Beyond a logic of quality: Opening space for material-discursive practices of ‘readiness’ in early years education

Abstract

This article is an exploration of the possibilities encountered through shifting from a ‘logic of quality’ to a ‘space of meaning-making’ within early years education. Focusing on ideas of ‘readiness’, this discussion aims to challenge normative understandings that relate this concept to the predictable achievement of fixed goals and outcomes. This article approaches ‘quality’ as a particular form of logic and seeks to explore new directions in thought and practice opened by shifting into a space of ‘meaning-making’. Aspects of new materialist thought are entangled in this space of meaning-making, creating opportunities for renewed understandings and practices of ‘readiness’. Binaries of human/material and discourse/matter are problematized with the intention of unsettling dominant constructions of ‘readiness’ as an independently representable and individualized identity. The article concludes by exploring an alternative understanding of ‘readiness’ as a material-affective relation between bodies (both material and human). Situated through a self-reflexive example from an early years setting in England, it is argued that entangling an attention to materiality within a space of meaning-making creates space to challenge the status quo, creating the potential for new ways of understanding experiences and happenings in early years contexts.

Introduction

It’s quite fashionable to say that the education system is broken. It’s not broken. It’s wonderfully constructed. It’s just that we don’t need it anymore. It’s outdated. (Mitra, 2013)

In Sugata Mitra’s (2013) TED talk, he makes a radical contention that dominant (western) models of education, through which much teaching and learning is structured, are based on an outdated logic. He calls for a fundamental shift that asks serious questions about the purposes of education and the political and ethical values that underpin pedagogical practices and decision-making. This shift is similar to that advocated by Dahlberg et al. (1999) in their discussions of quality in early years education – a shift towards what Dahlberg and Moss (2009: xix) describe as a ‘new image of thought’ that recognizes the importance of difference and complexity in relation to processes of pedagogical becoming. ¹

Dahlberg et al. (1999, 2007) have shown how the space opened up by this new image of thought can produce radically new ways of thinking about ‘quality’ in early years education. Their work advocates a shift from a decontextualized concept of ‘quality’ ‘as a universal truth that is value and culture free and equally applicable anywhere in the field under consideration’ (Dahlberg et al., 1999: 94), to a conception of ‘meaning-making’ that opens space for ‘explicitly ethical and philosophical choices, judgments of value, made in relation to the wider questions of what we want for our children here and now’ (Dahlberg et al., 1999: 107). This profound shift in logic – from a modernist discourse of quality that values predictability and control, towards a recognition of diversity, messiness and complexity as components of ‘meaning-making’ – opens up multiple possibilities and opportunities within the field of early years education. What this shift creates is a space of ontological and epistemological difference, in which there is potential for reimagining taken-for-granted ways of thinking and being.

This article engages with the space created by this ‘new image of thought’ in order to problematize a concept that has particular significance across international early years education systems – the concept of ‘readiness’ (for contemporary critical and post-foundational discussions of ‘readiness’, see Dahlberg, 2013; Durden, 2015; Evans, 2013, 2015; Moss, 2012, 2013; Pinedo-Burns, 2015; Whitebread and Bingham, 2011). ² It is argued that dominant concepts of ‘readiness’ emerge from the same logic identified by Dahlberg et al. (1999, 2007) as underpinning ‘quality’ – a logic expressed through technical and mechanistic vocabulary, within which ‘readiness’ and ‘quality’ are considered to interact through predictable and deterministic relations. Drawing the new materialist philosophy of Karen Barad (2007) into the space of meaning-making opened by Dahlberg et al. (1999, 2007), this article contemplates how, through alternative logics and practices, we might come to see familiar landscapes differently. The discussion is situated through a memory from the author’s own experiences as an early years teacher in England and, through engagement with this fragment of ‘data’, considers ways in which traditional and well-rehearsed responses and expectations can be deliberately jarred (Jones and Holmes, 2014).

