Sonja Arndt

Vibrancy of Childhood Things Power, Philosophy, and Political Ecology of Matter

In this article, we explore the “vibrancy of matter” and “things” in early childhood education. We use Bennett’s and others’ ideas on the political ecology of place in a philosophical examination of vibrant entanglements of “things,” “thing-hoods,” and childhoods. We work with Bennett’s challenge to shift from thinking solely about “think-power” to also consider “thing-power” and “thing-hood” to take the call for-of things seriously within young children’s place. Matter has agency that behaves in non-predictable ways, in assemblages, aggregates of powers, and forces and things impacting, shaping, and molding other matter and things. Children’s daily connectedness with this vibrancy of matter plays out in the territory of their early years settings as we illustrate through the well-loved stories of Pinocchio and Little Otik. We examine these dead-alive, wooden-thing-materialities as vibrant thing-hoods with agency and power in a theoretical re-reading of Foucauldian thought through new materialist philosophies. This article offers an alternative reading of conceptions of power, discourse, and matter. It provokes further openings and becomings in fresh entanglements, relationships, and responses by conceptualizing them through particular materialities of childhood stories.

Cross-cultural complexities of educational policies

We live in precarious times, where policy in and of education really does matter. In these precarious times when Twitter feeds and social media can dictate, direct and perpetuate quickly made promises and strongly affecting statements, there is a glaring need to pay attention to cross-cultural complexities inherent in educational policy. Revealing what it means to be a researcher, thinker, teacher and student in the contemporary media-saturated educational policy environment depends, amongst other things, on re-recognising diverse cultural knowledges and ways of being. Alongside the media barrage, and global trends to internationalise education, the confluence of diverse cultural knowledges and ways of being and their relationships in, and effects on, education impacts on policy from multiple angles. The challenge for policy research, studies and scholarship is the elevated need that this brings, for ‘keeping it complex’ and making space for multiple experiences of diverse cultural knowledges and lived educational experiences. This complexity depends on there being multiple ways of ‘doing’ policy research and thinking. It also reflects that there is not just one way of ‘doing’ or ‘knowing’ cultural ways of being (Kristeva, 2008). Since we carry with us our own historicised and localised cultural knowledges into increasingly rapidly transforming educational landscapes, we cannot assume any particular stability or ongoing singular status quo. In recent times various views on shifting educational landscapes have been espoused, with Bauman (2009), for example, arguing for conceptualising as a state of liquid modernity the rapid convergences of multiple realities and monumental shifts occurring through the globalisation, marketisation and fast-tracking of societies and education, where policy shifts and decisions are difficult to keep up with. Other arguments, for example from Springer (2016), position neoliberal discourses underlying such developments as dangerous, insidious and ultimately ruinous of individuals, their interdependence, collective responsibilities and the planet’s environment. They call for ‘new regimes of truth’ that move beyond neoliberalism’s

Pedagogies of difference: Unknowing immigrant teachers as subjects forever in process

Abstract Immersed in the bicultural, increasingly globalized, yet uniquely local, Aotearoa New Zealand early childhood landscape, immigrant teacher subjects are shaped in complicated, entangled ways. This paper attempts to open fresh spaces for re-thinking knowable teacher identities by drawing on Julia Kristeva’s work on the foreigner and the subject-in-process. It explores the immigrant teacher subject as “infinitely in construction, de-constructible, open and evolving” (Kristeva, 2008, p. 2). In a sector that is grappling with the complexities of outcomes driven expectations of productivity, mass participation and often homogenized indicators of ‘quality’, this paper elevates insights into the subject formation of the Other, to expose cracks in this veneer, through the notions of the semiotic and revolt. In this critical philosophical examination, I reconceptualise the idea of knowing immigrant teacher subjects, and their confrontation and (re)negotiation of social, political and professional expectations and unknowable foreignness.

A more-than-social movement: The post-human condition of quality in the early years

This article explores quality in early childhood education by de-elevating the importance of the human subject and experience, and heightening instead a focus on and tensions with the post-human. The argument traces the intricate web of ‘qualities’ woven throughout entanglements of subjects, objects and things that constitute what is referred to as ‘the early years sector’. The strike through the social in this post-human condition exposes critical concerns about the ‘problem’ of quality, and foregrounds the urgency of rupturing the status quo. Dislodged from the perceived comfort and safety of human control and determination, quality in the speculative state of the more-than-social movement can expect no conclusion. Instead, the (re)configuration of the early years sector as a more-than-social movement compels a rethinking of the dominance of human-centric philosophies. By repositioning Kristeva’s semiotic subject-in-process and Havel’s subject positionings within automatisms, this analysis inserts ‘non-human-being’ and ‘multiple beings-times’ into the ‘problem with quality’. In the early childhood sector, these ruptures create generative possibilities of quality entanglements with and beyond the human.

