Children’s Bodies in British Columbia’s Child Care Regulations: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This paper contributes to discussions that challenge dominant thinking by deeply reflecting on children’s bodies as they are depicted in British Columbia’s Child Care Licensing Regulations. Using critical discourse analysis, the author highlights how techniques of power are embedded in this particular document by examining how power works to regulate, normalize, and discipline children’s bodies in early childhoodeducation. The paper describes how this government policy works to create and sustain common child care practices by exploring four questions about the organization of the regulations document to open alternative conversations about young bodies in early childhood practices.

“Talk to the hand”: handling peer conflict through gestural socialization in an elementary classroom

“…With regard to the two emblems at the center of the present analysis-the OHP and coyote gestures-there is a dearth of research, particularly from discourse analytic perspectives. The few published works that briefly discuss one or the other of these gestures frame them as classroom management strategies, a focus which reflects wider developmentalist ideologies about children and children's bodies as unruly, untrustworthy, and in need of regulation through various techniques of power (e.g., Antonsen, 2019). For instance, Gee et al (2015) describe the quiet coyote gesture as a "fun" way to discourage students from talking (p. 206), and Khan (2019) discusses the OHP gesture, used by many teachers as part of a multimodal practice referred to as "give me five" (to be discussed below), as a "really beneficial" (p. 154) strategy for helping students learn to attend to the teacher.…”