Rachel Langford

Critiquing Child-Centred Pedagogy to Bring Children and Early Childhood Educators into the Centre of a Democratic Pedagogy

Child-centred pedagogy is both an enduring approach and a revered concept in Western-based teacher preparation. This article weaves together major critiques of child-centred pedagogy that draw on critical feminist, postmodernist and post-structural theories. These critiques have particular relevance for conceptualizing what it can mean to be, and what it takes to become, an early childhood professional. The construct of the female early childhood professional is particularly important with the current intensification of the teacher as a technician and the increasing numbers in the workforce from racialized groups who may face social inequities. The construction of the individualized child and its parallel denial of the influences of gender, ethnicity and class on who a child becomes are equally important. Drawing upon the work of reconceptualist scholars, some preliminary ways will be proposed in which we can theorize and reconstruct children and early childhood professionals at the centre of a pedagogy that is a democratic space for all.

Professionalization as an advocacy strategy: a content analysis of Canadian child care social movement organizations’ 2008 discursive resources

Do early childhood education and care (ECEC) professionals make good advocates? Canadian advocates have fought for better child care policies since the mid-1940s. What has happened to this advocacy with the recent increased professionalization of the ECEC sector? How does increased professionalization limit, innovate or expand advocacy strategies? This content analysis of seven Canadian child care social movement organizations’ discursive resources in 2008 examines how different types of child care social movement organizations communicated their positions to their members and the public to manage a changing economic and political climate. Preliminary findings indicate that both ECEC workforce sector associations and grassroots organizations shared common advocacy messages, played down problems associated with a market approach to child care, and framed child care as a business case in their messaging. The authors suggest this reflects a nascent discursive move towards the professionalization of Canadian child care movement advocacy messages.

A SHIFTING COLLECTIVE IDENTITY

Faring poorly by international standards, out-of-home childcare in Canada is often described as ‘in crisis’. This study addresses how national childcare movement actors, who are overwhelmingly women, have discursively constructed their collective identity during two contrasting political climates. Data comprise publically available media releases produced in 2005 and 2008 by the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada (CCAAC), a national grassroots childcare social movement organization. Guided by Faircloughs overarching framework for critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Kollers approach to analysing collective identity through CDA, the discursive mechanisms of CCAAC movement actors have employed in relation to their collective identity construction are identified and explored. Finally, whether or not these mechanisms may have been strategic is explored.

From Choice to Change: an analysis of the 'choice' discourse in Canada's 2006 federal election

A critical discourse analysis (CDA) was used to analyze the representation of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in the 2006 federal election in Canada. Guided by Faircloughs approach to CDA, this study analyzed written documents including newspaper articles from The Globe and Mail and The National Post, the policy platforms of the Liberal and Conservative parties, and political speeches from party leaders. Four textual and discourse processes were found to legitimize the ‘choice’ discourse and contribute to its dominance: conversationalization, nominalization, use of irrealis statements and recontextualization. It is concluded that a fundamental shift in discourse related to political and media discussion of ECEC policy in Canada is needed if progressive policy changes are to take place.

The innovation of Ontario full-day kindergarten educator teams: have they reproduced the split systems of care and education?

ABSTRACT This study investigated the implementation of a full-day kindergarten programme in Ontario, Canada. Key to the implementation of this programme has been a new kind of educator team consisting of a certified teacher and a registered early childhood educator and a complementary partnership in which each team member contributes equally. Our research examined team members’ perceptions and practices related to their roles and responsibilities. Findings suggest that the care work for which early childhood educators are disproportionally responsible is accorded less value and status than the work of educating children. Implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the care/education split, the social reproduction of care work and social inequities.

Caring about care: Reasserting care as integral to early childhood education and care practice, politics and policies in Canada:

Care and education have deep historical divisions in the Canadian policy landscape: care is traditionally situated as a private, gendered, and a welfare problem, whereas education is seen as a universal public good. Since the early 2000s, the entrenched divide between private care and public education has been challenged by academic, applied and political settings mainly through human capital investment arguments. This perspective allocates scarce public funds to early childhood education and care through a lens narrowly focused on child development outcomes. From the investment perspective, care remains a prerequisite to education rather than a public good in its own right. This chapter seeks to disrupt this neoliberal, human capital discourse that has justified and continues to position care as subordinate to education. Drawing upon the feminist ethics of care scholarship of philosopher Virginia Held, political scientist Joan Tronto, and sociologist Marian Barnes, this chapter reconceptualizes the care in early childhood education and care rooted through four key ideas: (1) Care is a universal and fundamental aspect of all human life. In early childhood settings, young children’s dependency on care is negatively regarded as a limitation, deficit and a burden. In contrast, in educational settings, older children’s growing abilities to engage in self-care and self-regulate is viewed positively. We challenge this dependence/independence dichotomy. (2) Care is more than basic custodial activities. The premise that care is focused on activities concerned with the child’s body and emotions, while education involves activities concerned with the mind, permeates early childhood education and care policy. Drawing on Held’s definition of care as value and practice, we discuss why this mind-body dualism is false. (3) Care in early childhood settings can be evaluated as promoting well-being or, in contradiction to the meaning of care, as delivering poor services that result in harm to young children. We will explore the relevancy of Barnes’s contention that parallel to theorizing about good care in social policy, “we need to be able to recognize care and its absence” through the cultivation of “ethics sensibilities and skills applied in different practices in different contexts.” (4) Care must be central to early childhood education and care policy deliberation. Using Tronto’s concept of a “caring democracy,” we discuss how such deliberation can promote care and the caring responsibilities of educators in early childhood settings, thereby redressing long standing gendered injustices. We argue that these four ideas can be framed in advocacy messages, in ways that bridge the silos of care and education as separate domains and which open up the vision of an integrated early childhood education and care system. A feminist ethics of care perspective offers new possibilities for practitioners, advocates, researchers, and decision-makers to reposition and reclaim care as integral to the politics and policies of early childhood education and care.

Book Reviews: Flows, Rhythms, and Intensities of Early Childhood Education Curriculum, Rethinking Play and Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education: Concepts, Contexts and Cultures, Wellbeing from Birth, towards Excellence in Early Years Education: Exploring Narratives of Experience

Towards Excellence in Early Years Education is a timely book that relates the summary of a doctoral study which explored the practices and pedagogy of two ‘exceptional’ early years teachers through a relational research process. The aim of the study was to deconstruct practice and professional reflection in an attempt to identify key attributes of early years education demonstrated in the work of these two teachers. As such, it is a valuable text for emerging researchers as it exemplifies the development of a particular study, with clear explanations of the process in a reflective and reflexive framework that encompasses some explorations of methodological, ethical and autobiographical challenges. One of the strengths of the approach taken is the attention Goouch pays to clearly define the context of her study and elucidate the interpretation of the terms she is using. Kathleen Goouch, 2010, Abingdon: Routledge, 180 pages, paperback, ISBN 978-0-4155-6608-7, £23.99