The article will begin by engaging with ‘the problem with quality’ (Dahlberg et al., 1999: 5), exploring this in light of new materialist concerns over the dominance of language and discourse in our framings of the world (Barad, 2007; Lenz Taguchi, 2012, 2014). Through this critical exploration, the possibilities afforded by opening a new materialist logic within a space of ‘meaning-making’ will be explored, focusing on the potential new lines of flight this opens up for thought and practice in relation to ‘readiness’ in early years education. ³ Working with this onto-epistemological shift, the article will conclude by suggesting an alternative concept of ‘readiness’, made possible by this opening of space and inspired by a particular Deleuzian notion of affect.

Constructing ‘quality’: From ‘technical language’ to ‘material-discursive’ practice

Dahlberg et al. (1999) consider that one of the dominant problems with the concept of ‘quality’ in early years education is its vocabulary. It is, they state, a ‘technical language’, expressed through terms such as ‘standardization’, ‘performance’, ‘targets’ and ‘outcomes’. They consider this language to be part of a discursive system of control that ‘place[s] more emphasis on the question “how do we identify quality?” than on the preceding questions “what do we mean by quality and why?”’ (Dahlberg et al., 1999: 94). Extending this concern, dominant notions of ‘readiness’ can be considered to share a similar technical vocabulary. Moss (2013) considers this vocabulary to be conservative and hierarchical, with a focus on fixed and predefined ‘early learning goals’ (Department for Education, 2013) and ‘desirable outcomes’ as markers, both for predictable patterns of progression in children and for high-quality teaching and learning environments. Within the kind of simplistic and deterministic logic considered by Dahlberg et al. (1999, 2007) to underpin notions of ‘quality’, the statements produced from this language can be understood as having a representational function. ‘Readiness’ can be constructed as a predetermined identity (the ‘ready child’), which can then be represented through language in policy and practice guidance (such as the English ‘early learning goals’ (Department for Education, 2013)). ‘Readiness’ is therefore considered to have a determinate and decontextualized form, and the role of language is to represent that form. The identity of the ‘ready child’ is abstract, existing independently from the language used to represent it, which is in turn detached from the children themselves, whose relation to those statements is through a simple comparison.

This detached relationship is, however, called into question when we start to incorporate a material logic into our thinking. Lenz Taguchi (2014: 82) discusses a concern, expressed within what she defines as the ‘material turn’, with an ‘overemphasized focus on the constituting forces of language and meaning making discourse’. The concern emanating from new materialist perspectives, such as those described by Lenz Taguchi (2014), is that language and discourse have been awarded too high a status in our understanding and configuration of the world. The emphasis on language neglects the role of matter and materiality as a force in the production of meaning – the focus being on discursive constructions of human subjects through language and speech acts, ignoring the potential of matter as an agentic and constitutive force (Lenz Taguchi, 2014).

In exploring the potential effects of a ‘material turn’, it is important, however, not to dismiss the role of language completely. It would be counterproductive to create a binary between material and discursive aspects of the world, granting one greater value than the other. Indeed, if we consider language and matter to operate together as part of an entangled assemblage, our ways of thinking about dominant concepts in early years education can fundamentally change. The following section situates this potential for change through a particular memory from the author’s experience as an early years teacher in England. Whilst written in the third person, the author’s role within this narrative was that of the teacher. As a methodological tool, the evocation of this memory has multiple functions. The event itself has a particular affective resonance for the author – a transformational quality that gained clarity through the writing of this article and the engagement with the material aspects of experience it provoked. Its inclusion here is not as an object for interpretation, to try and find out what it means. Rather, it is approached as a productive event and is brought into this discussion because of the possibilities it holds for theorizing and experimenting (Knight and Raynor, 2015) with concepts of ‘readiness’ beyond a logic of ‘quality’. The seemingly small example – what Thompson (2010), after Cotton and Griffiths (2007), refers to as a ‘little story’ – is (re)presented as a tool through which to explore the potential for thinking differently that is created by entangling discourse and matter in processes of meaning-making. Its style of presentation has been influenced by the new materialist thought and language explored within this article, just as the evocation of this memory through the process of writing has influenced the ideas developed.

