Abstract
There is little place for ‘cuddles’, ‘TLC’ and ‘love’ in neo-liberal discourses… (p.136)
Professor Jayne Osgood is well known in early years academic circles as one of a select number of Foucauldian-informed researchers in early childhood. Academics and practitioners with an interest in critical post-structuralist, deconstructionist and social constructionist perspectives on early childhood will find this book to be an exciting read.
At the current time early childhood education (ECE) is a field in which the process of the professionalisation of the workforce is a prevalent topic. In the UK it has been gathering momentum over the past 15 or so years, and the ECE field therefore provides a comparatively unique contemporary case study of professionalisation as a socio-cultural process, albeit via its unique manifestations within the early childhood domain. Osgood emphasises the limitations of a conventional technical approach to defining the early years ‘professional’, and she has detailed the chronology of the field in this engaging research monograph. Her detailed discussion of the emerging identities of early years workers in the context of the governmental and cultural discourses to which they are subject, and which position (but, crucially, do not determine) them within certain ‘regimes of truth’, is critical. In the process, Osgood questions and critically deconstructs existing conventional assumptions with regard to professional identities, focusing on the vectors of race, ethnicity, social class and gender, and what we might learn from these perspectives in early years research and practice. In Osgood’s view, ‘opportunities to reach critical understandings of the child and childhood as socially constructed are vital to reflecting upon professionalism’ (p.151).
The book consists of eight chapters (including an Introduction and Conclusion), with useful summaries at the end of each chapter to synthesise the main ideas (excepting Chapter 3). Chapter 2 examines the policy context around professionalism in the English ECE sector, focusing on themes of gender, parental understandings of child-caring, the comparatively new ‘politicised’ identity of the nursery worker, the needs of working mothers, the key differences between working mothers and nursery workers, and the childcare ‘market’. Particular attention is paid to key policy departures that ‘narrowly construct professionalism’ which, Osgood maintains, were designed to control the workforce (p.24). She likens this to other features in the sector, such as the marketisation of childcare, the 2006 introduction of Early Years Professional (EYP) status (see later) and the 2011 Tickell review of the Early Years Foundation Stage. Osgood states that she wanted to ‘map the ways in which the nursery worker has been constructed as a politicised entity through government discourses’ (p.21), and she emphasises workers’ ‘“terrors of performativity” from a neo-liberal climate shaped by demands for accountability, transparency, efficiency, performativity and so on’ (p.19). A central and recurring theme throughout the book is how ‘being “professional” and understandings of “professionalism” within the nursery school context are much more than a set of credentials and satisfaction of prescribed standards’ (p.25). This is crucial, for prevailing technicist, procedural definitions of professionalism almost invariably fail to engage with the complexity and subjective experience of what ‘being professional’ actually entails, in the context of racial, class, gender and other more sociological perspectives.
In Chapter 3, drawing heavily on the work of post-structuralist theorist Michel Foucault, Osgood then operationalises her theoretical and conceptual framework to inform the process of identity construction. She deconstructs key texts through critical discourse analysis, and sets out her methodological approach, by which she explicitly sought to minimise the impact of unequal power relations (p.149). Key concepts are discussed, such as those of deconstruction, processes of subjectification, reflexivity, knowledge, ‘truth’, discourse, power, agency and performativity. Osgood is especially interested in the ways in which power plays out within/through discourse, and the attendant implications for practitioners’ professional identities (p.28) and, à la Foucault, in ‘dismantl[ing]… previously unrecognised/unnamed modes of domination, and [in bringing] attention to disciplinary and normalising technologies that have gained credence over what constitutes “professionalism in the nursery”’ (p.29).
Crucially, she notes that this can also lead to ‘opportunities to understand professionalism in other ways’ (p.29), and there are interesting parallels here with the fields of counselling and psychotherapy, in which conventional notions of what constitutes ‘professionalism’ have also been strongly challenged in recent times, both being areas of work in which emotional engagement is at the forefront of action. Osgood is also refreshingly open about her own motivations in conducting this research, and clearly has no time for the chimera of alleged positivist neutrality; thus, ‘The study reported in this book was politically motivated by my subjective life experience, feminist politics and multiple/shifting identities’ (p.30).
