Sandra Cheeseman

Pedagogical Silences in Australian Early Childhood Social Policy

Growing international interest in the early childhood years has been accompanied by an expansion of public programs in Australia targeting young children and their families. This article explores some of the influences and rhetoric that frame these initiatives. It encourages critical examination of the discourses that shape the nature of early childhood programs in Australia and identifies a range of barriers that inhibit the involvement of early childhood teachers in the design and delivery of social policy initiatives for young children. As the imperatives of programs seeking to overcome social disadvantage take prominence in Australian early childhood policy initiatives, pedagogical perspectives that promote universal rights to more comprehensive early childhood experiences can easily be silenced. The article calls for pedagogical leadership to overcome these barriers and promote the democratic rights of all children to high-quality and publicly supported early childhood education and care programs.

From ideology to productivity : reforming early childhood education and care in Australia

Early childhood education and care services in Australia are undergoing major reforms, following widespread community concern about the quality of provision in general and the viability of corporate childcare in particular. A National Quality Framework has been developed by the current Australian Government to improve the quality, access and equity of early childhood services. As with any major social, political and economic change, however, the implementation of the reform agenda is subject to complex and often competing forces. In the paper, we describe the early childhood landscape in Australia today, and the possibilities and potential barriers to carrying out the much needed reforms proposed by the Australian Government. Early childhood professionals and the wider community are embracing the opportunity to work together to achieve a transformation in the way we educate and care for young children.

Infants of the knowledge economy: the ambition of the Australian Government’s Early Years Learning Framework

Shifts in global education policy to formalise curricula and make explicit learning outcomes for ever younger children have become popular for a number of countries responding to changes in global market economics. Human capital discourses, broadly aimed at shaping national prosperity, have entered the early childhood education and care policy landscape as somewhat of accepted wisdom. Using the Australian early childhood reform agenda and its accompanying Early Years Learning Framework as an example, this article interrogates two prominent productivity discourses that have permeated the early childhood education space – learning begins at birth and lifelong learning. We consider the relationship of these discourses to global/neoliberal ambitions for curriculum and question their place in the childcare experiences of infants under 12 months. Drawing on postmodern theory, we examine the complexity of nationalistic ideals aimed at creating platforms for socially just goals, against their potential to promote universalistic notions of childhood and infancy. In problematising the image of a cosmopolitan infant of the knowledge economy, we encourage thoughtful resistance to the reductionist tendencies of economic discourses in early childhood education and claim space for a balance of the personal, democratic and economic dimensions within a vision of the ‘best start in life’.

An Encounter with "Sayings" of Curriculum: Levinas and the Formalisation of Infants' Learning.

Abstract Increased global attention to early childhood education and care in the past two decades has intensified attention on the education of infants and assessment of their learning in education policy. This interest is particularly evident in the focus upon infants in the early childhood curriculum frameworks developed in recent years in many countries. To date, there has been little examination of implications of this policy/curriculum emphasis in relation to its possible implications for how infants are understood. In this article, using Levinas’ notion of ethical encounter, we present a critical reading of curriculum for infants. Drawing on his ideas of the ‘Other’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘unknowability’ we argue that the rapidly growing corpus of knowledge about infants and their inclusion in education policy and curricula texts, has the potential to narrowly define educators’ responsibilities and prescribe pedagogies in ways that may have unintended consequences. Using the Australian National Quality Framework (NQF) and its associated Early Years Learning Framework as examples, this article highlights the tensions inherent in a system that aims to provide equity, consistency and certainty, premised on a particular ‘knowing’ of the infant. We draw on Levinas’ ideas about ‘said’ and ‘saying’ to propose ways of working with policy and curricula texts that recognise that they can offer only partial understandings of the possibilities for infants’ learning.

Narratives of infants’ encounters with curriculum: Beyond the curriculum of care:

Australia’s National Quality Framework identifies responsibilities for early childhood educators who work with infants to plan for and assess their learning. Educators are urged to be ‘responsive to children’s ideas and play’ and to ‘assess, anticipate and extend children’s learning’. Responsiveness in relation to infants is often couched in terms of emotional support and attention to the attachment relationship, or in detailed guidance about supporting the infant in care routines. Drawing on Levinas’s ideas of ethical encounter to frame a consideration of infants’ learning more broadly, this article suggests the possibility to see beyond traditional perceptions of infants as objects of the attachment relationship, and identifies the potential for infants to be viewed as ‘initiators’ who guide educators’ responses. Working with Levinas’s ideas of absolute responsibility in the face-to-face encounter, the notion of ‘response-ableness’ is used to examine educators’ decisions and actions as they share in learning encounters with infants. Using video footage captured during an infant’s encounter with learning, the decisions of the educator prove influential. Creating a narrative of this experience illuminates the educator’s response-ableness, and shows how an infant’s ideas and investigations might form the basis of the learning encounter. Close examination of educator response-ableness may lead to richer possibilities for infants’ encounters with learning, beyond the curriculum of care.

Narratives of Infants' Encounters with Curriculum: The Benediction as Invitation to Participate.

Images of children as strong and capable rights-holders have nestled comfortably into the vernacular of early childhood education and care discourses. Promoting a view of children as entitled to contribute to decisions that affect them, these images are now framing themes of many curricular guides and learning frameworks. The inclusion of infants in these curricular guides suggests that they too are entitled to have a say in their learning, and yet little is understood about how we might get to the heart of what an infant thinks, intends and experiences. This article explores possibilities for visual narratives to enable a closer proximity to infants’ perspectives in relation to their learning. Drawing on Levinas’s ideas about ethical encounter and benediction, the authors seek ways to make visible the thinking, theorising and intent of one infant as she reveals her interests in learning.