Abstract
This issue of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood reflects some of the ongoing challenges for early childhood education around the globe and, for the most part, presents different perspectives on these continuing matters. The topics range from global considerations to small-scale studies investigating everyday practices in early childhood settings, and include the expansion of services to the global South, professionalism, emotional labour and risk. There are messages for all those who are interested in early childhood education, whether practitioners, researchers, students, policymakers or funders. The authors come from Norway, Denmark, the United Kingdom and Australia, and invoke a number of theoretical perspectives to develop their respective arguments.
The issue begins with an article by Ann Christin E Nilsen titled ‘The expansion of early childhood development services and the need to reconceptualize evidence’. As the title indicates, Nilsen addresses the expansion of early childhood development services in ‘developing’ countries, expressing concern about the implicit universalism in service provision. More specifically, she is troubled by the ‘implicit policing’ of families and childhood, indicating that now is the time to decide the kind of early childhood services that are best suited to particular ‘developing’ countries. She questions the use of traditional approaches, suggests that critical frames are needed, and indicates that there is a choice of several options which may be applicable. In conjunction with this concern, Nilsen identifies an issue that is bothersome to many in early childhood education: how to avoid reducing quality to a quantification of outcome and impact.
The emotional labour involved in everyday work with young children has received increased attention from researchers in the past few years. In her article ‘Emotional labour and governmentality: Productive power in childcare’, Merete Monrad uses Foucault’s lens of governmentality to investigate the relationship between power and emotional labour. Individual semi-structured interviews were undertaken in two Danish municipalities with 17 childcare workers (seven worked in kindergartens with children aged four to five and ten worked with children aged zero to three). Monrad investigates the emotional experiences of the workers that relate to matters such as sense of identity, emotional labour, coping strategies and collaboration with others. She explores how power relations can both constrain and enable emotional labour, and suggests that it can be conceptualized as a technology of the self.
Two articles draw on theoretical perspectives from Deleuze and Guattari, and both use empirical data in their inquiries. In ‘Segments and stutters: Early years teachers and becoming-professional’, Nikki Fairchild applies Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of segmentation and stuttering to becoming-professional. While there has been a lot of research that investigates professionalism, professionalization and the professional identities of early childhood educators, very little has adopted theoretical perspectives from Deleuze and Guattari. Like other research on these topics, Fairchild affirms the complexity of the processes of professionalization. What is different is the focus on the embodied and material forms of everyday practice, and how these are fundamental to teaching in the early years. These differences are revealed in data from the learning and teaching journeys of participants who reflected on and discussed their experiences as students while on campus and during field experience placements, undertaken as part of completing teacher education courses.
In addition to theoretical perspectives from Deleuze and Guattari, the article by Cecilie Ottersland Myhre, Hanne Berit Myrvold, Unn-Wenche Joramo and Marianne Thoresen, ‘Stumbling into the “kitchen island”: Becoming through intra-actions with objects and theories’, draws on ideas from feminist materialism – most particularly those of Karen Barad. The concepts of diffraction, affect and agency are used to show how intra-actions between human and non-human agents have important potential for learning, for both adults and children. The authors also indicate the inability to anticipate or predict these potentialities, and that the processes of becoming hold possibilities for disrupting established and routine practices. As might be expected from the title, a kitchen island – furniture often provided to support children’s play about ‘home’ activities – is central to the discussion.
Zoi Nikiforidou recommends that more attention should be directed to supporting children’s understanding of risk and the development of risk literacy skills. In ‘Risk literacy: Concepts and pedagogical implications for early childhood education’, Nikiforidou suggests that risk literacy can be part of everyday early childhood curricula and pedagogy. She describes how graphical representations and children’s probabilistic and possibility thinking are important parts of adopting risk literacy in early childhood settings. The goal is to equip children to be risk literate and, as part of the argument, Nikiforidou considers what she calls positive and negative discourses about risk.
The final article, ‘Critical narrative as a framework for professional border crossing in early childhood’, is written by Alice Brown and John Grigg. Grigg shares a number of excerpts from narratives written as a classroom teacher from 2008 to 2014. The excerpts depict the progressive ‘schoolification’ requirements experienced by Grigg and his responses, as well as those of some of his colleagues. The authors see engaging in reflection in conjunction with other strategies as a way of addressing systemic changes that are informed by discourses such as neo-liberalism, and which are not necessarily consistent with the pedagogical approaches preferred and adopted by Grigg and his colleagues.
The colloquium for this issue is written by Miriam Potts and entitled ‘Responding creatively to Bone and Blaise (2015) through packaging, drawing and assembling’. It is exactly what the title indicates – a response to an article by Jane Bone and Mindy Blaise that was published in Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood in 2015.
This issue concludes with a book review by Alexandra Melrose from Manchester Metropolitan University of Understanding Early Childhood: Issues and Controversies (3rd ed., 2014), authored by Helen Penn.