EARLY CHILDHOOD ASSESSMENT IN AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES AND FRESH OPENINGS

Abstract This paper engages with assessment practices in Aotearoa New Zealand. Te Whāriki, the internationally recognized early childhood curriculum framework, lies at the root of contemporary narrative assessment practices, and the concept of learning stories. We outline historical and societal underpinnings of these practices, and elevate the essence of assessment through learning stories and their particular ontological and epistemological aims and purposes. The paper emphasizes early childhood teaching and learning as a complex relational, inter-subjective, material, moral and political practice. It adopts a critical lens and begins from the premise that early childhood teachers are in the best position to make decisions about teaching and learning in their localized, contextualized settings, with and for the children with whom they share it. We examine the notion of effectiveness and ‘what works’ in assessment, with an emphasis on the importance of allowing for uncertainty, and for the invisible elements in children’s learning. Te Whāriki and learning stories are positioned as strong underpinnings of culturally and morally open, rich and complex assessment, to be constantly renegotiated within each local context, in Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond.

Thriving and surviving? The incredible problem of constructions of normality and Otherness in early childhood settings

This article explores what it means today for children to survive, thrive and reach their full potential – aspirations set out nearly 25 years ago as rights in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Espoused in the principles of the early childhood curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand, the spirit and intent of these aspirations are undermined by a range of normalizing strategies endemic to The Incredible Years behaviour management programme imported to promote effective management of challenging behaviour in young children. We draw here on the philosophies of Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault to question the normalization and consequent othering of children and childhoods, problematizing what it is to be ‘normal’. We confront government ‘solutions’ for education driven more by economic rationality than by educational concern for the complexities of the early childhood context. Our analysis of the normalization of childhoods and the government of teachers as ‘behaviour managers’ culminates in a rupturing of normalizing networks and highlights possible resistances and openings, towards surviving and thriving, and potential.

Young Children’s Education and Identity: A response to the European refugee crisis

In Kilis, by the border between Syria and Turkey, Ahmed runs a relief programme for refugees arriving from Syria. He offers tutoring for children, schooland kindergarten-like experiences, helping them to rebuild their lives in a new and foreign country, and with regaining a sense of trust in humanity, as he smiles, teases and understands (Smalley, 2015). Not all children involved in the current refugee crisis are this lucky. Not all children in this crisis have arrived at a final destination. And not all of them will. Ahmed, and Peters’ and Besley’s editorial, point to notions of cultural identity, freedom and rights, amongst others, in relation to very young children enmeshed in this crisis. I will use some of Julia Kristeva’s more recent interests in the European subject and identity, to provoke rethinking and dialogue on these points, and urgent action to follow: Ahmed is only the beginning. Understanding identity is complex, and in trying to do so Kristeva (2000, 2008) has repeatedly raised the question of European culture. Does it exist? And if it does, what is it—who is them, and who is us? Her response reflects her philosophy on the subject, as for ever in process, as she claims that, ‘there does exist an identity, mine, yours, but it is infinitely in construction, de-constructible, open and evolving’, going on to state that such ‘unsettling fragility’ and ‘vigorous subtlety’ create a paradoxical state for the European subject, and ‘European cultural destiny in particular’ (Kristeva, 2008, p. 2). Daily news reports of refugees escaping war and other atrocities, describe in more graphic detail the destinies that Kristeva was perhaps imagining. Fragilities play out in many ways, along railway lines, in the cold and rain, knowing that the fence along which they walk has been erected as a specific, vigorously unsubtle, act, to ostracise and exclude. A European destiny, identity, residency and security, is the dream that drives the current wave of refugees. While the European Union is a ‘global civilising effort’ (Kristeva, 2000, p. 114), where differences must be coordinated and reconciled, this, Kristeva claims, requires a renewed establishment of subjective freedom, towards a meaningful and useful Europe. The experiences of these refugees involve such a complicated and entangled daily evolution, that embeds the subjective strongly within the wider fall out of globalisation, political identities and freedoms, and the very critical

Ignorance in a Knowledge Economy

Foreigner: a choked up rage deep down in my throat, a black angel clouding transparency, opaque, unfathomable spur. The image of hatred and of the other, a foreigner is neither the romantic victim of our clannish indolence nor the intruder responsible for all the ills of the polis (Kristeva, 1991, p. 1).

True Fake News: Reshaping educational policies with the #MarchofOurLives

It’s lunchtime on a Tuesday, and the kids are piling into a pizzeria booth in Coral Springs, Fla., to plot a revolution. “The adults know that we’re cleaning up their mess,” says Cameron Kasky, an 11th-grader at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who started the #NeverAgain movement to curb gun violence three weeks earlier in his living room. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘I’m sorry I made this mess,’” adds buzzcut senior Emma González, “while continuing to spill soda on the floor.” (Alter, 2018)

Collective writing: An inquiry into praxis

This is the second text in the series collectively written by members of the Editors’ Collective, which comprises a series of individual and collaborative reflections upon the experience of contributing to the previous and first text written by the Editors’ Collective: ‘Towards a Philosophy of Academic Publishing.’ In the article, contributors reflect upon their experience of collective writing and summarize the main themes and challenges. They show that the act of collective writing disturbs the existing systems of academic knowledge creation, and link these disturbances to the age of the digital reason. They conclude that the collaborative and collective action is a thing of learning-by- doing, and that collective writing seems to offer a possible way forward from the co-opting of academic activities by economics. Through detaching knowledge creation from economy, collaborative and collective writing address the problem of forming new collective intelligences.