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’.
Introduction
The stranglehold that the notion of quality has in early childhood education is undeniable: the prevailing discourse supports the idea that everyone, from families to educators, policymakers, researchers and politicians, wants high-quality programs and the best early childhood education for all young children. However, the pursuit of quality has become increasingly associated with techniques of ‘control and calculation, technology and measurement’ (Moss, 2014: 17). This dominance is so pervasive that it becomes difficult to think about quality in any other terms, or, as Moss (2014: 18) puts it, there are limitations on ‘what it is possible to think’. In an attempt to suspend the habitual and contested assumptions associated with the mission for quality, we try to move beyond what these discourses make it possible to think by traversing some of the territory as it exists currently in Australia. As part of this, and like Unger (2005: 1), we reject the ‘dictatorship of no alternatives’ (DONA), preferring an exploratory approach where we try to imagine otherwise. We do this by presenting a rich description of a child/pipe/sand event, which we then work through with a DONA-like apparatus – the National Quality Standard (NQS) in Australia (Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, 2013) – and a brief Darwinian encounter. The intention is to use what is familiar in early childhood practice (observation, quality measurements) and make the familiar less familiar in order to create niches for variations and alternative imaginings of ‘quality’.
Imagining otherwise in an educational climate in Australia that is increasingly focused on ‘evidence-based’ practice has its own challenges. How might it be possible to create meaning that traverses the existing territory in unexpected, or perhaps less predictable, ways, and how do we begin experimentation in search of ‘otherness’ that retains relatable meaning and is thus able to speak back to discourses of quality that can be associated with control and calculation? Imagining otherwise seems to us to be a matter of politics and ethics because imagining otherwise requires analysis of the status quo and its limitations and possibilities for meaning-making as an open-ended, democratic process (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005). What are the tools available to us in Australia right now for making practice visible and opening it up for dialogue that encourages diverse interpretations? How can we make the familiar just unfamiliar enough so that the imagination is stirred into engagement with other ways of seeing and doing?
Our experimentation aims to complicate the notion of quality by imagining ‘thick description’ as a meaning-making device that enables the familiar to look less familiar. We suggest that thick descriptions offer possibilities for assemblages to become visible as processes of materialisation – as intensities and opportunities for difference to emerge. For the purposes of this article, assemblages are understood as ‘complex constellations of objects, bodies, expressions, qualities … that come together for varying periods of time to ideally create new ways of functioning’ (Livesey, 2005: 18). Processes of materialisation are seen as looking from the perspective of the material (e.g. object/s) and how the material (object/s) interacts with children – that is, the agency of the material and what happens between it and a child/children in a learning context/place/space (Lenz Taguchi, 2010). In the vignette that follows, this might mean considering how the pipe and the sand act on/with the girl and boy, and what these materials might do to the boy’s thinking and perception as he continues to struggle with the pipe and the sand. Intensities are conceptualised as a surge of energy across bodies and materialities that affects bodies and things and generates possibilities for the emergence of difference (Ringrose and Renold, 2014). ‘Thick description’ aims to make those possibilities visible and open them up for meaning-making processes.
We consider ‘thick description’ not as a tool to represent pedagogical moments. Our aim is not to use description to present human behaviour in context as a mirror for reflection. Instead, we trial description as a meaning-making device to experiment with imagining difference in order to explore the boundaries of ‘what it is possible to think’ (Moss, 2014: 18) about quality in early childhood education. The overarching idea is to juxtapose the drive towards standardised quality indicators (such as the NQS in Australia (Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, 2013)) with a vignette (a ‘rich description’ of an event in an early childhood setting) that stirs the imagination about what else may be possible when the concept of quality as measurable and describable according to clear indicators is in conversation with imaginings of difference.
Using familiar tools to imagine difference
Observation and description have a specific trajectory in early childhood education research. For instance, the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (Harms et al., 2015) relies on the observer taking notes with a neutral, objective/scientific gaze, which then allows, according to the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale’s designers, for accurate ratings of the quality of the service. Ethnographic methods, such as observation and description, often feature in early childhood research, including critical research that examines issues of social justice and diversity within interpretivist frameworks (Hawkins, 2014). Description, whether presented in narrative format or as scientific data, falls into the range of methods used to interpret, reflect and otherwise analyse what has been observed and recorded in the field.
