Zsuzsa Millei

The Problems with Using the Concept of 'Citizenship' in Early Years Policy

Early years policy increasingly uses the concept of ‘citizenship’ in relation to children in Australia and worldwide. This concept is used as a taken-for-granted idea; however, there is no singularly agreed-upon answer to the question of what ‘citizenship’ means when used in relation to children, and what practical considerations it carries both for policymaking and for implementation. This article introduces theoretical ideas of ‘citizenship’ from the field of political theory in order to begin a discussion on how we imagine and might imagine children as citizens in policy discourses. Some conceptualisations of children as citizens are also discussed and questioned as starting points to consider in regard to the use of the notion of children as citizens in policy and practice.

The (bio)politicization of neuroscience in Australian early years policies: fostering brain-resources as human capital

Abstract At the present, human capital theory (HCT) and neuroscience reasoning are dominant frameworks in early childhood education and care (ECEC) worldwide. Popular since the 1960s, HCT has provided an economic understanding of human beings and offered strategies to manage the population with the promise of bringing improvements to nations. Neuroscience arguments added new ways to regulate human beings, and thus another ‘hopeful ethos’ and investment into the future. In this paper, we examine different positive, life-improving, and hopeful takes on early childhood as forms of biopolitical government, which are closely related to the enhancement of individual capacities and the shifting problems of the neoliberal state. Curiously, this process, grounded on biological fatalism and naturalizing arguments, has led to new class categorizations and ways of social discrimination. We hence argue that even though a ‘hopeful ethos’ is offered through the (bio)politicization of neurosciences, it has led to eugenic arguments by re-inscribing social and economic differences into differences in brain architecture. Finally, we aim to demonstrate that ECEC policy offers an example of how current policies govern through scientific evidence and softer forms of ‘government by example’, at the same time moving the government of population into the home, and with that privatizing and personalizing self-investment.

Thinking differently about guidance: Power, children's autonomy and democratic environments

This article critiques guidance approaches to discipline, that are employed in early childhood environments with an aim to create democratic environments for children, and as part of ‘good’ practices. Advocates of guidance claim that this is a more humane or democratic approach to discipline that empowers children, and therefore, power in the classroom appears as more equalized or distributed. The author adopts a particular perspective in the field of educational psychology by using Foucault’s conceptualization of power and confession (1981). This analytical context opens up avenues to problematize guidance’s claims about the nature of teacher–child power relations, and children’s autonomy. Guidance is then re-read as a subtle, often invisible way of regulation, that sheds new light on a particular kind of autonomy children are allowed. The article concludes with an emphasis on the necessity to be vigilant with guidance. Vigilance is needed to keep in sight that guidance is a discourse that positions subjects in power relations and its quest for democracy is a part of its discourse with power implications rather than its ultimate goal.

“It takes a global village”: Troubling discourses of global citizenship in United Planet’s voluntourism

This article merges the fields of tourism studies with the social studies of children and childhood in a discourse analysis of the voluntourism company United Planet’s website. In the past decade, United Planet has emerged as a popular voluntourist company with a mission to “unite the world in a community beyond borders.” United Planet’s volunteer projects, as described on their website, combine international volunteering with cultural excursions to children living in the Global South. Through our analysis of the United Planet website and focusing on notions of childhood, we demonstrate that it constructs a seemingly harmonious transnational world that is without cultural and geographic boundaries and histories. However, the erasure of borders and historical power relations to construct a global community with a form of global citizenship attached to it hinges upon the maintenance of different trajectories and inequalities of Global North and South. In this way, this form of global citizenship contradicts United Planet, and voluntourism’s promise about the creation of a more equitable world and limits its membership to the North.

The Preschool Bathroom: Making "Problem Bodies" and the Limit of the Disciplinary Regime over Children.

In this paper we study the effects of power in a bathroom, which is a rarely analysed space in preschools, using empirical examples from a semi-ethnographic study conducted in New South Wales, Australia. We demonstrate that educators’ understanding and practices mostly consider their own positioning in discourses and come short in accounting for children’s practices in and expressed views on the bathroom. Educators also remain distant from children’s bodily experiences. The interplay of the open architectural design of the bathroom space and dominant discourses operating in the preschool constitute some children as ‘problem bodies’ apparently requiring (and justifying) direct intervention. Following this reasoning we argue that the surveillance, regularisation and normalisation in the bathroom is far from total, which leads us to question the adequacy of understanding the bathroom as forming a part of a modern (disciplinary) institution.

Complicating "Student Behaviour": Exploring the Discursive Constitution of "Learner Subjectivities".

