Sandy Farquhar

Philosophy and Pedagogy of Early Childhood

Abstract In recent years new discourses have emerged to inform philosophy and pedagogy in early childhood. These range from various postfoundational perspectives to objectivist accounts such as neuroscience in relation to brain development. Given the variety of competing narratives, the field is complex and multifaceted with potential to revision early childhood pedagogy through varied paradigms and philosophical orientations. This special issue sought scholarship on a range of philosophical perspectives about early childhood education, particularly those related to issues of pedagogy. In this article, we develop an argument for philosophically informed pedagogy to balance some of the psychological and empirical approaches that dominate the field. Based on the provocations of the seven articles that comprise this issue, we argue for greater attention to subjective and even mysterious approaches to learning that call for ontological orientations to pedagogy as a relationship rather than a response or an intervention.

Lost in Translation: The power of language

The paper examines some philosophical aspects of translation as a metaphor for education—a metaphor that avoids the closure of final definitions, in favour of an ongoing and tentative process of interpretation and revision. Translation, it is argued, is a complex process involving language, within and among cultures, and in the exercise of power. Drawing on Foucaults analysis of power, Nietzschean contingency, and the inversion of meaning that characterises the work of Heidegger and Derrida, the paper points towards Ricoeurs notion of linguistic hospitality as the ethical dimension to the inevitably inadequate representation of the ‘other’. In this exploration, translation is posited as a creative and interpretive act—involving neither image nor copy, but poetic transposition. The power of language emerges in the close association between power and knowledge, in which the ability to define what is real generates the realm of future possibilities. From a Foucauldian perspective, language functions as a creative strategic relation—a form of power that structures the field of other possible actions. It is through the mediation of translation, the paper argues, that language communicates, leaving us with a world of difference (i.e. ‘lost in translation’), as both our curse and our blessing as part of the human condition and as part of our ethical endeavour as educators. The contingent and arbitrary nature of language problematises what appears natural and necessary, generating the possibility of creative dialogue.

Narrative Identity and Early Childhood Education

An intensification of interest in early childhood by government, parents, and employers, focuses primarily on the provision of private early childhood education services outside of the home. With a focus on New Zealand, the paper argues that the form of early education now promoted is a particular form of care and education that moves children away from family and community narratives embedded in the historical, cultural and humanist intentions of the national curriculum Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996). It argues that current early childhood policy directions, largely driven by global economic agendas, pay scant regard to the lived experiences of children and families. Working with Ricoeurs narrative identity, Ricoeurs ‘capable subject’ is considered in order to examine the emerging purposes and aims of early childhood education, with a particular focus on just institutions for children and families.

Well-Being Narratives and Young Children.

Abstract Whereas research on children’s well-being in education has largely focused on adult perspectives rather than on children’s understandings, recent scholarship argues for a stronger focus on children’s experience and perceptions of their own well-being. Adopting a narrative approach, this article puts children’s stories centre stage as we explore a philosophy of well-being for early childhood in two distant but similar countries, Finland and Aotearoa New Zealand. The article reports on two independent narrative studies (one from Finland, the other from New Zealand) in which children tell about their own well-being. Both studies acknowledge the difficulties in obtaining unfettered access to children’s experiences and emphasize the importance of human connectedness and community in children’s lives. After a brief introduction, the article compares eudaimonic and hedonic conceptualizations of well-being. In keeping with the characteristics of narrative, children’s perspectives form the central core of the text, with tentative observations offered by the author/researchers as they attempt to interpret the embedded context of the children’s narratives. Connections are made between the two philosophical understandings of well-being and some pedagogical considerations about children’s lives.

Focus groups as temporal ecosystems for newly qualified early childhood teachers

This article reports on a focus group study of newly qualified early childhood teachers’ experiences during their first year of teaching. It argues that focus groups have the potential to invite dialogical engagement in ways that support teachers’ exploration of their own identities, and it emphasises the significant role group context plays in their professional support and development. A feature of the study was the way in which participants interacted with one another, with the researchers and with imagined others, resulting in a production of unique narratives that revealed both affiliation and difference. With a focus on the associational and interactional elements of the teachers’ responses, rather than the content of their responses, this article examines the use of focus groups as a method for exploring social interactions and group processes. In this study, focus groups are seen as temporal ecosystems, engendering new understandings from existing and ongoing encounters within the group. The authors argue that the resonance and cohesion of the interactions within the group are productive in responding to new teachers’ feelings of isolation, and that there is a need for more attention to the vitality of group processes in the lives of early childhood teachers.