As a qualitative tool, ‘thick description’ is a well-known method of qualitative research with a long tradition in anthropology and ethnographic methodologies (Enslin and Tjiattas, 2015). Originally proposed to represent ‘the Other’, to make difference more understandable and contextualise it, thick description in ethnography has an underlying sentiment of explaining difference within a social justice framework (Geertz, 1973). More recently, Gibson-Graham (2014) suggested working with ‘thick description’ and thin theory to generate performative modes of analysis that pay attention to complexities in data, including nuances and affects, which escape or challenge the authoritative voice of theory, and thus muddle or trouble, as Haraway (2013) puts it, interpretation and analysis. Performative modes of analysis highlight that interpretation and meaning-making are contributions to ‘world-making’. Analysis does not provide the answer or solution, but it may change perception. Rather than drawing on theory to explain how the child is learning, a performative mode of analysis seeks to open up new ways of seeing/perceiving with a view to ‘an open future’ (Gibson-Graham, 2014: 149), where meaning-making is an ongoing process. Thick description aims to describe in detail so that nuances and affects can become visible and thus available for reinterpretation.
In this article, we investigate possibilities of thick description as a meaning-making device by revisiting previously analysed data (Dalli et al., 2011) with the aim of making assemblages visible as processes where ‘becoming with’ the data creates unexpected new possibilities for meaning-making (Haraway, 2013). These assemblages and intensities as energies and process are potentially unstable and provisional (Lorimer, 2015), and thus challenge the idea of quality as standardisable and measurable (Tayler et al., 2013). They invite multiple perspectives and interpretations, and shift evaluation from ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of concern’ (Latour, 2004).
In attempting to make a move from ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of concern’, we begin with a matter of fact that is typically associated with early childhood education: an observation of children in a sandpit. A vignette is presented, which is followed by two readings of what could be happening in the sandpit. The first is a way of illustrating how children’s actions are contained within frameworks of accountability (documentation/learning stories) and the second is a juxtaposition that tries to create a space without the limitations of expectations for children to see and understand things in particular ways (such as outcomes to be achieved). This leads to a discussion that disrupts the idea that quality is standardisable and measurable by using (post-)Darwinian ideas about observation (Grosz, 2011). The discussion is broadly inspired by new materialism and its challenges to human-centric subject/object distinctions (Lenz Taguchi, 2010; MacLure, 2013; Olsson, 2013).
Thick description of the encounter
It is a sunny day in spring. The sun feels warm on the skin. The doors are open and the child crawls towards the sandpit. The child wears a jumper and brown pants. His soft slippers provide grip on the wooden deck and he reaches the sandpit. He tries to stand up in the sand but falls on his bottom. His mouth tightens. A plastic pipe lies within his reach. The pipe is hollow and about twice his height. A girl, sitting close to the pipe, digs a hole with a small spade. She stands up, reaching to the top of the pipe, and tips it into the hole. Holding the pipe steady with both hands, she uses her feet to trample the sand around the pipe down firmly. She steps away and looks at the pipe, now standing upright in the sandpit. An educator sits nearby, watching both children. The boy crawls to the pipe and makes an attempt at pulling himself upright by holding on to the pipe. The girl watches while the pipe begins to wobble in its sandy hole. The boy balances, both hands on the pipe, stands upright and pulls the pipe from its anchor in the process. The girl walks a few steps away and begins to dig a hole with a little spade. The adult remains seated and doesn’t seem to pay attention to the sandpit encounters. The boy continues to lift the pipe and then repeatedly pushes it down into the soft sand, but the pipe does not stand up by itself.
The usual imperative for early childhood educators in documenting children’s learning is to engage in a three-step process of observing; interpreting or evaluating; and taking some action or following up. In the vignette, the educator seemed to pay little attention to the sandpit activities, reducing the likelihood that this sequence of events would eventually comprise a learning story or a documentation of what these two children had been experiencing and what they might have been learning. This suggests that the educator might have seen it as inconsequential. If choosing to document it, the learning story might have gone something like this (we will call the boy James and the girl Chloe):
James was playing in the sandpit near Chloe, who was digging a hole, into which she inserted a large hollow plastic pipe upright, which was about twice the height of James. James tried to use the pipe to pull himself up, but moved it from the hole in his attempt to stand. When Chloe moved away and began to dig nearby, James tried many times to put the pipe back where it was and to make it stand up in the hole, the way it had been. James showed that he had a sense of belonging by joining the play and was confident and independent enough to try to put the pipe back in the hole. He persevered when faced with a challenge, even though the task was difficult and he did not succeed. Follow-up action might have included showing James how Chloe dug a hole deep enough for the pipe and trampled the sand around the base of the pipe to help it stand upright. An educator might have noted elsewhere than in the learning story that James’s actions could also be seen as taking over what Chloe was doing, and that she did not contest his actions, preferring instead to move to another part of the sandpit and resume digging without the pipe.
