories. Young people’s insights into the challenges of mainstream pedagogies and promises of relational pedagogies invite us to consider what could be different in structures and processes which aim to deliver educational equity. We argue there is a need for more research which offers rich accounts of the emotional and relational fields which underpin student subjectivities and engagement.

Gayby Baby – From the politics of representation to the politics of care:

Background: Real life stories can enable audiences to empathise with the experiences of marginalised groups and communities and are extremely powerful tools in struggles for equality. High-quality documentary research can convey the life experiences of marginalised peoples in ways that are recognisable to them and which further their struggle for equality. Often, marginalised people are represented by ‘filmmakers’ eager to capitalise on the affect produced by detailed renditions of everyday political struggles. However, film-makers are rarely trained in how to empower participants to understand film-making and distribution processes. These understandings and dialogic processes are important if participants are to have a real say in how they are represented. Process: In 2011, Maya Newell and Charlotte Mars began to develop an observational feature documentary Gayby Baby (2015) focused on same-sex families, for the first time revealing the child’s perspective on debates concerning Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer and their children’s equality. They were interested in empowering participants to have a real say in the film. Jen Skattebol’s family was one of the four families featured in the film. This shared activist experience grounds the authors’ discussion of ethical care in representative practices. Discussion: Recently, documentary film-making and academic research has seen the emergence of a new value system that measures success in terms of ‘impact’ in the public sphere. This developing interest amplifies the ethical issues involved in representational work and raises new questions concerning the implications of subject participation in the development of resources that aim to improve health and well-being in broad political terms. This article sketches out the contours of a more ethical form of social impact making that grew out of kitchen table conversations between documentary subject and maker – the researched and researcher. Ethical frameworks of care need to be recalibrated in line with the issues foregrounded by burgeoning social impact agendas.

Troubled kids? Locational disadvantage, opportunity structures and social exclusion

ABSTRACT Young people growing up in poverty often have restricted access to out-of-school enrichment activities that are important for generating the soft skills that support post-school transitions. This paper compares young Australians’ accounts of their opportunity structures – their engagement with enrichment activities, their post-school aspirations, and their knowledge of routes to achieve them – in two suburb types – improver suburbs (close to the median on many indicators) and isolate suburbs (severely disadvantaged on most indicators). While young people in improver suburbs felt able to access facilities and networks in equally or more affluent neighbouring suburbs, young people in isolate suburbs felt excluded from neighbouring suburbs, and experienced more restricted opportunity structures than young people living in improver suburbs, even those who were themselves economically disadvantaged. The paper argues that this geographical experience of exclusion prevents many economically disadvantaged young people from accumulating knowledge and skills valued in post-school settings.

‘It’s Hard to Blend in’: Everyday Experiences of Schooling Achievement, Migration and Neoliberal Education Policy

This chapter explores how the neoliberal logic of global education policy is experienced in the lives of disadvantaged migrant students in Australia. Policies based in competitive market logics not only concentrate social and economic disadvantages in certain schools but also place pressure on the pedagogical practices level to speak upward to comparison regimes instead of to the learning needs of students. These logics underpin an array of policy mechanisms which ‘identify’ migrant students and their learning needs and resource them accordingly. Currently the educational attainment of advantaged migrant students is aggregated with that of disadvantaged migrant students thus hiding the resource needs of the most disadvantaged, a move which evacuates an understanding of any of the intersectionalities which shape their access to resources. This chapter sketches this broad policy context and then complicates it with two distinctly-different resourcing experiences of being disadvantaged in this context. These cases allow insight into the way historical legacies and local contingencies interact with top-down policy. We need to better understand such instances of imbricated policy implementation as they challenge the logics of pedagogy driven by testing and performance regimes and point to different policy possibilities.