We also learn here of the clear and detailed aims of the study (p.31), and the methods adopted in the course of Osgood’s five-year ethnographic research and its hybrid methodology on which the book is based, involving some 30 professionals at different levels in the sector, working in three London nurseries, and with their involvement in various kinds of qualitative semi-structured interviewing (stakeholder, life-history interviews, and focus-group discussions), informal observation and documentary policy analysis (p.31). The policy context for the research was one of identifying and deconstructing ‘dominant discourses… in relation to the professionalisation agenda in the early years’ (p.31).
For this reviewer, the book is worth the price for Chapter 4 alone, which subjects recent British early years policy-making to a critical analysis that enables us to reflect on policy initiatives in new and unconventional ways, and exposes the way in which ‘policy texts are littered with normative assumptions’ (p.45). For example, we find the strong claim that ‘the Government cultivated and promoted a discursive “crisis in childcare” in order that ECEC might be refashioned in particular ways’ (p.40), a conclusion deduced from a careful analysis of the rhetoric and the reality of policy detail, located within a wider political and cultural (i.e. neo-liberal) context. The tensions, ambiguities and contradictions of policy-making are squarely addressed by Osgood: ‘audit-culture’ constructions of the notion of ‘quality’ are repeatedly exposed and challenged (e.g. pp.46, 49, 120) – for example, with Osgood arguing that ‘government is committed to creating and communicating particular discourses that act to silence alternative discourses that might pose a threat…’ (p.46).
The ‘EYP Status’ phenomenon is also critically examined (pp.51–54), and there is also a refreshingly critical discussion of the ideology of ‘evidence-based policy-making’ (pp.54–55). Policy-making is seen to stem from particular political motivations (p.56), with the state’s model of professionalism valuing ‘technical competence and [a] narrowly defined focus on neo-liberal values which can assure transparency, accountability and measurable outcomes’ (p.56). Chapter 4 should certainly be required reading for all students of England’s early years policy-making – both academics and practitioners. Later in Chapter 7, Osgood also shows the impact of discourses around quality, regulation and surveillance on nursery workers’ sense of professionalism, arguing (in a way similar to sociologist Nikolas Rose) that ‘Through objectifying practices of constant surveillance and the promotion of normalising discourses, subjects come to regulate themselves in ways that render the exercise of state power invisible’… (p.121) – a classic Foucauldian ‘disciplinary technology of the self’ (pp.29, 88, 121), with one participant evocatively quoted as saying, ‘…you know somebody is watching you, judging your every move’ (p.127).
Chapters 5–7 then draw upon the data collected for the study. Chapter 5 looks at the social construction of childhood, with modernist and humanist (and even some psychoanalytic) discourses coming in for strong criticism (although any systematic psychoanalytic perspectives are missing from the text), as Osgood attempts to ‘expose the way in which hegemonic essentialist discourses about childhood come to inflect understandings of the self and, further, inform nursery work and daily interactions with children’ (p.59). Thus, Osgood is closely concerned with how nursery workers ‘do’ child-centred pedagogy or humanist values, and ‘the extent to which the unwitting promotion and legitimation of certain discourses can act to limit and constrain childhood experiences’ (p.76). I will return to some of these latter issues in my discussion below.
Osgood challenges conventional discourses such as childhood innocence (e.g. pp.60, 65, 72) (which she refers to as ‘a mythical construct’ – p.72), and finds that while such discourses are present in the worlds of nursery workers, the latter ‘nevertheless contested them and offered counter-discourses in attempts to understand the child as culturally constructed’ (p.61) – for example counter-narratives of ‘responsibility, independence and resourcefulness’ (p.67). Osgood also found ‘tensions and contradictions within the practitioners’ narratives of their own childhoods’ (p.65), which had implications for their engagements with children. For her, ‘young children are routinely subjected to, witness and contribute to all forms of discrimination throughout their daily lives’, and the task of nursery workers is to understand how kinds of discrimination ‘discursively impact on children in their everyday lives’ (p.85). Overall, Osgood discovered ‘significant dissonance between nursery workers’ subjective experiences of childhood and their professional practice with children’ (p.86), along with ‘professional disillusionment’ through having to perform in ‘politically correct’ ways in an environment that denied any meaningful space for challenging ‘normative expectations of practice’ (p.86).