Making variations matter with Darwin
Reading the description with the intention to open spaces for differences to emerge, Elizabeth Grosz’s (2011) turn to Darwin comes to mind. Grosz (2011: 3) revitalises Darwinian thought by focusing on Darwin’s emphasis on considering life as the process of ‘emergence from earlier forms, increasing in complexity and organization’. Her argument is that Darwinian perspectives offer possibilities for ‘making variations matter’ (Dionne, 2014: 204) by paying attention, over time, to the open-ended transformations that occur in any given assemblages. For the boy in the sandpit, this would mean that the child–pipe–sand assemblage could be re-viewed with an eye on increasing complexity and organisation (Duhn, 2015). Would such a reading generate openings for pedagogical difference to emerge? What might be the difference for the child? Can a Darwinian reading assist with the unsettling of the Australian NQS DONA-like measurement of quality?
A DONA reading depends on identifying the child’s learning and articulating effective teaching strategies that will support further learning:
He persevered when faced with a challenge, even though the task was difficult and he did not succeed. Follow-up action might have included showing James how Chloe dug a hole deep enough for the pipe and trampled the sand around the base of the pipe to help it stand upright.
A DONA reading backs up the interpretation with theory to generate pedagogical follow-up action. The child was ‘faced with a challenge’ (learning opportunity); ‘he persevered’ (learning disposition); ‘he did not succeed’ (learning outcome identified). Pedagogical action includes scaffolding James’s learning so that he understands how to dig a proper hole next time. If the teaching strategy leads to a successful outcome in the future (James has learned how to dig a hole that is deep enough), the learning story serves as evidence of quality teaching. Darwinian ideas about observation provide a pause to reconsider what else might have happened with the child in the learning story. If learning theories move to the background, what are the questions that become possible (see Table 1)?
Juxtaposition of the NQS as a DONA and Darwinian observations which support ‘imagining quality otherwise’ as a DONA alternative.
Reading the vignette from a Darwinian viewpoint builds on the early childhood tradition of child observation and, at first glance, it is difficult to see the relevance of a different, perhaps even intensified gaze to a project that wants to question the current ‘quality trajectory’, with its emphasis on evidence and accountability (Grieshaber, 2002). In many ways, observation as a pedagogical tool reiterates the deeply engrained desire for interpretation and planning for learning. Historically, child observation as a method is based on the assumption of the objective/scientific gaze of the observer, who uses the observation to plan for improved future learning (Hamre et al., 2012). Our suggestion is that a Darwinian observation continues the tradition of the gaze. However, the way in which the gaze encounters its ‘object’ is fundamentally different from a traditional observation, for two reasons.
Firstly, there is no attempt to observe for the purpose of gathering evidence to then plan and act to improve learning. Rather than being goal-orientated (look, plan, act, document, reflect, etc.), focused and honing in on its object, the Darwinian gaze is curious and supports open-mindedness (What is there to see/sense?). Secondly, the gaze lingers and opens up (What else is there to see/sense?). Instead of following the child in search of meaningful learning, the gaze takes in the possibilities for encounters of all kinds in search of increasing complexity and organisation. The relevance lies in the way in which teachers enable or close down the child’s initiation of narratives (Løkken, 2009). In our vignette, the child has time to persist and to form relationships with the pipe and the sand and the girl. The boy and the pipe challenge each other – it is a dance and a lively encounter. The pipe has its own ways of resisting gravity, not so dissimilar to the boy’s – both get up; both wobble; both are embraced by the soft and shifting sand, which encourages movement and flow. Seeing the pipe–child–sand in relationship with each other opens the gaze to the complexity and organisation of the encounter. For instance, the girl’s apparent withdrawal in the learning story (‘James’s actions could also be seen as taking over what Chloe was doing, and that she did not contest his actions, preferring instead to move to another part of the sandpit and resume digging without the pipe’) may be interpreted as her ‘world-making’ in the encounter. She is not giving up the pipe to the boy, but she is aware that the moment of intensity has passed, and the warm sand invites her to try again, elsewhere. The subtle shift in meaning-making here creates variations in gender discourses by enabling new interpretations of what is observed: she is no longer a girl who does not contest a takeover. Instead, the girl’s finely tuned perception of intensities in the encounter and her ability to respond to the inviting sand by moving elsewhere become visible as possible strengths. For the observer, it becomes possible to be affected by the assemblage, when the complexity of the children’s efforts to create their world emerges through performative analysis.
