The micropolitics of posthuman early years leadership assemblages: Exploring more-than-human relationality

Abstract

Engaging with posthuman theorising, this article puts to work a number of concepts to produce generative reimaginings of early years leadership. In 1992, Deleuze argued that we are witnessing a transition from societies of confinement to ‘societies of control’. In societies of control, power operates through neo-liberal corporate worlds via a process of ‘continuous modulation’, which encourages a regime of perpetual flows of change, revealing new productions of a more posthuman agency. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the author notes how the concept of assemblage can be employed to explore leadership. She argues that early years leadership in England is part of a wider set of connections and relations which include human and non-human ‘bodies’. The assemblage connects and collects bodies, and is not defined by its individual components but by what is produced as these bodies interact. These interactions can be striated, which explores certain forms of leadership. However, smoother spaces can also be produced, which empirically reveals the situational ethics and micropolitics of four early years leaders who are entangled with children, policy, neo-liberal framing, quality, curriculum, and social and material worlds in their settings and schools. This article broadens current views on early years leadership by taking a more-than-human view of relations between human and non-human bodies as a distributed subjectivity which reworks notions of solely human agency. This production allows the author to question how posthuman leadership and the ethics and micropolitics of connectivity might function in this new form of more-than-human relationality.

Introduction

In this article, I attend to a (re)thinking of leadership in English early childhood education and care (ECEC), which is currently viewed as emergent and situated (Male and Palaiologou, 2015), with a focus on a wider ethic of care (see Rodd, 2013). To do this, I engage with posthumanist theorising to propose how the concept of assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) can be employed to consider leadership as a more-than-human concern. Paying attention to non-human bodies and how these are in relations with human bodies allows me to broaden existing views of ECEC leadership and subjectivity, which then acknowledges the wider complexities found in ECEC work. The existing debates in England surrounding leadership have focused on successive professionalisation agendas based on the desire to upskill an existing workforce to deliver revised curricular expectations (Lindon et al., 2016) and for workforce recognition (Payler and Locke, 2013). What has followed has seen the ECEC sector define its own pathways to leadership which meets the needs of children, families and other ECEC staff (Rodd, 2013; Siraj-Blatchford and Manni, 2007). This has been coupled with an exponential growth in nursery places and ECEC settings following the implementation of government-funded hours for children who meet specific criteria (Bonetti, 2018). Sims (2017) explores the tensions inherent in ECEC leadership within neo-liberal market models of education where increasing levels of compliance and surveillance impact leadership behaviours. This article builds on and moves beyond current human-centred debates of leadership and applies posthuman modes of thinking to explore wider social and material processes (see Fox and Alldred, 2017).

Posthumanist thinking allows for the decentring and rethinking of the human subject and its potential for agency, where humans engage with the material (non-human) world to reveal more-than-human relations (see Coole and Frost, 2010). Furthermore, exploring posthuman concepts can offer new ethical and political possibilities for fracturing binary dualisms and discourses which separate human and material (non-human) worlds (Braidotti, 2013). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) proposed the concept of assemblage as a collection of heterogeneous bodies which emerge and come into relations around events. These bodies consist of both humans and non-humans, and could be drawn from several registers – for example, policy, social, material, abstract entities and physical (Baugh, 2010). Thinking with assemblages moves the world away from fixed and stable systems which are composed of discrete subjects/objects to a more connected and relational constellation of bodies (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). The assemblage is concerned with what these connections do and produce rather than what the elements or bodies are (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Within and through these relational systems flow mechanisms for control (macropolitics) and mechanisms for releasing new potentials (micropolitics); ‘in short, everything is political’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 249). Attending to these new ontological conceptions of bodies, politics and assemblages reveals complex connections which note the influence of the material world on human bodies.

This article is divided into three sections. In the first, I explore historical leadership development in England and the influence and development of the market model of ECEC. With the second section I develop theorisations of posthuman leadership, where I draw on the notion of assemblages and smooth and striated space (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) to explore the micropolitical relations through which ECEC leadership is materialised. In this way, posthuman leadership is expansive in smooth space or controlled in striated spaces where micropolitical flows open ECEC leadership potential to new affirmative modes of expression. This is contextualised using Deleuze’s (1992) notion of ‘societies of control’, which pays attention to new modes of power fluctuations which develop in neo-liberal worlds. These are explored empirically and revealed in the third section. Throughout this article, the term ‘non-human’ has been applied to all matter, materials and the natural world, which are not human corporeal bodies (Braidotti, 2013). Additionally, the term ‘more-than-human’ has been used to consider how objects/things have agency and vibrancy (Bennett, 2010), and how these are relationally co-implicated in human lives (Whatmore, 2006).