Chapter 6, the book’s longest chapter, looks at the formation of nursery-worker identity and ‘projects of the professional self’, as personal biographies shape professional subjectivities (p.118). Osgood looks at the uneasy tension and relationship between maternalistic and professionalism discourses, and the assumptions around class, gender and race in and around motherhood and nursery work. Normalising middle-class discourses around issues like sensitive mothering and ‘quality’ care are identified, which are then argued to influence the particular form that early years professionalism takes, such that ‘ECEC practice becomes widely accepted as a form of “mother-care”’ – with much of Osgood’s interview data being saturated with references to motherhood (p.87), and with a ‘middle-class’ discourse that assumes whiteness, liberalism and self-regulation as the norm being dominant (p.88). There is also interesting information in this chapter about some observed differences between state-run, voluntary and private nurseries, with (for example) ‘workers in private sector nurseries becom(ing) dehumanised and obscured from parental view where nursery provision is “marketed” to parents as a “service”’ (p.108), and data yielding ‘a bleak picture of the lives of nursery workers in the private sector’ (p.111). Osgood also emphasises the highly emotional labour of nursery work (p.114), and how this acts to position the work as quite distinct from conventional masculinist professionalism discourses that would judge the presence of (for example) mothering behaviours as professionally inappropriate (p.115). The ‘project of the self’ becomes a complicated journey when workers have to negotiate between providing quality care yet remaining within professional boundaries (p.117) (again, the parallels here with counselling and psychotherapy are close and intriguing). Osgood concludes that: ‘Being professional’ or the discursive positioning within and through normalising middle-class discourse can undermine the efforts of nursery workers to do professionalism in ways that are instinctive, intrinsic to the nature of the work and foundational to providing appropriate emotional nurturance and regulation to young children in nurseries. (p.118)
Chapter 7, titled ‘Negotiating professionalism’, focuses on the ways in which professional identities are constructed in nursery work, from which are notably absent any serious consideration of issues around race, gender and class. In the process Osgood fundamentally questions what is meant by professionalism in nursery settings, preferring to see it as being fluidly related to workers’ personal biographies and aspects of their private lives. In previous research, she had argued that neo-liberal discourses promote a form of professionalism that privileges masculinist values and cultures (p.120), and here Osgood is concerned with what she terms the seductive power of, and the danger of uncritically accepting, ‘externally imposed normalised and normalising constructions of professionalism’ (p.121). However, aligned with the Foucauldian perspective that emphasises sites of resistance to prevailing hegemonies, practitioners are not construed as helpless victims of hegemonic discourses, but rather, Osgood found ‘widespread scepticism about developments to ECEC practice’ (p.124), with appraisals of Ofsted revealing ‘scepticism and doubt over the appropriateness of demands for standardisation, measurable outcomes and the related goals of efficiency, effectiveness and accountability’ (p.124), and ‘an acute distrust of Ofsted’s capability to assess quality and professionalism in a rigorous and specialised way…, with its overly prescriptive and narrow focus, denying space for subjective representations of professionalism’ (p.125). Osgood therefore discovered a substantial tension in terms of workers paying lip-service to hegemonic forms of professionalism, whilst remaining sceptical about its appropriateness in their work (p.127).
Thus, Osgood identified what she terms ‘professionalism from within’ amongst her interviewees (pp.130–133), whereby prevailing hegemonic notions of professionalism were notably absent from practitioners self-definitions of professionalism (p.131), and an ethic of care prevailed over narrower rationalistic discourses, as ‘the occupational demands of nursery work amount to more than the mere execution of a set of preordained competencies’ (p.135).
Notions of ‘emotional capital’ and ‘emotional labour’ are also foregrounded in the chapter, and a key finding is that ‘the top-down, technicist, outcomes-driven nature of neo-liberal policy reform jarred with the motivations and values of those working in the sector’ (p.56). For Osgood, effective (as opposed to ‘professional’) nursery work consists in emphasising what she terms ‘critically reflective emotional professionalism’ (p.4), and she advocates emotions being reclaimed as both ‘vital and credible’ in early years practice (p.146), with emotional professionalism being ‘celebrated and acknowledged rather than denigrated and obscured from public discourse’ (p.147). Yet ‘the current reform agenda, and the related narrow focus in training programmes, effectively banish emotions or at least hide them from view because “emotional professionalism” runs counter to hegemonic masculinist constructions’ (p.147).
