Marek Tesar

Vibrancy of Childhood Things Power, Philosophy, and Political Ecology of Matter

In this article, we explore the “vibrancy of matter” and “things” in early childhood education. We use Bennett’s and others’ ideas on the political ecology of place in a philosophical examination of vibrant entanglements of “things,” “thing-hoods,” and childhoods. We work with Bennett’s challenge to shift from thinking solely about “think-power” to also consider “thing-power” and “thing-hood” to take the call for-of things seriously within young children’s place. Matter has agency that behaves in non-predictable ways, in assemblages, aggregates of powers, and forces and things impacting, shaping, and molding other matter and things. Children’s daily connectedness with this vibrancy of matter plays out in the territory of their early years settings as we illustrate through the well-loved stories of Pinocchio and Little Otik. We examine these dead-alive, wooden-thing-materialities as vibrant thing-hoods with agency and power in a theoretical re-reading of Foucauldian thought through new materialist philosophies. This article offers an alternative reading of conceptions of power, discourse, and matter. It provokes further openings and becomings in fresh entanglements, relationships, and responses by conceptualizing them through particular materialities of childhood stories.

Cross-cultural complexities of educational policies

We live in precarious times, where policy in and of education really does matter. In these precarious times when Twitter feeds and social media can dictate, direct and perpetuate quickly made promises and strongly affecting statements, there is a glaring need to pay attention to cross-cultural complexities inherent in educational policy. Revealing what it means to be a researcher, thinker, teacher and student in the contemporary media-saturated educational policy environment depends, amongst other things, on re-recognising diverse cultural knowledges and ways of being. Alongside the media barrage, and global trends to internationalise education, the confluence of diverse cultural knowledges and ways of being and their relationships in, and effects on, education impacts on policy from multiple angles. The challenge for policy research, studies and scholarship is the elevated need that this brings, for ‘keeping it complex’ and making space for multiple experiences of diverse cultural knowledges and lived educational experiences. This complexity depends on there being multiple ways of ‘doing’ policy research and thinking. It also reflects that there is not just one way of ‘doing’ or ‘knowing’ cultural ways of being (Kristeva, 2008). Since we carry with us our own historicised and localised cultural knowledges into increasingly rapidly transforming educational landscapes, we cannot assume any particular stability or ongoing singular status quo. In recent times various views on shifting educational landscapes have been espoused, with Bauman (2009), for example, arguing for conceptualising as a state of liquid modernity the rapid convergences of multiple realities and monumental shifts occurring through the globalisation, marketisation and fast-tracking of societies and education, where policy shifts and decisions are difficult to keep up with. Other arguments, for example from Springer (2016), position neoliberal discourses underlying such developments as dangerous, insidious and ultimately ruinous of individuals, their interdependence, collective responsibilities and the planet’s environment. They call for ‘new regimes of truth’ that move beyond neoliberalism’s

Towards a philosophy of academic publishing

Abstract This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in the fields of education and philosophy. The paper is the result of a collective writing process.

A more-than-social movement: The post-human condition of quality in the early years

This article explores quality in early childhood education by de-elevating the importance of the human subject and experience, and heightening instead a focus on and tensions with the post-human. The argument traces the intricate web of ‘qualities’ woven throughout entanglements of subjects, objects and things that constitute what is referred to as ‘the early years sector’. The strike through the social in this post-human condition exposes critical concerns about the ‘problem’ of quality, and foregrounds the urgency of rupturing the status quo. Dislodged from the perceived comfort and safety of human control and determination, quality in the speculative state of the more-than-social movement can expect no conclusion. Instead, the (re)configuration of the early years sector as a more-than-social movement compels a rethinking of the dominance of human-centric philosophies. By repositioning Kristeva’s semiotic subject-in-process and Havel’s subject positionings within automatisms, this analysis inserts ‘non-human-being’ and ‘multiple beings-times’ into the ‘problem with quality’. In the early childhood sector, these ruptures create generative possibilities of quality entanglements with and beyond the human.

Teachers’ voice, power and agency: (un)professionalisation of the early years workforce

Abstract This article examines Slovak early years teachers’ concerns with conceptions of teacher professionalism. It suggests that there is a mismatch between understandings of professionalism, policy aspirations and the attitudes of teachers to their own professionalism, and that this mismatch fuels early years teachers’ sense of agency. These tensions between conceptions of professionalism, teaching practice and actual working conditions have led to a ground-up approach to self-governance within the early years teacher workforce. We analyse teachers’ discussions in an early years online forum of 12,500 members that was started and remains governed by the teachers themselves. It represents in itself a very particular attitude and response to the need to determine what it means to be a professional teacher. This analysis examines intersections of policy, quality and professionalism, and highlights considerations of power and voice, and the complexities of uncertainty and change. The article concludes with the suggestion that teacher attitudes, power and agency are impacted in unpredictable ways by the policy landscape.

Re-negotiating an ethics of care in Kenyan childhoods

Abstract Childhoods in contemporary Kenya are entangled with discourses of care in a post-colonial landscape. Such imaginaries of childhoods through discourses of ‘care’ and ‘charity’ are well established through Western lenses. Another lens that is often enacted is the lens of de-commercialised, un-spoilt, pure and innocent childhoods in the Kenyan landscape. In this study, the authors utilize Nel Nodding’s concept of an ethics of care, and a feminist lens, to explore this binary of Western views through real experiences of childhoods. This paper provides an analysis of childhoods as lived experiences in Kenya, and challenges constructions of children/childhoods as vulnerable, based upon observations and interviews conducted in Kenya in the remote area of Kwale County.

Forever young: Childhoods, fairy tales and philosophy

Fairy tales play a substantial role in the shaping of childhoods. Developed into stories and played out in picture books, films and tales, they are powerful instruments that influence conceptions and treatments of the child and childhoods. This article argues that traditional fairy tales and contemporary stories derived from them use complex means to mould the ways that children live and experience their childhoods. This argument is illustrated through representations of childhoods and children in a selection of stories and an analysis of the ways they act on and produce the child subjects and childhoods they convey. The selected stories are examined through different philosophical lenses, utilizing Foucault, Lyotard and Rousseau. By problematizing these selected stories, the article analyses what lies beneath the surface of the obvious meanings of the text and enticing pictures in stories, as published or performed. Finally, this article argues for a careful recognition of the complexities of stories used in early childhood settings and their powerful and multifaceted influences on children and childhoods.

Writing E/scapes

scape.xa01 a brief ‘escape or means of escape’xa02 ‘a scenic view, whether of sea, land, or sky’xa03 ‘in its various senses’xa04 ‘a long flower-stalk rising directly from the root or rhizome’xa05 a theoretical approach to writing