Leadership development and childcare markets in English ECEC

In England, the continuing expansion of neo-liberal thinking is affecting and influencing expectations within ECEC. Provision is driven by a statutory curricular framework (Department for Education, 2017), which is delivered to children between the ages of birth and five. Children from birth to the September after their fourth birthday may attend non-compulsory ECEC, where provision is split across a range of diverse settings including private day nurseries, children’s centres, nurseries attached to schools and childminders. The terms ‘private day nurseries’, ‘children’s centres’ and ‘nurseries attached to schools’ are known globally under a variety of different names – for example, ‘long day care’ or ‘preschools’; ‘childminders’ are also known as ‘family daycare’, where provision is in a home-based environment. Here, provision can be sessional or full time for up to 51 weeks of the year, as selected by parents. These settings are part of a mixed market economy with government, private for-profit and private not-for-profit involvement (Lloyd, 2013). Funding for ECEC places is drawn primarily from two sources: government subsidies paid per hour for children who meet certain criteria (Bonetti, 2018) and fees paid by parents either as a ‘top up’ to government funding or where their children do not meet the funding criteria. The minimum required qualification to work, and lead practice, in these types of settings is a vocational accreditation which is equivalent to exit-level high school certificates (e.g. a Level 3 National Vocational Qualification (NVQ3)), although academic qualifications have developed to postgraduate level in recent years (e.g. Early Years Professional and Early Years Teacher; Department for Education, 2017). Once children pass the September after their fourth birthday, they enter compulsory schooling for the Reception Year, with teaching underpinned by the same curriculum as non-compulsory provision (Department for Education, 2017). The Reception Year is fully funded by the government and generally led by qualified teachers who hold either an undergraduate or postgraduate teaching qualification.

The term ‘leadership’ in English ECEC is complex, with many contested factors and meanings which can sometimes be based on wider political agendas. In fact, there has been a conflation of the notions of professionalism, professional status and identity, management and leadership, which has confused the sector’s understanding of the role of a ‘leader’ in ECEC. This can be traced back through the historical and situated developments of ECEC, which provides different global understandings of the term based on national political and social systems (see Miller and Cable, 2011). Initially in England, ECEC leadership had close links to government professionalisation agendas employed to ‘establish appropriate confidence and professionalism’ within the sector (Lindon et al., 2016: 15). This was coupled with a desire to raise standards of practice with the implementation of the Early Years Professional, followed by the Early Years Teacher, as a means to do this (Department for Education, 2013). These changes were initiated as part of the introduction of a new curricular framework – the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) (Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2008) – and government-funded hours for children who met certain criteria (Baldock et al., 2013). Concurrently, these developments were reflected in an exponential increase in ECEC settings to meet the demands for childcare places (Lloyd, 2012, 2013). The impact of neo-liberal political systems creates ‘education as a product’ (Sims, 2017: 2), where standardised curricula and assessments become a way to monitor quality and government investment (Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes, 2018), and I argue that these initial leadership developments were framed by neo-liberal ECEC-as-product discourses.

In England, the expansion of ECEC settings was linked to the then Labour government’s (1997–2010) focus on reducing child poverty associated with family unemployment (Baldock et al., 2013), based on a model of human capital theory, where ECEC investment was thought to promote social mobility and potential future workers (Heckman, 2000). The role of the ECEC leader was to balance the tensions between implementing curricular frameworks (Lindon et al., 2016), influencing and developing the existing workforce (Rodd, 2013, 2015), and providing interventions which cemented ECEC as part of an educational continuum to develop the child into a future worker (Simpson et al., 2015; Sims, 2017). Subsequent professionalisation agendas were driven by policy recommendations for graduate leaders of pedagogy and practice (McGillivray, 2011; Payler and Locke, 2013), although sufficient funding for this has failed to materialise (Bonetti, 2018). More recent policy developments have produced the Early Years Teacher, influenced by a more school-ready discourse of ECEC practice (Department for Education, 2013), which has shifted the focus from ‘leadership’ to ‘teaching’, signalling a possible ‘removing of the discretionary decision-making power’ (Sims, 2017: 5) assigned to leadership towards the delivery of a curricular body of knowledge signifying a more performative role (Moss, 2017). Ironically, the new status does not confer the same benefits and recognition of Qualified Teacher Status, required for teaching in maintained compulsory education; this lack of parity does little to promote those who wish to take a pedagogical leadership role (Hevey, 2013; Bonetti, 2018). Tensions remain, as the current requirement for a non-compulsory-setting leader is the vocational NVQ3 (Department for Education, 2017), and sustainability has been questioned when ECEC settings are part of a mixed market economy where payments for provision are drawn from a split between parents and government funding (Lloyd, 2012; Moss, 2017).