The final chapter draws together the main themes and findings of the research, summarising the impact of the professionalisation agenda on nursery workers, and Osgood also offers recommendations for future research, policy and practice, including advocating that practitioners ‘critically appraise and reflect upon the importance of their biographies on their professional identities and practice’ (p.5). A key finding for Osgood is that ‘the discursive positioning of nursery workers within… middle-class discourses acts to undermine efforts to “do professionalism” in ways that are intrinsic to the nature of the work’ (p.151), and so this research adds importantly to the substantial early childhood literature that advocates a fundamental reconceptualisation of early years practice, that moves well beyond current prevailing neo-liberal, audit-culture values and practices.
There are a few aspects of the book that I think need further interrogation. I have some difficulty with Osgood’s apparent outright rejection of humanism and humanistic thinking. Post-structuralist thinking by no means has a monopoly on critical thinking in the field, and many if not most of the cogent critiques in this book could have equally come from a ‘radical-humanist’ perspective. There is always a difficulty in critiquing humanistic approaches, because the latter can cover such a wide territory that it is easy to construct highly partial caricatures of what a humanistic viewpoint might consist of, and then knock them over. Thus, on page 69 we read that ‘Humanist approaches to understanding the child and childhood deny children the opportunity to make sense of their world’. Many humanists I know (not least those strongly influenced by Carl Rogers’ educational theories) would take very strong objection to this arguably very inaccurate, or at least partial, characterisation. Perhaps we can all be subject to the dangers of superficial ‘either/or’ binary thinking, and overly simplistic labelling – including, even, post-structuralist theorising itself.
Another example is the argument that the notion of a ‘care-free childhood’ is an imaginary middle-class construct, and just another myth (p.74). Surely it is more complex than that, and many critical commentators would argue that it is an empirical question as to whether children today have greater burdens to carry (however we might define them) than children did in the past. Moreover, that (many) people have a tendency to romanticise and sentimentalise the past, and about children and childhood, does not necessarily mean that there are not still real issues here about (for example) children growing up more quickly today, that need to be addressed and critically thought about.
Another highly complex area for consideration is that of sexuality in childhood, considered in Chapter 5 under ‘Heteronormativity in the nursery’ (pp.80–82). The view that adults’ concerns about young children being exposed to sexual matters are nothing more than an acting-out of dominant cultural, heteronormative discourses is in danger of grossly oversimplifying what is a crucially important question. Psychoanalytic theory certainly sees all children as intrinsically sexual beings, yet whether we can assume that an adult definition of ‘sexual’ is also appropriate for children must surely be questioned – yet this is precisely the kind of place we reach when it is claimed that the distinction between ‘adult’ and ‘child’ is essentially an arbitrary one. Certainly, some consideration of psychoanalytic views on gender (more contemporary versions of which are often strongly informed by feminist theory) might have helped here.
Further, to characterise humanist thinking as embracing a simplistic ‘innocent child’ discourse might be regarded as misleading. For some years there has existed a rapidly growing literature challenging the idea that children are overly or constitutionally fragile and need to be protected from themselves (cf. the work of Tim Gill and Sue Palmer, for example); if there is a ‘mythical construct’ here, perhaps it is far more the post-structuralist characterisation of ‘the innocent child as humanist discourse’, than it is that discourse of itself. I also assume that there are some adult materials that Osgood would agree young children should not be exposed to; if so, then the argument surely becomes one of where that line should be drawn, rather than whether it should be drawn at all. On this view, I would dispute the argument that the categorisations of ‘adult and ‘child’ are ‘arbitrary’ (p.72): of course they are culturally constructed (and so need to be debated at that level), but this is by no means the same as their being ‘arbitrary’.
Academic writing might inhibit the audience for the book. I think the important arguments that Osgood and others have to bring are so crucial for raising awareness in the field that it would be good to see articles sharing their research appearing in the professional magazines, as well as in the more ‘pure’ academic journals.
This is an outstanding book for anyone with a critically open mind about the issues of professionalisation and the possible trajectories it could take beyond government-imposed neo-liberal discourses and regimes of truth, and it should be required reading on all courses in early childhood and early years education. I cannot emphasise how important it is to have widely available an accessible alternative perspective on EC professionalisation that challenges prevailing taken-for-granted discourses, and which values practitioner subjectivities and a rich diversity of pathways to becoming a worker with young children. For as soon as we succumb to a mechanistic, one-size-fits-all conveyor-belt mentality in deciding who is to work with young children, we are almost certainly destined to substitute proceduralism for heart in the care and development of children. For this reason alone, I unreservedly recommend Narratives from the Nursery to anyone for whom these issues matter.