Becoming-table, becoming-shelter

Imagine a space – a space inhabited by an assemblage of bodies, both human and non- or more-than human. An open space of coarse-feeling carpet, on which sits a group of 23 children, four and five years old. In front of them is a chair, on which sits an adult holding a picture book, from which she is telling a story. Enclosing this space of carpet and human bodies are the bodies of tables, chairs, cupboards and boxes. Each of these bodies is inscribed with a series of expectations concerning how it should ‘be’ in that space. The children are expected to sit, as still as possible, their legs crossed, their backs straight, their gaze directed towards the adult in front of them. The adult is expected to command their attention, to perform a role of ‘teacher’. Crucially, each of these bodies is expected to remain physically separate, inhabiting only their immediate zone of space and not encroaching on or joining with the space of another. The children are corrected if and when they begin to stray into another space, told to keep their hands folded in their laps to avoid the temptation to fiddle with the bodies around them. The non-human bodies are also imbued with expectations of their functions and use. A young boy shuffles backwards through the opening created by the joining of table and carpet, enclosing himself in the space. He has been crying. He has not long been attending this classroom space. His anxiety at being in this new space is communicated through his tears. He leans forward, his head in his hands, elbows resting on his knees, eyes peeking out from his new residence towards the adult in front of the group. ‘Come out from there’, he is instructed, as the adult gestures towards the space in which he ‘should’ be sitting. He continues to peer out, but does not move. He is asked again to move, and again does not. Eventually, he is instructed to come out, to sit ‘properly’. He is told, ‘We don’t sit under tables. Tables are for sitting at, for working on’. He shuffles back to his original space. He again sits with his elbows on his knees, this time his face hidden by his hands. When he lifts his head, his feelings are again betrayed by silent tears.

The following sections work with this example in a space of meaning-making, exploring the potential of this space for affecting alternative understandings of ‘readiness’.

Beyond a ‘discourse’ of ‘quality’: ‘What other languages can we choose to speak?’

Dahlberg et al. (1999: 2) ask this question in their problematization of quality in early years education. However, whilst this is an important question, from a new materialist perspective it could be considered to neglect the role of the material world in shifting to a space of making-meaning, placing the focus wholly on the role of language in the construction of concepts such as ‘readiness’. It is possible, however, to introduce a material element to this statement – to entangle its focus on language with the effects of that language in the material world, valuing both the discursive and material elements of life and of pedagogical experience.

Material-discursive practices of meaning-making

The argument developed in this article considers both language and materiality to be important in our processes of meaning-making. The language used to talk about concepts such as ‘quality’ and ‘readiness’ in early years education matters. How we choose to talk about things, the vocabulary we use, and our strategies for the communication of our thoughts and ideas matter greatly to the ways in which they are perceived and understood, and the material affects they have in the world. The language used within educational discourse matters particularly because it acts not only to represent and communicate concepts and identities, but also to bring them into being through the practices they engender. The ways in which concepts such as ‘readiness’ and ‘quality’ are discussed, therefore, affect the practices that are produced within educational contexts, and the ways in which these concepts manifest themselves within the educational experiences of children and adults.

In recognizing the active role of language, however, it is imperative that we do not neglect the equally active role of the material world. Attention to the material within our processes of meaning-making has the potential to fundamentally shift the sense that is made of experiences within pedagogical spaces. Within the example above, the child’s actions could be viewed as inappropriate if understood through a fixed and normative logic of ‘quality’ (Dahlberg et al., 1999, 2007). Understandings of how to behave in that space and the ‘correct’ ways in which to interact with material elements of the environment can be understood to dominate the adult’s responses to the child’s actions. To think of this in terms of the child’s perceived ‘readiness’ for that environment, he may be considered ‘un-ready’, unaware of the ‘appropriate’ behaviour or unable to follow particular rules and expectations. This understanding of the situation relies, however, on fixed understandings of the form and function of the bodies within that context: of the ‘table’ as an object for sitting at and working on; of the carpet as a barrier defining the group and creating a boundary beyond which it was considered inappropriate to stray; of crossed legs, straight backs and stillness as accepted characteristics of human bodies in that space. All of these expectations and social codes could be considered as indicating the ‘readiness’ of these bodies to participate within this context.