ECEC leadership development has been linked to quality (Rodd, 2013), where effective leadership is expected as ‘the leader inspires changes in the quality of service delivery’ (Sims and Waniganayake, 2015: 190). Scholars have argued that good leadership should be inclusive and collaborative (Davis, 2012), distributed and collegial (Siraj-Blatchford and Manni, 2007), and more effective when transformational styles are employed (Lindon et al., 2016). The notion of quality practice and leadership has been problematised in a more neo-liberal market model of ECEC (Campbell-Barr, 2014; Moss, 2017), and there are difficulties in adopting and adapting a standardised leadership style in such a wide and diverse English ECEC sector (McDowall Clark and Baylis, 2012). Sims (2017: 5) argues that leaders have an ‘obligation to engage in more active resistance’ to counter the expectations of ‘externally monitored standards [that have] acted to de-professionalise early childhood educators’, which occurs in neo-liberal markets. This resistance has started to manifest in England with organisations such as the Save Childhood Movement (2014) and Keeping Early Years Unique (n.d.), which are presenting a leadership narrative counter to the performative compliance practices required by curricular delivery (Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes, 2018; Moss, 2017; Sims, 2017). In this article, I argue that by viewing ECEC leadership as an assemblage, different articulations of resistance can be explored. This is situated in Early Years Teacher contexts, and by considering the influence of the material world, a new ethical and political dimension is produced.

Developing a posthuman leadership assemblage

Societies of control

Foucault (1977) argued that biopolitics and biopower circulate as disciplinary practice where control is achieved via the subject under surveillance. In ECEC, the regulatory requirements can produce performative subjectivities of a ‘good leader’ (see Ball, 2003). However, leaders can find ways to resist this (Osgood, 2006). Building on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, Deleuze (1992: 4) theorised the neo-liberal turn when he proposed that ‘in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory’ with more far-reaching networked levels of governance and regulation. Here, institutional power was not exercised through disciplinary societies (Foucault, 1977) but via relational networks within and between institutions, which afforded individuals a perception of greater freedom but under multiple levels of control which become self-policing through the effects of modulation. These modulations produced the dividual subject who needed to undergo a regime of perpetual training and (self-)assessment. Here, the dividual leader could never fully attain the expectations of the control society. This type of leadership sees subjectivities influenced by expected curricular outcomes for children (Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes, 2018) and the demands of the neo-liberal market model (Lloyd, 2012, 2013; Sims, 2017). This article will explore how the ECEC leader can find ways to escape this dividual status, and will note the processes of both micropolitics and macropolitics and how these influence current expectations of the Early Years Teacher. Building on my doctorate (Fairchild, 2017a), I propose a more expansive, more-than-human view of subjectivity and theorise this via the leadership assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).

Leadership assemblages

The conceptual tool of the assemblage is a key part of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) philosophy and is an ontological starting point for the way life proceeds as a series of flows and connections. The term ‘assemblage’ is derived from the French word agencement, which suggests a collection and arrangement of bodies and things (Nail, 2017). An assemblage is defined by the connections that are made between bodies in a seemingly random and indeterminate way. The content and form of the assemblage becomes coded by the way the connections are expressed; bodies are transformed during these processes, and this generates connections to other bodies, with the cycle of connection and transformation occurring ad infinitum (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). This ability to form combinations and connections as a constellation of bodies has been described as machinic and provides an alternative vision of subjectivity and transcendent structures of identity which are not bound to a unitary form (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).

Massumi (2015: 52) notes that a ‘body’ is more than ‘the body as a thing apart from the self or subject. I mean that the body is that region of in-mixing from which subjectivity emerges’. In this way, the ‘body’ and its agentic potential are recast, where the ethics of the assemblage produced an ontology of affirmative connected processes with, as yet, unknown potential. One of the challenges of working with the assemblage is the seemingly random, anarchic nature of the connections, which appear as devoid from human intentionality. However, Anderson et al. (2012: 174) note that ‘assemblage thinking allows us to attend to how these often disparate activities become entangled with one another’, and this provides the means to a unique way to think about ECEC leadership that acknowledges wider, more-than-human relations. Massumi (2015: 66) argues that this anarchic randomness is part of the development of philosophy: ‘nonconscious process is [more than] an absence of thought … nonconscious process is the birth of thought’. In this article, I employ the conceptual power of the assemblage to explore how non-human bodies become embedded and connected to ECEC leaders, and the ways in which they influence events are revealed in the empirical data.