Childhoods and time: Rethinking notions of temporality in early childhood education

Childhoods are temporal encounters that are vibrant, changing, shifting and, in some discourses, even disappearing. Childhood is a temporal encounter – an encounter with an idea that speaks to the experience of time. In early childhood education, this encounter has been progressively constructed and compartmentalized – from ideas of childhood to the seven-year childhood stretch, and now to the in-between childhood phases. With new constructions of childhoods come new ethical and pedagogical relationships. At the same time, new childhoods are constructed as timeless – childhood is a natural state both forgotten and then remembered. Notions of time and temporality can be seen to draw from multiple theoretical threads. One thread, noted in Bloch (2013), engages with new historicism, or cultural history (Popkewitz et al., 2001) and relates to the post-structural theories of language, truth, power, governmentality and technologies of the self (Foucault, 1980, 1991). Another thread traces Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of the rhizome that focuses on contingency, non-linearity, rhizomatic, unpredictable and uncertain movement, and a micropolitics of political action (Dahlberg et al., 2007; Rose, 1999). The articles in this special issue specifically focus and work with notions of time and temporality, drawing from diverse post-structural framings as opposed to a more modernist history that suggests causality, progress and linear time, from past to present – an evolutionary historical notion of time. These diverse perspectives focus on Foucault’s argument that:

Time in early childhood: Creative possibilities with different conceptions of time

Time is an important driver of pedagogy which is often overlooked in the busy atmosphere of an early childhood centre. Engaging philosophically with three different concepts of time, and drawing examples from literature and art to focus attention on how time is constituted in early childhood centres, this article argues that we inhabit the intersection of several different forms of time. Despite this, we tend to focus on only one form of time – chronological time, a formulation that is at the basis of our western education system. Our understandings of time impact on the way we think about education and the way we teach children. Incorporating different understandings of time in the space of early childhood has transformative potential, the enactment of which is at the heart of a good education. This article accepts the need for young children to be familiar with social conventions to do with time, but also advocates for an expanded subjectivity that flourishes within alternative notions of time.

New Zealand early childhood curriculum: The politics of collaboration

Abstract The New Zealand early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education [MoE],1996), is frequently hailed as a community inspired curriculum, praised nationally and internationally for its collaborative development, emancipatory spirit and bicultural approach. In its best form community can be collaborative, consultative, democratic, responsive and inclusive. But community and collaboration can also be about exclusion, alienation and loss. This paper engages with Te Whāriki as a contestable political document. It explores this much acclaimed early childhood curriculum within a politics of community, collaboration and control. Driving the direction of the paper is a call for a revitalised understanding of curriculum as practices of freedom, raising issues of how to work with difference and complexity in a democratic and ethical manner. The paper concludes that although official curriculum is unavoidably about control, there is a world of difference in the ways such control might be exercised. The real curriculum exists where teachers are working with children - it is in the everyday micro-practices that impacts are felt and freedoms played out.

Interpreting Our Selves

This chapter engages with Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity, to render the self an unstable nexus of meaning, engaged in the ongoing invention and reinterpretation of itself. The complexity of interpreting the self is highlighted through the use of literary metaphors that posit the self variously as author, as interpreter, and as evolving text. The article delves into the field of hermeneutics to undermine the possibility of certainty in self-knowledge, recognizing that no observation or description is free from the effects of the observer’s experiences, presuppositions and projections of his or her personal values and expectations. The chapter argues that, in the edusemiotic sense of interpreting ourselves, we are doubly caught in a hermeneutic circle: initially with the self as the interpreting subject, and subsequently in the resulting interpretation, with the self as the object of that interpretation. Self is, thus, evolving text, albeit with a finite number of possibilities. The interpretive basis of identity involves a dialectical understanding of our selves as simultaneously constant and changing, our life story unfolding like a narrative. It is through interpretation that people give meaning to their experiences of the world, and through interpreting our experiences we become signs enriched with existential meanings. Using the metaphor of life as continuous textuality, this chapter concludes that, through narrative, our ever-evolving self is necessarily located historically, temporally, and contingently.

Flows of Knowledge in Teaching Teams: A Collaborative Approach to Research in Early Childhood Education

The aim of this chapter is to theorise and propose ways to consolidate and build knowledge about the nature and impact of teacher education on teaching team relationships in Early Childhood Education (ECE). ECE teacher education provides a critical opportunity to study and practice being in a teaching team. In this chapter, we explore the nature of early childhood (EC) teaching teams with a focus on ‘knowledge’.