Introducing a particular new materialist logic into this process of meaning-making, however, introduces the notion that, as Barad (2007: 151) considers, ‘matter does not refer to a fixed substance’. For the child, the table in the example above did not necessarily exist as an object with a fixed function, but, through its relationship with the child, its function emerged as a tool through which to create a safe and secure space: a becoming-shelter. In that moment, the ‘table’ created a physical space into which the child could retreat from the amassed human bodies, its function becoming defined through the intra-action (Barad, 2007) of child and table. Both the child and the table-shelter were active in this process of becoming, enabled by the dynamic nature of those particular bodies in that particular context. Crucially, therefore, by attending to the active role of all matter in this context, the ‘stuff of matter’ can be considered as becoming perceptible only through its constantly changing relations with other bodies (other matter) in that space (Sellers, 2013).

In this recognition of the active and dynamic nature of matter, perceived deterministic relationships between ‘high-quality’ learning environments and the production of ‘readiness’ start to break down. If, as Barad (2007: 151) tells us, ‘matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative intra-activity’, it is no longer possible to predict the effects of particular material configurations of the learning environment on the ‘readiness’ of an individual or group of children. As the example above indicates, the intra-active process of entanglement between human and non-human bodies in the school environment can be surprising, challenging our expectations of form and function in the material world. The function of the table is displaced in its entanglement with the child, becoming a place of shelter and safety as it intra-acts with the child as he negotiates his early school experience. At the time, as the adult in this context, my reading of this incident was informed by the kind of logic that Dahlberg et al. (1999, 2007) identify as the logic of ‘quality’. My expectations of this child’s behaviour were emergent from standardized norms, through which I constructed an idea of ‘appropriate behaviour’ in relation to children’s engagement with the material environment. In order to be ‘ready’ to learn and to participate productively in that environment, the child would have to learn to follow the rules and boundaries of the setting – including sitting at, as opposed to under, tables. Thinking in material-affective terms, however, the human–material relationship can be perceived as producing ‘new, molecular knowledge that isn’t predicated on predetermined cognitive goals’ (Jones and Holmes, 2014: 135). Through engaging with an open and unpredictable space of meaning-making, we are able to foreground ‘provisionality, multiplicity and subjectivity, rather than closure, standardization and objectivity’ (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005: 88). We can begin to think about ‘readiness’ in relation to material engagements within the environment and the relation of human and non-human bodies. In the example above, the child’s joining with the table-shelter enabled him to create material conditions in which he could participate in the classroom milieu, his interruption of traditional ways of being in the space producing the possibility of participation. Crucially, the potential for ‘readiness’ was created through the coming together of child and object in this context, without the child having a preconceived idea of the form that relationship ‘should’ take. What was created was ‘a milieu of becoming in which the happening itself is the thing; there are no specific outcomes, only mo(ve)ments of openings to possibilities for forces and energy to be generated anew – becoming-child, happening-thing’ (Sellers, 2013: 164).

The ‘problem’ in this example emerged, however, through the dominant discursive practices that dictated ‘proper’ use of the object as ‘table’. This dominant discursive figuration of ‘table’ and its appropriate use enacted what Barad (2007: 151) describes as ‘boundary making practices’ – material-discursive practices that constrain and enable possibilities within the world. Through dominant understandings of ‘readiness’, the child’s actions were not read as valuable and were diverted back to a norm that acted to exclude him further from the classroom milieu. It can be seen, therefore, how a space of meaning-making can open possibilities for seeing children’s unexpected and unpredictable experiences and engagements with their worlds in different, more positive ways.