An interruption
‘The National Quality Framework raises quality and drives continuous improvement and consistency in Australian education and care services’ (Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, 2015a). Introduced at the beginning of 2012, the key requirements of the National Quality Framework are being phased in over time (e.g. qualifications, educator-to-child ratios). One part of the National Quality Framework is the NQS. The NQS sets a national benchmark for early childhood education and care, and outside-school-hours care services in Australia, including long day care, family day care and many preschools/kindergartens. Each service in the country is being assessed progressively to ensure that it meets the standard. The assessment results in a rating for each of seven areas of quality, and one overall rating for each service. The seven areas of quality are:
Educational program and practice
Children’s health and safety
Physical environment
Staffing arrangements
Relationships with children
Collaborative partnerships with families and communities
Leadership and service management. (Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, 2015b)
These seven areas of quality comprise 18 standards and 58 elements, which are subsections of the standards. The standards are described as high-level outcome statements and, in turn, the ‘elements describe the outcomes that contribute to the standard being achieved’ (Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, 2013). Ratings are awarded in each of the seven areas of quality (and the overall rating) according to the following levels:
Excellent – awarded by the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA)
Exceeding National Quality Standard
Meeting National Quality Standard
Working towards National Quality Standard
Significant Improvement Required
These ratings must be displayed by each service and are published on the ACECQA and MyChild websites. Prior to calculating the ratings an assessor visits each service to gather data and review the required information. The assessment report is written off-site and returned to the service a few weeks later. The report contains detailed feedback, but here we focus on the information available on the ACECQA and MyChild websites, as this is what potential users of early childhood services are able to see in order to assist them in choosing services.
This brief sketch of the NQS reveals the ways in which quality is regulated and supervised through pre-specified outcomes. Any semblance of personal judgment is removed in the quest for ‘objectivity’ in the calculation of the final eight ratings (one overall rating and one for each of the seven quality areas). This process of quantification occurs in the name of quality, but reduces the highly complex and disparate processes of relationships, learning and teaching, and so on to the equivalent of a set of eight digits. It is based on a set of categories (seven ‘quality’ areas split into 18 standards and 58 elements), which are considered measurable in an objective sense through a ‘technology of quantification’ (Dahlberg et al., 2007: 88). In the process, it produces a set of words (read ‘digits’) that are comparable with all other such services in Australia, and is presented as a sure and certain account of quality that has been realised through a rational procedure and impartial method. It orders the unorderable, tames the untameable, and reduces complexity, sophistication and convolution to masquerade as something simple. In the words of critical theorists Adorno and Horkheimer (1997: 24), such measures ‘make the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities’. Numbers and words such as those on the NQS report (and the ACECQA and MyChild websites) command attention and are powerful arbiters of parental decision-making. They provide ‘consumers’ with assumed certainty about the quality of services delivered through this measure, and inadvertently sanction the market aspect of neo-liberalism.
Far from valorising quality, we seek to free quality from some of the expected and quantified assumptions found in the seven quality areas, and to explore what is demonised, and attempt to breathe some new life into what can be regarded as often meaningless expressions of quality. How do we create meaning about quality and what might constitute quality? The NQS or some version of it is most likely here to stay, but the value of playing with what might be considered idealism in comparison to the NQS is a worthy undertaking, if only to distinguish some possibilities and potentialities, and to imagine otherwise.
An alternative: Imagining quality otherwise
As an alternative to the DONA (Unger, 2005: 1), we provide a juxtaposition of the NQS reading with the Darwinian viewpoint by way of Table 1. This attempt at meaning-making is a way of unsettling the NQS narrative by using Darwinian-inspired imagination and creating an emergent version of potentialities and possibilities. The NQS provides a predictable, certain and calculated approach to quality. It attempts to capture the best intentions of educators, but, instead of reflecting the complexity of life in early childhood settings, in the final instance compresses it into a few words for each quality area.
