Melinda G. Miller

Productive and inclusive? How documentation concealed racialising practices in a diversity project

This article examines how documentation concealed racialising practices in a diversity project that was seen to be productive and inclusive. Documentation examples are taken from a doctoral study about embedding Indigenous perspectives in early childhood education curricula in two Australian urban childcare centres. In place of reporting examples of ‘good’ early childhood education practice, the study labelled racialising practices in educators’ work. The primary aim was to understand how racialising practices are mobilised in professional practices, including documentation, even when educators’ work is seen to be high quality. Extracts from two communal journals that captured an action research process around embedding practices are examined to show how racism and whiteness were concealed within the documentation. This enables understanding about how documentation can provide evidence to stakeholders that diversity work in mainstream childcare centres is productive and inclusive, despite disparity between what is recorded and what occurs in practice.

Reconceptualist Work in a Colonising Context: Challenges for Australian Early Childhood Education

Reconceptualist work in early childhood education remains fluid and challenging. Since the early 1980s, the Reconceptualist movement has provided new forms of praxis, particularly in response to critiques of developmental frameworks and universal ideas about quality that negate local and diverse articulations of early education and care. In the past decade in particular, reconceptualist work has bought into focus issues around colonialism , Indigenous education and decolonising approaches to research and practice. The theorising of Soto (The politics of early childhood education. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2000), Soto and Swadener (Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 3(1), 38-66, 2002) and Ritchie (Children Issues, 11(1), 26–32, 2007). are some examples of reconceptualist work that highlight how colonialism produces historical silences and political and social invisibility for Indigenous peoples, and how centring Indigenous knowledge frameworks and perspectives in research and practice supports decolonising early education and care. As explored in this chapter, issues around colonialism are central to reconceptualist work in the Asia-Pacific context, particularly in Australia which remains a colonising context to the present day. In Australian early childhood education , reconceptualising requires engagement with interrelated concepts of colonialism , whiteness and racism. Exploration of these concepts is challenging for many educators due to their socialisation and gaps in education and training. Such challenges hinder the development of skill sets necessary for new forms of scholarship and activism that underpin reconceptualist work.