Drawing on the material-discursive logic explored in this section, it seems appropriate to offer a reframing of the question from Dahlberg et al. (1999: 2) with which we entered into this discussion: ‘What other languages can we choose to speak?’ Perhaps we may ask instead: What other material-discursive practices can we engage with? To ask this question, and to take it seriously, offers a hopeful way forward in the field of early years education. It highlights that the transcendent and teleological view of knowledge that Dahlberg et al. (1999, 2007) align with ‘quality’, and through which, it is argued in this article, the concept of ‘readiness’ is framed, is not an inevitable logic. It is a choice. This logic emerges from a ‘field of possibilities’ that, crucially, ‘is not static or singular but rather is a dynamic and contingent multiplicity’ (Barad, 2007: 146). This recognition of choice gives reason for hope. It highlights the contextual and provisional nature of what we think we know, situating that knowledge as emergent from a whole ‘field of possibilities’. Barad (2007) considers that the possibilities from which knowledge emerges do not stand still, but are constantly reconfigured – giving hope for alternative ways of thinking and being. As Dahlberg et al. (1999, 2007) suggest, the simplistic logic of ‘quality’ is not the only possible way of knowing in early years education and, by opening out to these alternative logics, we create space for radically new and different pedagogical understandings and experiences.

‘A struggle to hold open’: Creating space for complex understandings of ‘readiness’

In their exploration of a ‘new image of thought’, Dahlberg and Moss (2005: 93) state that ‘pedagogical work that seeks to be transgressive is engaged in a struggle to hold open’. What is held open is a space of possibility. Pedagogical practices resist the closure of normative definitions, standards and outcomes, instead acknowledging and embracing the unknown, unpredictable and creative aspects of learning and development. New spaces for thinking emerge, within which asking political and ethical questions of value and meaning becomes not only possible, but essential. Assumptions and taken-for-granted concepts and knowledges are shaken as we can no longer rely on predefined systems and predictable practices. What is created is a space of uncertainty, but within that uncertainty is the chance of creation.

It has already been suggested in this article that a meaningful shift in understandings and practices of ‘readiness’ requires significant changes in the underpinning logic. What is required is a shift from a mechanistic logic of cause and effect, which may draw a direct and predictable relation between specific markers of ‘best practice’/‘high quality’ and particular normalized outcomes of ‘readiness’, towards a complex logic that sees these things as contestable, provisional and contextual. This move beyond a logic of ‘quality’, with its aspirations for certainty and closure, towards an open pedagogical system of possibilities has radical consequences for dominant understandings of ‘readiness’ as the predictable achievement of particular goals and outcomes. By choosing to work with ‘uncertainty, subjectivity, democracy, creativity, [and] curiosity’ (Moss and Dahlberg, 2008: 8), it becomes impossible, even illogical, to define ‘readiness’ according to predefined goals, outcomes and attributes such as might be valued in a logic of ‘quality’. This then prompts the questions: If ‘readiness’ can no longer be defined according to the acquisition of particular skills, knowledge and attributes, what other understandings is it possible to create? How is it possible to think about ‘readiness’ without a pre-given idea of what we are to be ‘made ready’ for, and what are the implications of this shift in logic for understandings of quality in early years education?

