Maja Plum

Humanism, Administration and Education: The Demand of Documentation and the Production of a New Pedagogical Desire.

Through the example of a Danish reform of educational plans in early childhood education, this paper analyses the emergence of a new pedagogical desire related to administrative educational reforms promoting accountability, visibility and documentation. Two arguments are made: first, it is argued that the changes in administrative practices during the last decade constitute a transformation, but also a reproduction of relations between knowledge and governing that goes back to the big expansion of the welfare state. Second, it is argued that these relations between knowledge and governing are not restricted to the administrative practices, but are part of education and its humanistic legacy as well. As such, the administrative demand of documentation becomes possible and recognisable through its reproductive elements. Elements that are constituted in a transformative conjunction in which the ‘professional nursery teacher’ is produced as a reflective daily researcher, who outlives her pedagogical desire as an analytical care for the optimisation of the ‘learning child’.

The emergence of the analytical method in early childhood education – the scientific effort to produce the learning child for the nation in a global era

Through an analysis of a recent Danish administrative educational reform in the area of early childhood education, this article raises a discussion about the way pedagogical objects and subjects are generated in the knowledge acquisition of administrative educational reforms promoting accountability, visibility and documentation. It is argued that pedagogy is generated as a sequential and unit-specified way of working on the production of ‘the learning child’, forming a time- and material-optimising approach. Hereby, the nursery teacher, as a daily scientific researcher, comes to serve the nation by an ongoing observational intervention, producing the learning foundation for the entrepreneurial citizen, and thus the nation as a knowledge society in a globalised world. This is what this article terms the emergence of the analytical method.

A "Globalised" Curriculum--International Comparative Practices and the Preschool Child as a Site of Economic Optimisation.

Globalisation is often referred to as being external to education – a state of affairs presenting the modern curriculum with numerous challenges. In this article, ‘globalisation’ is examined as something that is internal to curriculum and analysed as a problematisation in a Foucaultian sense, that is, as a complex of attentions, worries and ways of reasoning, producing curricular variables. The analysis is made through an example of early childhood curriculum in Danish preschool, and the way the curricular variable of the preschool child comes into being through ‘globalisation’ as a problematisation, carried forth by comparative practices such as Programme for International Student Assessment. It thus explores some of the systems of reason that educational comparative practices carry through time, focusing on the ways in which configurations are reproduced and transformed, forming the preschool child as a site of economic optimisation.

Making ‘what works’ work: enacting evidence-based pedagogies in early childhood education and care

Abstract Inspired by perspectives from actor-network theory, this paper challenges key assumptions in evidence-based pedagogies. Through a multi-sited analysis of the evidence-based pedagogy ‘Dialogic Reading’ (DR) in the area of early childhood education and care in Denmark, the paper explores how DR is enacted as part of an assemblage of tests, research in the field of audiologopedics, classifications of reading disabilities, day care centres and the book as a ‘nice experience’. It also explores how DR is organised in a local day care centre, hereby organising objects such as dolls, books, children and a mattress. As such, the paper shows how DR, as an evidence-based method, is established through concrete relations, rather than abstracted and universal principals. It argues that these relations stabilising DR are never enacted once and for all, but require continual work to be held together as a method that ‘works’.

Signing in: knowledge and action in nursery teaching

ABSTRACT Based on fieldwork conducted in two day care centres in Denmark, this paper explores knowledge and action as relational and intertwined phenomena in nursery teaching. Engaging with perspectives from actor network theory, emphasis is put on the socio-material distribution of knowing and acting. That is, how the nursery teacher becomes part of knowledge and action through an assemblage of various elements, such as packed lunches, children, noises, crumbs, another nursery teacher and a bucket. A notion of the sign is developed in which signs can be gestures, words or artefacts stabilised in a web of relations, hereby signalling the kinds of relations that are important to attend to. ‘Signing in’ is a way of becoming part of these relations. Against this background, this paper critically addresses ambitions to professionalise the field of early childhood education and care, questioning the divide between knowledge and action on which such initiatives are based.