Linda Henderson

Partial and incomplete voices: the political and three early childhood teachers’ learning

The early childhood–school relationship is reported as having points of separation and difference. In particular, early childhood teachers located in a school setting report experiencing a push-down effect. This paper reports on a participatory action research project involving three early childhood teachers working within an independent school. Using lyric poetry as a method of data (re)presentation, the paper argues this method allowed for multiple layers of politics within this context to emerge. Because of this, a more nuanced account of the early childhood–school relationship is uncovered. The paper concludes by arguing that this method offers the possibility of narrating participatory action research in a powerful and respectful form.

Entering a crack: an encounter with gossip

In this paper, I enter a crack to think otherwise about the concept “gossip”. Drawing on previous scholarship engaging with Deleuzian concepts to inform research methodologies, this paper builds on this body of work. Following Deleuze and Guattari, the paper undertakes a mapping of gossip, subsequent to an encounter with a crack. Thinking about gossip as something other than woman’s small talk, the paper follows a line opening up gossip onto an intensive web of affects and Deleuze’s becoming-woman. It concludes arguing that the process of entering a crack unlocked thought, making possible new ways of engaging with data.

Splitting the World Open: Writing Stories of Mourning and Loss

This article follows two women-academics engaging in a methodology of collaborative writing that holds each other in folds of friendship. By writing together that which has been hidden, new openings are being created where experiences of trauma, mourning, and forgetting are seeking out ways to re-member and heal. In this process, the authors are discovering ways of becoming-differently in their positioning as women-academics.

Teacher Learning in the In-between: Encountering an ‘Invisible Barrier’

Since early childhood has become the focus of national and supranational political spaces, issues around teacher learning have also gained a firm position in the debates. This has seen the literature on teacher learning largely being positioned within a managerial/alternative dichotomy, arising from a resistance to technical-rationalist discourses present in contemporary policy. This article examines data from a participatory action research project investigating the learning of three early childhood teachers working in an early childhood centre located in an independent school in Australia. It illustrates shifts in data analysis methods, which permitted teacher learning to be understood outside of this dichotomy and instead as that which is always already taking place in the in-between. Working with Deleuze and Guattaris concepts of lines and forces, the in-between became an intensive space of affect where teacher learning was produced in/through the circulation of multiple discourses that were always already leaking.

Positioning ourselves in our academic lives: exploring personal/professional identities, voice and agency

ABSTRACT This paper provides a rationale for understanding personal/professional identities to support personal/professional learning and positioning in academe and higher education. It explains the importance of women writing and speaking out the stories of their lives (everyday and academic), having their voices heard and responded to, and using embodied knowledge to question and challenge workplace systems and structures of power and sexism and invisibility. Importantly, this paper opens the space for women’s visibility, voice and agency in academic and educational life.

But That Wasn't Enough: Exploring Affective Assemblages within a Professional Relationship.

ABSTRACT This paper engages with the early childhood–school relationship. The relationship has a long-standing history of being defined by a series of divisions and separations. Research has identified the divisions and separations to be largely determined by differences around concepts of learning and pedagogy. Discursive analyses of these differences often result in a series of impasses. The aim of this paper is to move beyond these discursively determined impasses. I draw on data from a small pilot study where a group of early childhood teachers come together to talk about their use of Transition Statements. I bring to the analysis of the data the concept of affective assemblages. This allows me to look beyond that which has been discursively produced in order to ask new questions, and to offer new ways of being in relationship.

Formative Interventions in Leadership Development in Early Childhood Education: The Potential of Double Stimulation.

This article critiques the usefulness of double stimulation, a key concept in Vygotskian analyses of human development, with leaders in early childhood services in Australia. A series of formative interventions was conducted to identify and address systemic tensions that were confounding leaders’ attempts to realise a central object of activity in their work: the development of their staff in order to enhance children’s learning. An example of double stimulation is drawn from workshop comments and interviews with one of the participating leaders. The article elaborates on a tension identified between explicit cultural expectations of professionalism and an implicit division of labour that position leaders as having the primary responsibility for solving problems of practice. The article concludes by reflecting on the usefulness of double stimulation in fostering sustainable leadership practices in early childhood education.

Reconceptualising the Interview

In our present “interview society” (Atkinson and Silverman, 1997), interviewing, as a method of gathering information, has become almost a routine technique and a taken-for-granted activity (Mishler, 1986, Gubrium and Holstein, 2003b, Weiss, 1994).

The Joy in Writingassemblage

This chapter unpicks a writing-assemblage: sarahlindaeileen, lindaeileensarah, eileenlindasarah. We seek to write in playful ways. Playful writing. Writing that brings pleasure, encourages rhizomatic thought. Here lies the purpose of this chapter as us-three together make sense of how our writing-assemblage is created and how we can write playfully to produce more than just lines of writing that count within the 21st century university.

‘Someone had to have faith in them as professionals’: an evaluation of an action research project to develop educational leadership across the early years

Abstract This article reports on an evaluation of three action research projects developed by a group of teachers working across the early years in three independent schools. The article examines the role of action research in developing educational leadership capabilities. Drawing on the educational leadership literature, concepts and ideas of action and activism, influence and change, and capacity to develop a vision are used to describe and analyse the data from qualitative pre-project and post-project individual interviews. The article argues that the empirical findings suggest action research was a powerful tool in developing educational leadership capabilities. This article concludes by suggesting that further research is needed to better understand how action research can be utilised to develop sustainable forms of educational leadership in the early years.