Understanding readiness through a logic of affect

Exploring these questions involves shifting from planned and predictable concepts of progress, as movement between fixed points, to an emergent focus on potential and possibility. This focus is rooted in the idea that, as Deleuze (1992: 627) considers, ‘you do not know beforehand what a body or mind can do in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination’. It is impossible to know a ‘normally developing’ child or a ‘high-quality learning environment’ through predetermined ideas of who or what they ought to be. It is, however, possible to know a body through the affects it has in the world – to stop seeing the ‘ready child’ and the ‘high-quality environment’ in isolation, and to see them emerge together as part of an entangled and affective process. Thinking with a logic of affect directs attention to bodies, ⁴ and to the material relations that exist between bodies in educational spaces. Each body affects and is affected by other bodies in space, and ‘it is this capacity for affecting and being affected that [also] defines a body in its own individuality’ (Deleuze, 1988: 123). The body of a child and the environment in which the child is situated are, therefore, in constant intra-action (Barad, 2007) with a range of human and non-human bodies, all of which have a key role in their becoming-ready.

As well as being relational, affect is rooted in movement. This is a significant shift from the dominant discourses of ‘quality’ and ‘readiness’ discussed in this article, which can be considered to be based on stasis – on pinning down and defining rather than opening up through becoming. Affect in this context is a force of movement and becoming that increases the capacities of bodies to act in the world. In this sense, according to Springgay (2011: 69, 78), ‘affect is transitive; it is about movement and force’, and gives rise to ‘a pedagogy of encounters that engender movement, duration, force, intensity’. It is an alternative to defining bodies according to a fixed state or notion of identity, defining them instead by their ‘capacity for being affected, by the affections of which they are “capable”’ (Deleuze, 1988: 26).

By engaging concepts of ‘readiness’ with a logic of affect, a common orientation towards potential and possibility emerges. Affect is fundamentally concerned with the potential of bodies – with their virtual capacity to affect and be affected. It faces towards an open future as opposed to one defined by specific goals and outcomes – a future that is ‘not quite in view from the present, a future that scrambles any map in advance of its arrival’ (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 21). Affect offers a ‘hopeful’ logic in that it considers the present to be an open door, a threshold of potential (Massumi, 2003). It allows us to look to an open future hopefully and offers a challenge to utopian ideals that would construct a far-off, predefined goal or identity as the driving force of experience.

A new way of experiencing ‘readiness’: Potential and the virtual side of affect

In the previous section of this article, it was argued that the language used to talk about concepts such as ‘readiness’ and ‘quality’ matters greatly. However, whilst the ‘powerfully normalizing and regulatory’ language that dominates discussions of ‘quality’ and ‘readiness’ remains ‘strongly related to criteria and standards’ (Moss and Dahlberg, 2008: 8), affect gives us another language through which to explore – a language that is far more in tune with the values which underpin the concept of ‘meaning-making’. It is a vocabulary of potential, uncertainty and virtuality that engages us with concepts such as ‘readiness’ in new and different ways, enabling us to appreciate unpredictable aspects of early years education as necessary and productive, as opposed to problematic.

One of the fundamental characteristics of Dahlberg et al.’s (1999, 2007) concept of meaning-making is that it is relational. Through introducing a focus on materiality, however, any subject–object binary that may exist within this relationship is dissolved. As Sellers (2013: 168) states: ‘matter is not perceived as an array of particular things and fixed substances, it is understood as the relations of one thing among many others’. ‘Things’ are not a priori constructs (Sellers, 2013: 168) and, as such, are constantly imbued with potentiality for their becoming-different. The affects through which bodies and events come to have meaning have both actual and virtual sides (Springgay, 2011), forcing us to view bodies from the perspective of their potential or virtuality (Massumi, 1992). When we perceive affect, what we actually perceive is its expression – the actions and emotions of bodies caught up in affective encounters. This is the actual side of affect. Equally important, however, is the virtual side of affect, which Dahlberg and Moss (2009: xxiii) describe as a ‘swarm of potential that follows us through life’. This virtual aspect is important as it allows us to engage with the concept of ‘readiness’ as a part of an open pedagogical system, created within a space of ‘meaning-making’. It opens the way for a coherent concept of ‘readiness’ that ‘surpasses the knowledge we have of a body as well as the consciousness we have of it’ (Olsson, 2009: 76), thus offering an alternative to the dominance of fixed goals and outcomes that are so often seen to structure ‘readiness’, and indeed ‘quality’, in early years education.