Smooth and striated spaces and micropolitics

Segmentarity is how the physical and social world is ordered and compartmentalised (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). This segmentarity can be resisted by smooth space, which is the space within which connective processes and assemblages are expressed. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) consider how smooth space can be surrounded by striated space (macropolitics), which is a stable system and a product of segmentation (e.g. by the state), and vice versa. They debate: ‘smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed by striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to smooth space’ (552). Deleuze and Guattari go on to detail that ephemeral smooth space has no memory and can only ever hold microhistories, microsociology and micropolitics, which allows it to be a site for transformation and possibility. Deleuze and Guattari were particularly interested in the tensions between smooth and striated space when they considered ‘how the forces at work within the space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces’ (581). Striated space produces a more segmented society, giving rise to a stability which is required for the social world to function. However, Deleuze and Guattari considered that all aspects of life are in constant motion and movement, which reveals the production of micropolitics where life becomes more fluid and ephemeral. The resultant lines of flight are connections which move life in new directions, reflecting Deleuze and Guattari’s image of tiny, imperceptible ruptures and the impact they have (Conley, 2010).

It could be suggested that the use of smooth and striated space might suggest or reveal a binary, with striated seen as ‘bad’, for example, over coding the space with more formal or performative aspects of leadership, which Sims (2017: 4) has noted can ‘increase the compliance behaviour of those enacting the framework’. The binary opposite sees smooth space as ‘good’, a chaos space where anarchic movements provide counter-actualisations to striated leadership. Lenz Taguchi (2010: 97) details how pedagogic space is marked with these striations, ‘materialised as habits, routine behaviours, organisations of time, space and material’. Within ECEC, there will always be the need for striated space which produces repetitions in leadership practice that are comfort(able)(ing). The flux and flows between smooth and striated spaces and the micropolitical lines of flight they produce will be explored below to consider how more-than-human relational ECEC leadership can be conceptualised and contextualised. This, is turn, will move notions of ECEC leadership away from contested binarised views of leaders as dividuals performatively delivering a curriculum, to a more expansive view of how leadership is drawn from both human and non-human connections through a range of ever shifting assemblages.

Empirical entanglements

In the remainder of this article, I explore how posthuman leadership assemblages can be put to work empirically. The data is drawn from my doctoral study, where four ethnographic case studies explored how Early Years Teachers and children were in relations with ECEC material and teaching spaces. The data articulated in this article was part of the semi-structured interviews collected during this inquiry. Ethical approval was granted by my institution and the data in this article has been anonymised. I draw on MacLure (2013), who encourages researchers to engage in new modes of data analysis which go beyond usual patterns of coding and analysis by theme. In this article, I focus on the seemingly mundane data fragments which were revealed in the data – on the ‘small but consequential differences’ (Barad 2007: 29) which explore ECEC leadership. In this way, the data emerged as ‘data pulses, data frequencies, data intensities’ (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2018: 471). I seek to move beyond modes of representational thinking in the articulation of the empirical data. Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 55) argue that representation ‘fails to capture the affirmed world of difference. Representation has only a single centre, a unique and receding perspective’. In this vein, I do not analyse the data fragments in a traditional sense but consider what is produced within and through the leadership assemblages (see Taylor and Gannon, 2018). This allows me to chart the contact zones of human and non-human relations, and ‘fashion some form of address that is adequate to their form’ (Stewart, 2007: 4).

Articulating posthuman leadership assemblages

In this section, I draw on four data fragments – one from each of the ethnographic case studies. Claire was a nanny who had originally worked in a reception class, a private ECEC setting and a toddler drop-in forest school; Sarah was a self-employed childminder who worked in a cluster that included two other childminders; Hannah was a reception teacher in an all-girls private school; and Rose was a deputy manager in a private, pack-away, sessional Montessori preschool.

