Imagining otherwise: A (brief) Darwinian encounter with quality standards

Abstract

The prevailing discourse of quality in early childhood education in Australia and internationally supports the idea that everyone, from families to educators, policymakers, researchers and politicians, wants high-quality early childhood education programs for all young children. This dominance is so pervasive that it becomes difficult to think about quality in any other terms, putting limitations on 'what it is possible to think' when it comes to quality early childhood education. In an attempt to suspend the habitual and contested assumptions associated with the mission for quality, this article aims to move beyond what these discourses make it possible to think and imagine by traversing some of the territory as it exists currently in Australia. As part of this, we adopt an exploratory approach where we try and imagine otherwise. We do this by presenting a vignette, a rich description of a child/pipe/sand event, which we work through using the National Quality Standard in Australia and a brief Darwinian encounter. The intention is to use what is familiar (observation, quality measurement) and make the familiar less familiar in order to create niches for variations and alternative imaginings of 'quality'.

Leading through complexity in early childhood education and care

“…The concept of quality in ECEC is contested (Duhn & Grieshaber, 2016). The concept, however, remains the current model for measuring the standard of performance of early childhood education and Douglass (2019) notes that leadership is 'one of the single most important drivers of organisational performance, quality improvement and innovation ' (p. 6).…”

Theorising young children's interests: making connections and in-the-moment happenings

“…However, my intention for this paper is not to report the research findings per se, but to re-turn (Barad, 2014) to one event from previously analysed data in order to enable 'different understandings, different feelings and different subjectivities to emerge' (Lennon, 2017, p. 55). The re-imagining of single events has been used by early childhood scholars to generate new readings of quality (Duhn and Grieshaber, 2016) and to unsettle subject-object relations in early childhood data analysis (Hultman and Lenz Taguchi, 2010). In this paper I apply a similar approach in order to problematise and open up different ways of conceptualising interest in early childhood education.…”

‘Belonging’ in Australian early childhood education and care curriculum and quality assurance: Opportunities and risks

“…This arguably optimistic view is not universally held. Duhn and Grieshaber (2016: 60), for instance, contend that the Standard ‘orders the unorderable, tames the untameable, and reduces complexity, sophistication and convolution to masquerade as something simple’. It seems unlikely that the revisions to the Standard would have been sufficiently far-reaching to have alleviated their concerns.…”