Meaning-making: Creating space for difference and the emergence of the new

The possibilities afforded by considering ‘readiness’ as a material-affective relation draw attention away from ideas of an individualized ‘ready child’, focusing instead on ‘readiness’ as something emergent from intra-active, relational encounters within an entangled milieu of early years education. We are forced to question our understandings of bodies (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010), as we can no longer define the bodies that make up an early years assemblage by a perceived surface boundary – they cannot be understood in isolation, as ontologically and epistemologically separate from their milieu. Rather than the achievement of a specific state of being, or the acquisition of particular knowledge and skills, ‘readiness’ can be understood in relation to the ability of bodies to engage in passages of affect. ‘Readiness’ becomes about the ability of a body to enter into productive encounters – encounters through which their belonging to and being in the world takes on a particular meaning (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). The capacity and potential of a body to be ‘ready’ is, therefore, ‘never defined by that body alone’ (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 3), but is caught up within the material-discursive milieu of which that body is a part.

This affective and relational concept of ‘readiness’ negates any assumptions of a ‘normally developing’ body, expected to pass through certain predictable stages. Such idealist/nativist assumptions (Brown, 2010; Meisels, 1999) rely on normative notions of maturational development to determine expectations of what a child is ‘ready’ to learn at particular points in his or her educational ‘journey’, and when, for a ‘normally developing child’, those points should be. According to this particular framework of understanding, we can assume that it is possible to identify in advance the form of the child who is ‘ready for school’ or ‘ready for learning’, and, consequently, to identify the child whose development may indicate a delay in that child reaching this desired goal at the ‘appropriate’ time. By shifting our attention to the material-affective nature of encounters, however, we can begin to focus on the virtual potential of bodies and their ‘readiness’ to explore this potential openly and to actualize certain lines of flight through their productive encounters. Olsson highlights the importance of this focus on bodily potential:

It is true that not all children learn to walk, for some reason they might not. But the question of potential becomes even more urgent in relation to these children … From the point of view of bodies joining other bodies the important thing becomes to seek to open for potentiality in every situation, in relation to every body. (Olsson, 2009: 4)

The space opened up by affective meaning-making allows this attention to potentiality. Deleuze (1988) tells us that once we start to define bodies according to their capacities for affecting and being affected, many things will change. As the product of an affective encounter, ‘readiness’ may be related to an increase in bodily potential – a ‘threshold of potential’ that opens to ‘where we might be able to go and what we might be able to do in every present situation’ (Massumi, 2003: 3). ‘Readiness’ is, therefore, a pedagogical opportunity – an opening to something unpredictable brought about through a relational encounter that expands the space of the possible for all bodies connected within that encounter. The young boy in the example above could be understood as expanding the space for his positive participation in the classroom milieu through his intra-action with the table-shelter. His action of resting his elbows on his knees, and looking out from his sheltered space towards the group, indicates a desire to remain connected to the activity, despite positioning himself differently from the others. His ability to maintain this positive participation was, however, shut down by the effects of being forced to rejoin the group and conform to the dominant expectations and behaviours of a child who was ‘ready’ for school. Rather than understanding his engagement with the material body of the table-shelter as an expansion of the possibilities for his participation, it was understood to be a deviation from an expected, normalized idea of how to ‘be’ in that context as a child who was ‘ready’ for school.

Creating space for material-affective practices in early years education

Attending to material-affective aspects of experience has particular implications and challenges for the practices that emerge within spaces of early years education. This discussion is reluctant, however, to delineate the specific forms these practices may take. The premise of this article is that learning, and therefore ‘readiness’, is unpredictable. Similarly, spaces of meaning-making do not emerge in predictable ways and as a result of predefined practices, but are the product of constant critical reflection and of educators asking difficult questions concerning themselves, their practice and the possibilities for material-affective relationships that are opened up or closed down by their ways of working. Such critical interrogation is crucial to the creation of spaces in which different flows of thought and practice can intra-act, exposing ‘the multiple, competing, and even, at times, contradictory positions and spaces in which we find ourselves’ (Cheek, 2007: 1054). Such reflexive questions may include:

• How do my own understandings and beliefs about children, childhood and pedagogy affect what is considered valuable within the context of children’s educational experiences? What are the dominant influences affecting these beliefs? How do these beliefs affect the events and experiences that emerge within my setting?

