Susan J. Grieshaber

Shifting from Developmental to Postmodern Practices in Early Childhood Teacher Education

Changing times and postmodern perspectives have disrupted the taken-for-granted relationship between child development knowledge and the preparation of early childhood teachers. Despite ongoing exchanges about how best to respond to the critique of the developmental knowledge base, few descriptions of how particular teacher educators have gone about reconceptualizing their curriculum exist. Employing postmodern views of knowledge, power, and subjectivity, this article describes three pedagogies employed by the authors to enact a postmodern teacher education. After describing each of these pedagogies—situating knowledge, multiple readings, and engaging with images—an example from classroom practice is given to illustrate how these strategies come together to assist students to understand how teaching enacts power relations. The article concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges involved in trying to shift from developmental to postmodern practices in the preparation of early childhood educators.

Mealtime rituals: power and resistance in the construction of mealtime rules.

This paper discusses how child resistance is lived on a daily basis through the construction and operation of mealtime rules in four Australian families with young children. It focuses on the sociologically neglected situation of everyday parent-child conflict and resistance and posits young children as actively engaged in contestation and negotiation of power relationships within the family. Analysis of domestic dialogue and conflict episodes demonstrates how mealtime rituals function as techniques of discipline through which young children are normalized. Although resistance and contestation occurred in all families, the construction and operation of mealtime rules were also a regulatory mechanism for constituting boys and girls in different ways. Girls were constructed as helping to prepare, serve and clean after meals, which boys were the recipients of this service from their mothers and sisters.

Interrupting Stereotypes: Teaching and the Education of Young Children.

Research Findings: Despite calls to the contrary, research about teaching has tended to take a back seat to research about childrens development and learning in early childhood education. After exploring why this might be the case, this essay considers the importance of teaching for early childhood education and the contexts in which it occurs in these early years of the 21st century. It presents a view from the Antipodes (Australia), a down-under perspective from the southern hemisphere where early childhood education and research associated with it have been influenced to a large extent by what happens in the northern hemisphere. Policy or Practice: The paper encourages the active interruption of stereotypical performances of early childhood practitioners and children by suggesting practitioners push the boundaries of their theoretical and practical knowledge by making way for contradictions and inconsistencies that accompany all forms of diversity and difference, taking risks, and disrupting the status quo.

Child Observation and Accountability in Early Childhood Education: Perspectives from Australia and the United States

The changing ways child observation is being used by preschool teachers in the United States and Australia are described in relation to the accountability movement pressuring young children and their teachers in both countries. The costs of the accountability movement in early childhood education are explored, and a call for genuine accountability based on assessment strategies such as traditional child observation is made.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s International Early Learning Study: Opening for debate and contestation:

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is initiating the International Early Learning Study, a cross-national assessment of early learning outcomes involving the testing of 5-year-old children in participating countries. The authors use this colloquium to inform members of the early childhood community about this project and to raise concerns about its assumptions, practices and possible effects. The authors also invite readers’ comments, to start a process of democratic dialogue and contestation.

Healthy Sexual Development: A Multidisciplinary Framework for Research

ABSTRACT A group of Australian researchers from a range of disciplines involved in studying childrens sexual development developed a framework for researching healthy sexual development that was acceptable to all disciplines involved. The 15 domains identified were: freedom from unwanted activity; an understanding of consent; education about biological aspects; understanding of safety; relationship skills; agency; lifelong learning; resilience; open communication; sexual development should not be “aggressive, coercive or joyless;” self-acceptance; awareness and acceptance that sex is pleasurable; understanding of parental and societal values; awareness of public/private boundaries; and being competent in mediated sexuality.

Rethinking Parent and Child Conflict

This book is set in the context of contemporary life and depicts relationships among parents and children in four families living in a capital city in Australia. Because of the overabundance of manuals and the step-by-step advice that many provide, it is often assumed that parent and child conflict is easily resolved. The Hollywood film Parenthood implies that childrearing means a lifetime of anxiety for parents and goes as far as to suggest that after so many centuries, somebody must have found the formula for turning children into happy and successful adults. These are the capacities (innocence, naivety, vulnerability, etc.) that child development theorists have assumed are part of the child’s nature.

Departures from Tradition: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia

In 2009, the Commonwealth Government of Australia published the first national learning framework for use with children aged birth to five years. The framework marks a departure from tradition in that it emphasizes intentional teaching, learning as well as child development, a particular type of play-based learning, outcomes, and equity. This article analyzes aspects of the document that depart from well established approaches to early childhood education in Australia and identifies challenges for educators who are required to use the document. It concludes that ongoing and supportive professional learning opportunities must accompany the introduction and enactment of the document.

New Adventures in the Politics of Literacy: an Introduction

In what ways are childhood and literacy political? The identification and categorization of the ‘child’ as a distinctive kind of human subject coincided with the formation of the European nation state, the proliferation of mercantile economies and calls for mass literacy and secular schooling (Luke, 1989). There is a longstanding and powerful connection between ‘childhood’ as an ontological and cultural category and what Benedict Anderson (1991) called ‘print capitalism’. Over several centuries, then, schools, churches, families and industries have been charged with the promotion of particular literate traditions and the construction of distinctive kinds of text practising children. It is precisely these very educational institutions and linguistic monocultures built around practices with the written word that appear to be teetering on some kind of an historical brink. For according to discussions of Canadian and Australian, UK and US schooling in this edition of JECL, the teaching of initial print literacy is struggling to adapt to heteroglossic, multilingual student bodies, new communications technologies and modalities of representation, and the tenacious forms of social inequality that run with globalized economies. The political formation of early childhood literacy follows discernable and durable patterns, detailed in these articles.We can speak of early childhood literacy education as ‘political’ across three connected strata: • AS IDEOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION – Literacy education is a mode of ideological representation. That is, it is an introduction to particular social and political ideologies, cultural values and beliefs which are selections from possible sociocultural positions and class interests. The first two articles here by Larson and Gatto and Comber and Nichols question how policy foci on basic skills narrow and constrain ideational and curricular diversity of early literacy instruction. Apart from these overt ideological implications, several recent discussions of No Child Left Behind have suggested this narrowing of literacy as curriculum sets the grounds for cross-curricular achievement slumps in mid and upper primary years (e.g. Calfee, 2002).

Parents' Choice of Early Childhood Education Services in Hong Kong: A Pilot Study about Vouchers.

The introduction of a voucher scheme for early childhood education in Hong Kong has resulted in significant changes in the field. This article reports data from a pilot study that aimed at understanding better how parents chose an early childhood education service following the introduction of a voucher scheme in Hong Kong. Eighty-six Chinese parents with children aged three participated in interviews and focus group discussions. This group of parents had just undergone the process of selecting a kindergarten or nursery for their children for the school year 2007–2008. The participants were from a range of socioeconomic circumstances and educational levels who had selected non-profit-making kindergartens and nurseries in public and private housing estates. The results showed that what parents looked for in their choice of service closely matched how they defined quality. Moreover, their views on quality greatly resembled the specific notion of quality that the recent reform policy has been heavily promoting. The findings point to the complex interactions among policy, choice, and practices of early childhood education. The new voucher scheme is intensifying the governing of both the self and the field, the impact of which is worrisome.