Nikki Fairchild

Segments and stutters: Early Years Teachers and Becoming-Professional

There has been extensive research and analysis of the professionalization of early childhood educators/teachers. The recent promotion of a teacher-led workforce in England has further focused discussions on the modelling of early years teachers as professionals. In this article, the author develops an alternative analysis using the concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to explore professionalization as a process of becoming. English policy focus has been on constituting early years teachers as reflective and rational subjects, and moving towards a narrower view of professional identity where school-ready discourses are prevalent. The author’s research with early years teachers reveals a complex negotiation and interchange with the demands of professional identity. This is analysed through Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of segmentation to refer to the forms of power which order early years teachers’ professional identity, and stuttering to develop the forms of resistance and negotiation that suggest a more fluid model of becoming. In particular, the analysis focuses on how stuttering opens up beyond the limits of a discourse analysis to suggest embodied and material forms of practice that are central to early years teaching. This methodology allows a move beyond the binary nature of humanist thought which posits mind-matter and culture-nature, towards a politics of possibility in which emerging early years teachers are engaged with an embodied and material world.

Improvising Bags Choreographies: Disturbing Normative Ways of Doing Research

Postqualitative research-creation improvisations offer new possibilities to explore method/ology. In this article, we question how bags, as seemingly mundane objects, work as ontologically lively matter—as active agencies—to choreograph human–nonhuman relations and heterogeneous materialities. Working from three questions—How might a bag become? What do bags do? What do bags enable and enact?—we discuss four research-creation improvisations and the insights they generated. The article maps how bags choreographies put affects, bodies, and materialities into comotional relations to disturb normative approaches to research both within conference sessions and through writing articles.

The micropolitics of posthuman early years leadership assemblages: Exploring more-than-human relationality

Engaging with posthuman theorising, this article puts to work a number of concepts to produce generative reimaginings of early years leadership. In 1992, Deleuze argued that we are witnessing a transition from societies of confinement to ‘societies of control’. In societies of control, power operates through neo-liberal corporate worlds via a process of ‘continuous modulation’, which encourages a regime of perpetual flows of change, revealing new productions of a more posthuman agency. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the author notes how the concept of assemblage can be employed to explore leadership. She argues that early years leadership in England is part of a wider set of connections and relations which include human and non-human ‘bodies’. The assemblage connects and collects bodies, and is not defined by its individual components but by what is produced as these bodies interact. These interactions can be striated, which explores certain forms of leadership. However, smoother spaces can also be produced, which empirically reveals the situational ethics and micropolitics of four early years leaders who are entangled with children, policy, neo-liberal framing, quality, curriculum, and social and material worlds in their settings and schools. This article broadens current views on early years leadership by taking a more-than-human view of relations between human and non-human bodies as a distributed subjectivity which reworks notions of solely human agency. This production allows the author to question how posthuman leadership and the ethics and micropolitics of connectivity might function in this new form of more-than-human relationality.