• What is the role of the material within my conception of ‘readiness’ in local classroom contexts? How do the material aspects of the learning environment support or impose challenges on children’s ‘readiness’?

• How do established pedagogical practices and processes – for example, documentation and assessment – open or close spaces of meaning-making? What are the tensions emergent within these spaces? How can we respond to these tensions and what actions can we take?

Such questions provoke deep reflection on how we are positioned as educators, and indeed how we position ourselves, within the relational milieu of early years settings. This critical awareness of the understandings and beliefs that underpin our practices helps us to maintain a sense of responsibility and accountability for what emerges, forcing us to recognize that we are active in the production of particular events and experiences. As educators, this can prompt transformational shifts in thinking and practice, and can help us to work within the institutional spaces and structures created by discourses of quality, rather than being ‘worked over by’ them (Cheek, 2007: 1057).

These questions are key in focusing us, as educators, on being constantly self-reflexive about the practices we produce and enact. Constantly interrogating our practices can stop us from becoming too comfortable, taking for granted particular ways of working as inevitable ‘best’ practices. Olsson (2009) identifies that, often, what start as new practices and ways of thinking about children and pedagogy can very quickly become standardized maps. Even when we think that we are challenging standardization and normalization – for example, through working with material-affective logics and spaces of meaning-making – unless we are constantly and critically aware of our own practices, beliefs and values, we can end up performing in taken-for-granted ways that are not very different from the stereotypical notions we originally set out to challenge. Critical reflection is crucial in understanding the material-affective spaces we are in and productively navigating the tensions that emerge as different beliefs and practices meet. As Cheek highlights:

Unless we better understand how we are positioned in these spaces, and how we may, in turn, position ourselves, then there is the very real possibility that we will be worked over by the spaces rather than working in them and, importantly, on them. (Cheek, 2007: 1057)

Conclusion

In the call for papers for this special issue, the editors asked contributors to consider new possibilities for what might constitute ‘quality’ within the complex landscape of early years education. The discussion developed within this article has drawn specifically on the possibilities that are either closed down or opened up in relation to the concept of ‘readiness’, either through choosing to work with a logic of ‘quality’ or by entangling alternative logics within a space of meaning-making. Situating this discussion through the author’s self-reflexive experience, it has been argued that, as identified by Lenz Taguchi (2014: 85), children are not just discursively inscribed, but ‘actively participate in the material discursive construction of themselves’ through their intra-actions with human and non-human bodies in their environments. Crucially, the logics that are worked with to inform pedagogical practices, understandings and decision-making are identified as a choice. As Dahlberg et al (1999: 107) are careful to identify, ‘the discourse of meaning making calls for explicitly ethical and philosophical choices, [and] judgments of value’. Informed by such perspectives, what we think we know about concepts such as ‘quality’ and ‘readiness’, or indeed the choice to introduce a material focus to our work, can never be divorced from ethics and politics. There is nothing inevitable or natural about the practices that emerge from discourses of ‘readiness’. They are the products of choices and decisions, to which all of us working within the context of early years education must hold ourselves accountable. Whilst this article has attempted to explore what may become possible for understandings of ‘readiness’ through the development of a material-discursive focus within early years pedagogy, the question of what is at stake by thinking and practising in this way must constantly be asked. Those of us working within the field of early years education must ensure that we maintain a stance of constant critical questioning, never allowing ourselves to be too comfortable with the landscape we create, or for our practices and understandings to become taken for granted as part of the status quo.