The tightening noose: Scientific management and early childhood education

Global Studies of Childhood

Gibbons

Fitzsimons

2015

This article explores what it means today for children to survive, thrive and reach their full potential-aspirations set out nearly 25 years ago as rights in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Espoused in the principles of the early childhood curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand, the spirit and intent of these aspirations are undermined by a range of normalizing strategies endemic to The Incredible Years behaviour management programme imported to promote effective management of challenging behaviour in young children. We draw here on the philosophies of Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault to question the normalization and consequent othering of children and childhoods, problematizing what it is to be 'normal'. We confront government 'solutions' for education driven more by economic rationality than by educational concern for the complexities of the early childhood context. Our analysis of the normalization of childhoods and the government of teachers as 'behaviour managers' culminates in a rupturing of normalizing networks and highlights possible resistances and openings, towards surviving and thriving, and potential.

Section: The Aotearoa New Zealand Landscapementioning

confidence: 99%

Thriving and surviving? The incredible problem of constructions of normality and Otherness in early childhood settings

Global Studies of Childhood

Gibbons

Fitzsimons

2015

“…He stresses, that ‘all you should ever do is explore it, play around with the terms, add something, relate it to something else’ (139). Following his arguments, we use an exploratory approach, which we claim to be in accordance with the openness and unpredictability that can be found in both Deleuze’s and Merleau-Ponty’s writings, although in slightly different manners (Deleuze, 1990; Deleuze and Guattari, 1994; Merleau-Ponty, 2002; Merleau-Ponty & Lefort, 1968), and reflected also in the concepts of revolt and the critical thought of Kristeva (1986). As Lewis (1956) emphasises in the opening quote on ‘re-thinking’, our hope is that ‘perhaps you [the reader] will get some idea of it [educational space/place] if you think like this’.…”

mentioning

confidence: 93%

Philosophical reimaginings of educational places and policy: Through the metaphor of a wardrobe

Alerby

Policy Futures in Education

Westman

2017

The aim of this paper is to challenge the physical and conceptual boundaries of educational places and spaces with the use of metaphor: the story of Professor Kirke’s magic wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book in The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis (1950) . By explicating and theorising the concerns that arise, we provoke diverse ways of thinking about the complexities of shifting, expanding, constantly evolving educational spaces and places. In our theorisations, we draw on the philosophy of the life-world through Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on a post-structural approach through Julia Kristeva’s work, and on the new-materialist perspective of Gilles Deleuze. As these three philosophical perspectives draw upon different basic assumptions about humans and the world, they also illuminate different aspects of a variety of phenomena and concepts, which we elaborate on in this paper to reach a more comprehensive understanding of educational spaces and places. Our argument arises from philosophical engagements with the story of the Pevensie siblings’ transformation – and transportation – to Narnia through the wardrobe, with notions of educational openings and opportunities, to explore possibilities for reimagining the conceptions and realities of places and spaces in education. To conclude, citizens of today, including children, students, teachers, politicians and researchers, need to discuss basic assumptions for education and policy to reimagine the entangled complexities of educational spaces and places.

“…Spaces and places represent the structures and securities as well as the anxieties and symbolic stasis of national and international quality and achievement benchmarks (OECD, 2013; Siraj, 2008), professional ethics (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005) and teacher education standards. Equally and often subversively, they might also interfere with and undermine their restrictive tendencies (Hannigan, 2013). The convergence of perspectives on and conceptions of learning spaces and places significantly implicate educational policy futures.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Editorial

Policy Futures in Education

Alerby

Westman

2019

Rethinking spaces and places offers critical opportunities for reconceptualising policy. This can define learner experiences, learning environments, and many bodily, spiritual or affective encounters in formal and informal educational contexts. Learning spaces and places can be inviting and inspiring, and create expectations and open up possibilities. Places and spaces can also have the opposite effect, however, limiting learning and inhibiting opportunities. Openings and limitations arise in relational entanglements connecting embodiments of learner experiences, notions of space and place, and learner subjectivities. One view is that individuals access the world through their bodies and that the knowledge they develop is always embodied. The body inhabits the world, and learners' corporeality can therefore be tied to spaces and places-individuals are affected by and affect the space and place in a mutual interplay (Merleau-Ponty, 2002). Spaces and places, then, can be seen as complex webs of historicised, localised or other social or material realities (Alerby, Hagstrom & Westman, 2014). Mutual ontological, epistemological interdependencies and affects arise in these multiple entanglements. They can be variously encountered and