When educators consider ‘student behaviour’, they usually think about ‘problem behaviour’ such as disruption or defiance. This limited and limiting view of ‘student behaviour’ not only fails to acknowledge children as educational actors in a wider sense, but also narrowly positions educators as either in control or out of control of their classroom. Mainstream educational psychology’s responses to ‘challenging behaviour’ point educators to numerous ways to prevent its occurrence, through, for example, changing their disciplining approaches and techniques. However, much of the advice directed at improving student behaviour fails to interrogate the core notion of ‘student behaviour’ itself, as well as the conceptual baggage that it carries. The focus is squarely on eliminating ‘problem behaviour’ and often resorts to a pathologisation of students. Meanwhile, when considering ‘student behaviour’ through a Foucauldian post-structuralist optic, behaviour emerges as something highly complex – as spatialised, embodied action within/against governing discourses. In this opening up, it becomes both possible and critical to defamiliarise oneself with the categorisation of ‘challenging behaviour’ and to interrogate the discourses and subject positionings at play. In this paper, we pursue this task by asking: what happens with the notion of ‘behaviour’ if we change focus from ‘fixing problems’ to looking at the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’? What does it become possible to see, think, feel and do? In this exploration, we theorise ‘behaviour’ as learning and illustrate the constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’. Drawing on two case scenarios, we explore how children accomplish themselves as learners and how this accomplishment links the production of subjectivity and embodied action, and illustrate how ‘student/child behaviour’ appears significantly different to what mainstream educational psychology would have us see.

Rethinking transition through ideas of 'community' in Hungarian kindergarten curriculum

This chapter provides a Foucauldian genealogical analysis of the concept of “community” in three curriculum documents signposting major changes in the conceptualization of kindergarten education in Hungary. Our approach is to closely examine the discourses of the core curriculum documents and their sociopolitical contexts in order to explore the shifts in the ideas of “community” and “communitarianism” contained within the texts, focusing particularly on the period of “transition” in Hungary. This chapter interrogates the shifting ideas of “community” and finds that the meaning of “transition” in the context of post-World War II (WWII) Hungary needs to be radically reassessed. Furthermore, the study suggests that the “transition” in Hungary has been in fact a drawn out process, one beginning well before the early 1990s and involving major reforms throughout the post-WWII period. By outlining the shifts in the conceptualizations of “community” embedded in kindergarten curriculum, the chapter explores what political problems were attempted to be solved through the changing conception of this early education. Furthermore, the study examines whether these reconceptualizations can be considered to be directly linked to the transition of particular political ideologies – from socialism to neoliberal capitalism – or rather, do they represent much smoother transitions to a new era after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“We reaffirm our Mozambican identity in the fight against HIV and AIDS”: Examining educational perspectives on women’s ‘proper’ place in the nation of Mozambique

There is increasing recognition of the importance of space in the study of education, resulting in a greatly diversified literature on the geographies of education. This article builds on this growing body of scholarly work to examine a number of critical spatial assumptions underpinning school-based HIV- and AIDS-related education in Maputo, Mozambique. It does so through an analysis of key governmental and ministerial documents and policy-makers’ and educators’ conceptions of the aims of such education. This article highlights how school-based HIV- and AIDS-related education in Mozambique was conceptualized in gendered and distinctly place-based terms. In addition, we elucidate how, despite the various discursive shifts since the struggle for independence from Portugal, young women continue to be construed as the symbolic anchor of the nation, their natural place defined in relation to the domestic, the intimate, and local ‘in-here.’

Memory and kindergarten teachers' work: children's needs before the needs of the socialist state

More than 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, scholars and educators continue to engage with histories under socialism and re-evaluate the consequences of those education systems for everyday lives then and in the present. This article develops an understanding of how kindergarten teachers understand their historical work in the socialist system. It does so by using the memories of five teachers who taught before 1989 in socialist Hungary. I consider memory as discourse that teachers produced during their interviews to reason about their practices. My research question is: In what ways did the interviewed teachers see themselves as ideologues representing the state? To answer this question, I use Foucauldian discourse analysis informed by the concept of governmentality to examine the organised practices and rationalities through which political subjects are governed. I discuss three rationalities: (1) constructing childrens needs and generating their interests through play; (2) collective engagements; (3) teachers as experts; and then move on to analyse the ways in which explicit socialist ideology is understood by the interviewed teachers. From the interviews it emerges that the teachers understand their own historical position as not being ‘in the service of the state’ but as experts looking after the interests of children to learn so that they can become useful members of society. The analysis also offers some insights into the interconnectivities of politics, history and culture across localities.

‘Special’ non-human actors in the ‘inclusive’ early childhood classroom: The wrist band, the lock and the scooter board:

It is well established in research that early childhood classrooms are one of the most controlled environments during the human life course. When control is discussed, the enactment of regulatory frameworks and various discourses are analysed but less focus is paid on the materialities of classrooms. In this article, we pay attention to ‘special’ non-human actors present in an ‘inclusive’ early childhood classroom. These ‘special’ non-human actors are so named as they operate in the classroom as objects specific for the child with a diagnosis. The ‘special’ non-human actors, in the specific case the wrist band, the lock and the scooter board, take on meaning within discourses in the ‘inclusive’ classroom. We illuminate how these non-human actors contribute to the constitution of the ‘normal’ and the regulation of educators and children. To trouble the working of power and the control these objects effect on all who is present in the classroom, we ask the following questions: What do these non-human actors do in the ‘inclusive’ classroom and with what effects? How do non-human actors reproduce/produce the ‘normal’, impossible/possible ways to be and act, thus control educators and children? The data used in our analyses were produced as part of a 6-month-long ethnographic engagement in three early childhood settings in the broader region of Newcastle, Australia. It includes observations and conversations with children.