Feminist Praxis and the Gaze in the Early Childhood Curriculum

MacNaughton, Glenda

doi:10.1080/09540259721286

Cited by 47 publications

(30 citation statements)

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“…Or, it is also possible that the daycare workers did not 'see' gender. In her 1991 study of an Australian early childhood teacher, MacNaughton stated that modern approaches to curriculum development in early childhood education can support patriarchal gender relations by skewing the teacher's gaze and that a feminist reconstruction of this gaze is needed (MacNaughton 1997). She hopes that, in another 20 years, it will no longer be possible to find early childhood educators who fail to 'see' gender.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gendered Constructions of Professionals in Daycare

Timmerman

Schreuder

2008

Sex Roles

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In The Netherlands the boys' problem debate in education has expanded to daycare, concerning the children between 0 and 4 years of age. Women daycare workers are blamed by mainstream media for frustrating boys' need for physical activity and adventure. In 2004 we conducted a study, involving 96 daycare workers in 36 daycare centers in a Dutch city. We addressed the research question whether the stereotypical representation of women's daycare work in the media is an adequate picture of these professionals' perceptions of their work in daycare. Findings indicate that the stereotypical images of women daycare workers in the media-debates do not resemble the personal qualities and professional characteristics that these daycare workers ascribe to themselves.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gendered Constructions of Professionals in Daycare

Timmerman

Schreuder

2008

Sex Roles

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“…Rather, the emphasis on testing and assessment, performance indicators, league tables, stratified and hierarchical management and administration structures, have replaced the masculine nature of schools identified in the late 1980s with a postmodern 're-masculinisation' of primary education. (Skelton, 2002, p. 92) In the 1980s and 1990s, Australian scholars Clark (1989), Davies (1989a, b) and MacNaughton (1997) maintained that child-centred discourse, which is understood as gender-neutral in practice, functions to reproduce 'narrow regimes of gender' (Clark, 1989, p. 254). Clark has described the uncomfortable position female teachers are in when they allow extreme expressions of masculinity within the free child-centred setting and the undermining of their own confidence and 'teacher self'.…”

Section: The Male Child At the Centrementioning

confidence: 99%

“…(Maher, 2001, p. 27) The Female Child Outside of the Centre If the child at the centre of pedagogy is the male, where is the female child? Several writers (Walkerdine, 1985;Clark, 1989;MacNaughton, 1997) contend that essentialized gendered dichotomies between male and female children within child-centredness render regulated and constrained girls outside of the centre. Walkerdine (1985, p. 231) described how, within a gendered dichotomy, the female child's independent explorations are ignored and repressed while certain feminine qualities, such as conformity, good behaviour and neatness, are reinforced.…”

Section: The Male Child At the Centrementioning

confidence: 99%

Critiquing Child-Centred Pedagogy to Bring Children and Early Childhood Educators into the Centre of a Democratic Pedagogy

Langford

2010

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood

105

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Child-centred pedagogy is both an enduring approach and a revered concept in Westernbased teacher preparation. This article weaves together major critiques of child-centred pedagogy that draw on critical feminist, postmodernist and post-structural theories. These critiques have particular relevance for conceptualizing what it can mean to be, and what it takes to become, an early childhood professional. The construct of the female early childhood professional is particularly important with the current intensification of the teacher as a technician and the increasing numbers in the workforce from racialized groups who may face social inequities. The construction of the individualized child and its parallel denial of the influences of gender, ethnicity and class on who a child becomes are equally important. Drawing upon the work of reconceptualist scholars, some preliminary ways will be proposed in which we can theorize and reconstruct children and early childhood professionals at the centre of a pedagogy that is a democratic space for all.In my own work as an early childhood educator, a primary school teacher and a teacher educator, child-centred pedagogy has had a tenacious hold on my thinking about teaching and learning. This tenacity is reflected in Grieshaber & Ryan's (2005, p. 9) observation that 'there is no doubt that child centeredness is an enduring and fixed entity in early childhood education. In fact, it could be said that it is a revered concept '. Cannella (1997, p. 130) has remarked upon child-centred pedagogy's apparent 'pedagogical determinism' for early childhood education settings. Moreover, to counter formal and academic programmes making headway into the early years, the 'rightness' of child-centred pedagogy has been invoked (Brooker, 2005). Yet, on a personal level, the following events in my teaching and research career have served to heighten my disquiet about child-centred pedagogy. When I was a kindergarten teacher, a manual advised me that my classroom should be so centred on the children that a visitor would not be able to identify who I was. Rendering me invisible struck me as poignantly counter to attempts to raise the respect and status of early childhood educators and to include the teacher as an important member of the classroom community. Later, I encouraged my students in a teacher preparation programme to embrace child-centred pedagogy. Yet as we discussed the role of the teacher in child-centredness as a 'facilitator', and 'stage manager', I felt uneasy about placing a group of predominantly young women struggling with the low status accorded their professional choice 'behind the scenes' of an early childhood education setting. Furthermore, there was something about the primacy of the teacher roles of observing and facilitating that seemed to me to unnecessarily limit the range of possible interactions between teachers and children. Finally, some of my own research findings added to my growing doubts about how we currently understand child-centred pedagogy (Langford,...

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“…To classify as socially significant, the eye must linger on 'other' (or in some cases an object) as an indication of social orientation and, by extrapolation, preference. Such lingering often referred to, as 'a gaze' appears to offer important clues to researchers across multiple theoretical domains, including feminist literature (MacNaughton 1997). In recent studies of infant experience, several psychological studies compare the longer length of the gaze when newborn infants are shown human faces versus other social cues and, in doing so, make the claim that infants are more oriented to people than objects (see, for example, Ales et al 2012;Colonnesi et al 2012;Okumura et al 2013).…”

Section: The Significance Of the 'Look'mentioning

confidence: 97%

The Work of the Eye in Infant Pedagogy: A Dialogic Encounter of ‘Seeing’ in an Education and Care Setting

White

Redder

Peter

2015

IJEC

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This paper examines the significance of a 'look' in infant-teacher dialogues in an early education and care centre in New Zealand. Drawing on Bakhtin's principle of 'visual surplus' video recordings of two infants', aged under 1 year of age, interactions with their teacher and teacher interpretations of these interactions were analysed in terms of the time it took for an infant to be 'noticed'. The results revealed that teachers responded to infants' initiations significantly faster when a 'look' accompanied verbal initiation than when it did not, while the length of the interaction did not depend on whether or not a 'look' was used to initiate an interaction. Different types of 'looks' (a gaze/glance/watch) were found to generate different responses and were given different values by teachers. Results also highlight the fact that 'look' initiations are often nested within language sequences that take place in a larger dialogic space of adults and peers. The findings point to the significance of the 'work of the eye' in understanding the complex nature of communications that occur between adults and infants in early childhood education settings.

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Feminist Praxis and the Gaze in the Early Childhood Curriculum

Cited by 47 publications

References 0 publications

Gendered Constructions of Professionals in Daycare

Gendered Constructions of Professionals in Daycare

Critiquing Child-Centred Pedagogy to Bring Children and Early Childhood Educators into the Centre of a Democratic Pedagogy

The Work of the Eye in Infant Pedagogy: A Dialogic Encounter of ‘Seeing’ in an Education and Care Setting

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