Reading Images of School Buildings and Spaces: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Visual Research in Histories of Progressive Education

McLeod, Julie; Goad, Philip; Willis, Julie; Darian‐Smith, Kate

doi:10.1057/9781137447357_2

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…This perspective is coupled with insights from contemporary spatial-material analyses of education (e.g. McLeod, Goad, Willis and Darian-Smith, 2016), including attention to touch, sensation, movement, and emotion (Burke 2015;Kozlovsky 2010). Central to my analysis is an understanding, as explicated in Chapter Three, of the child as a practically formed subject at the intersection of techniques of power and of the self (Foucault 1997f).…”

Section: Chapter Sixmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Developing Child to Competent Learner: A Genealogical Study of the Kindergarten Child and Progressive Reform in Aotearoa New Zealand

Buchanan

2018

Structuring the Thesis

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Historically through to the present day, early childhood education has been the focus of myriad and potent investments; a persistent, if variously inflected, feature is its reforming and progressive impulse. This thesis offers a history of the kindergarten child in Aotearoa New Zealand in which themes of subjectivity, knowledge, temporality, truth, and freedom are central. The history, a form of genealogy (Foucault 1984), examines two moments of significant early education reform in New Zealand. Analysis of these reforms is anchored by, and extends from, the landmark policy statements of Pre-School Education: Report of the Consultative Committee on Pre-School Educational Services (DOE 1947) and Education to be More: Report of the Early Childhood Care and Education Working Group (DOE 1988).Working with diverse historical sourcestextual, visual, socio-spatial, expert, professional, and practice orientedthe thesis develops a historical account of these reforms and their respective elaboration as self-consciously new and leading-edge practices. It explores the kindergarten child as the subject of changing progressive discourses through analysis of epistemological and affective investments and close examination of practices within what I conceptualize as free-play, developmental pedagogies of freedom (late 1940s and 1950s), and sociocultural learning pedagogies of empowerment (late 1990s and 2000s). The identified pedagogies and their respective conditions of reform are situated in juxtaposed rather than linear temporal relations. That is, I conceptualize them as two differently liberating "timespaces" (Baker 2001, 24), each animated by fervently held understandings of the nature of young children, and what their good education should entail. Engaging a nonbinary and practical understanding of processes of subject formation, I understand the pedagogies, spaces, concepts, materials, and practices under examination as technologies of government and subjectivity, and the forms of naturalfree or empoweredconduct that they presumed and promoted are analysed.Motivated by critical genealogical aims, the thesis seeks to unsettle current certainties and commitments to the truth of the child in early education, a subject who is commonly understood and called forth as a competent, social and culturally diverse learner. Overall, the thesis argues that these reforms and their respective pedagogies have a "double gesture" (Popkewitz 2009, 397), entailing a valorization and promotion of particular forms of liberated ii conduct and work-upon the self, whilst simultaneously foreclosing alternative possibilities.Developing a somewhat anti-progressivist account, the history illuminates the surprisingand often neglected in present-day critiqueforms of caring attention towards children as embodied, affective subjects within mid-century developmental pedagogies. It surfaces, too, the often overlooked essentializing effects of discourses of empowerment, diversity, and competence within recently ascendant learning-framed pedagogies.While il...

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Section: Chapter Sixmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Developing Child to Competent Learner: A Genealogical Study of the Kindergarten Child and Progressive Reform in Aotearoa New Zealand

Buchanan

2018

Structuring the Thesis

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“…Along with international advocates of "deschooling" and radical education such as Ivan Illich (1971Illich ( /1973, Paul Goodman (1964) and Paulo Freire (1970Freire ( /1972), Schoenheimer saw schools as oppressive, socialising young people into the habits of institutionalised thought and conduct, undermining individuality and dulling the creative spirit: he believed that it was imperative to destroy "the school as it now is" (Schoenheimer, 1973, p. 3). As a regular contributor to the national press, Schoenheimer was a prolific and influential critic of schooling [1]. His frustrations with traditional schooling and concerns about modernity were shared by many educators, as was his desire to create new educational communities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimenting with education: spaces of freedom and alternative schooling in the 1970s

McLeod

2014

History of Education Review

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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to explore philosophies of progressive education circulating in Australia in the period immediately following the expansion of secondary schools in the 1960s. It examines the rise of the alternative and community school movement of the 1970s, focusing on initiatives within the Victorian government school sector. It aims to better understand the realisation of progressive education in the design and spatial arrangements of schools, with specific reference to the re-making of school and community relations and new norms of the student-subject of alternative schooling. Design/methodology/approach -It combines historical analysis of educational ideas and reforms, focusing largely on the ideas of practitioners and networks of educators, and is guided by an interest in the importance of school space and place in mediating educational change and aspirations. It draws on published writings and reports from teachers and commentators in the 1970s, publications from the Victorian Department of Education, media discussions, internal and published documentation on specific schools and oral history interviews with former teachers and principals who worked at alternative schools. Findings -It shows the different realisation of radical aims in the set up of two schools, against a backdrop of wider innovations in state education, looking specifically at the imagined effects of re-arranging the physical and symbolic space of schooling. Originality/value -Its value lies in offering the beginnings of a history of 1970s educational progressivism. It brings forward a focus on the spatial dimensions of radical schooling, and moves from characterisation of a mood of change to illuminate the complexities of these ideas in the contrasting ambitions and design of two signature community schools.

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Seeing the difference: Anticipatory reasoning of observation and its double gesture in teacher education

Lee

2020

Curriculum Inquiry

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Reading Images of School Buildings and Spaces: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Visual Research in Histories of Progressive Education

Cited by 3 publications

References 12 publications

From Developing Child to Competent Learner: A Genealogical Study of the Kindergarten Child and Progressive Reform in Aotearoa New Zealand

From Developing Child to Competent Learner: A Genealogical Study of the Kindergarten Child and Progressive Reform in Aotearoa New Zealand

Experimenting with education: spaces of freedom and alternative schooling in the 1970s

Seeing the difference: Anticipatory reasoning of observation and its double gesture in teacher education

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