A reading of Table 1 shows that the NQS and DONA narrative is highly likely to be informed by the well-known early childhood planning cycle where educators in the pipe–child–sand assemblage observe what is happening; are ready to intervene if a learning opportunity (safety, behavioural matter, etc.) arises; and, should this occur, document the learning and reflect on it. In the vignette, the educator maintained a distance and the regulatory gaze, with no physical or linguistic engagement with either the child or the materials. There are many possible reasons for adopting this position and, for some educators, this may have been a missed opportunity for the children to learn about wet and dry sand, balance, weight, and so on. Adopting a Darwinian perspective and imagining otherwise adds a dimension of complexity that opens possibilities beyond seeing children in terms of their physical, cognitive, social and emotional developmental capacities. It moves the focus from ideas of potentially extending children’s cognitive understandings about wet and dry sand through conversation (a predictable and well-rehearsed approach more likely to occur with older children than the boy in the vignette), to curiosity about what else could be happening in these moments. What might be happening in the intra-action between the boy, the pipe and the sand? The agency of the pipe and the sand in the encounter suggests that forces (learning?) are at work in between the materials (pipe, sand) and the child. How does the pipe act on the boy and the sand? How does the sand act on the boy and the pipe? These and other questions move into the territory of imagining in ways other than the likely NQS-informed interpretation.
Reading the vignette with the intention of opening spaces for differences to emerge makes it possible to see the assemblage as the sand and the pipe ‘becoming with’ the boy, which creates new possibilities for meaning-making (Haraway, 2013). Meaning-making is occurring in the assemblage: the pipe and the sand are affecting the child, and the child is affecting the pipe and the sand. Such assemblages are momentary and conditional on the intra-action among the materials, space and persons, and are therefore not fixed, as pedagogical documentation of this event might be/come. Making oneself open to what children are engrossed in (Lenz Taguchi, 2010), and releasing oneself from the confines of quality as a standard, suggests a collective and ethical responsibility for meaning-making (quality?). For Olsson, teachers and children can engage together in a ‘collective construction of new values’ (Olsson, 2009: 80), which are created ‘in the moment on a case-by-case basis’ (Grieshaber and McArdle, 2014: 112). This is an ethics of imagining otherwise that exists in the here and now (Lenz Taguchi, 2010), where meaning is made moment by moment and exposes the deep complexity and layers through which such assemblages may be read. These ideas unsettle the belief that quality can be measured, and that this measure can then be applied against a standard. They also suggest that the measures of quality with which we currently work would be hard-pressed to capture ethical meaning-making of the type being imagined by Lenz Taguchi (2010) and Olsson (2009).
A conclusion?
The NQS involves assessments using predetermined instruments, procedures, processes and reporting mechanisms, which purport to measure quality. No consideration is given to the different histories of early childhood care (childcare) and education (preschool) in this previously differentiated system, which had two relatively distinct purposes: (1) to provide childcare to enable parents to participate in the workforce and (2) to prepare children for school through preschool education (Thorpe et al., 2010). These differences are elided in the assessment of quality, despite what Thorpe et al. (2010) maintain is a concentrated focus on regulation around safety and hygiene, and a lack of focus on education in the childcare sector; and an emphasis on narrow versions of school readiness in preschool provision. A final quality rating of a few words (e.g. ‘Meeting National Quality Standard’), which appears on a website, makes these complex histories, contexts and associated practices invisible.
A new materialist story about the children, the sand and the pipe provides an alternative to a story about unstated physical competence, confidence through a sense of belonging, parallel play, and social and emotional development. The pipe–sand–child becomes something else, offering opportunities for children to initiate and create their own stories, potentially escaping from the determinism and predictability of a voyeuristic (developmental? behavioural? learning?) gaze. In trying to make the gaze and Darwinian perspectives porous and leak into each other, we imagine otherwise by suggesting that children might be able to make their own worlds, rather than having their worlds made for them (by the 58 elements of the seven quality areas), and that, as part of this, their desires might be closer to being realised, rather than remaining unknown.
The issue may not be that, politically and pedagogically, it is better or more emancipatory or empowering for children to have their voices heard (Clarke, 2007), but rather that porous perspectives, including children’s perspectives and worlds, might create niches for variations to emerge. Quality may not just be about measurable standards and outcomes, but also about creating conditions for increasing complexities, differences and changeabilities, and for perceptions of being alive to the world and to oneself with others (pipes and sand included). Who knows what imaginations and new stories are possible if DONA is no longer in sole charge of quality meaning-making.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.