Claire: Environmental Learning Leader

As the ‘Environment Learning Leader’ I took groups of [reception-aged] children out of the classroom to provide forest school sessions … I supported NVQ students … encouraged them to interact and engage with the children … I promoted equality and anti-discriminatory practice … I led a change in the attitudes of the teaching staff towards the use of the outdoor environment … and obtained funding from the Board of Governors to purchase all-weather protective clothing so children could participate in outdoor learning in all weather conditions.

Multiple iterations of leadership are present in this extract as bodily components of the leadership assemblage: pedagogical leadership, supporting staff/trainees, change management and funding. Claire becomes embodied and embedded in the territory of the outdoor environment as she transverses the striated space of the classroom and the smoother space of the forest. Lenz Taguchi (2010) proposes ‘circular’ and ‘horizontal’ movements to denote the interplay between smooth and striated pedagogical spaces. The circular movements note the codings and expectation of pedagogy – in this case, the predictability of the school classroom, where, Lenz Taguchi (2010: 100) argues, ‘it is difficult to let go of habits of thought and taken-for-granted ways of thinking and doing that make us feel safe’. This tension can be sensed as Claire works with NVQ (vocational) students and discusses how she supports them with respectful engagement with children. There are also hints of smoother horizontal space, where Claire challenges normative practice and influences the structural pedagogical knowledge of teaching in the outdoor environment. Micropolitical flows see Claire encourage the teachers to ‘disengage and detach … from habitual behaviours and habits of thought’ (Williams, 2008, cited in Lenz Taguchi, 2010: 99) and to see affirmative, creative ways to work in outdoor spaces. These lines of flight further influenced the school governors to secure funding for all-weather clothing for the children. Lorraine (2005: 174) details that ‘attuning ourselves to life-as-becoming requires disorientating ourselves from established spatial norms in order to attend to spaces unfolded in the play of movements’, and this is exemplified in the flows Claire experiences. Claire’s leadership in societies of control see bodies within and through assemblages traverse smooth and striated spaces. These assemblages are not fixed or static, but are in constant motion as Claire is connected to learning spaces and environments, pedagogies, working with staff and trainees, outdoor clothing, funding and school governors. Each of these connections provides new leadership possibilities for Claire as the micropolitical activations reveal agentic, more-than-human ways to circumvent dividual subjectivities.

Sarah: self-evaluation

For my self-evaluation form, I used the format we used to have in business, which is ‘Where we’re at, where we want to be and how are we going to get there’, so going through all the areas … of childminding because often you’ll sit there and go, ‘Oh, that went really well and this didn’t go so well’, but you’ll forget good things you’ve done but another childminder would say, ‘Oh, remember, that worked really well, the thing you set up in your playroom’ … the self-evaluation form covers everything from working with parents, the delivery of the EYFS, safeguarding, advertising, our business, are we doing our tax returns … we are very much characterised by continuous improvement because when you are self-employed you, sort of, you are constantly responsible for everything that you do.

As a self-employed childminder, Sarah was influenced by market forces as she needed to ensure that she could recruit sufficient children to keep her business viable. Sarah had been a childminder for 10 years. Having worked in marketing before entering ECEC, she employed some of her previous skill sets in her current role. The self-evaluation form is a striation and control modulation, which was a regulatory inspection requirement for all ECEC settings, where controls are ‘a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to another’ (Deleuze, 1992: 4). These modulations overcode ECEC work which promotes the striated macropolitical space of familiarity and expectations for quality professional practice. Sarah’s leadership is situational and contextual, as she creates the conditions for governance and self-regulation. Here, the self-evaluation form documents quality practice, and this becomes comfort(ing)(able) to Sarah, which then promotes evaluation and change in her setting’s practice. Paradoxically, in societies of control, the leader and their practice are never fully attained – one can never be a ‘good enough’ leader; one can only experience modulations and remain in a constant state of change, which is exemplified by the constantly evolving self-evaluation form. The striations serve a dual purpose – maintaining control and expectation of good practice and a means of self-scrutiny where freedom to run a business is tempered by preset expectations. Sarah’s connections within and through the assemblages she experiences challenge her dividual status, as micropolitical smoothing of this space is generated in professional discussions within the childminding cluster, where collective remembering of the past year highlights the nuances in practice that are not always easy to capture in a static document. Furthermore, smoother spaces are articulated in the way pedagogical activities unfold for children, revealing the movement between macropolitical expectations and micropolitical leadership events. Each of these connections is ephemeral and in movement as leadership assemblages change form as a result of the relations which occur between human and non-human bodies.

Hannah: budgets and classrooms

This year we have had 100% of my class are from [the nursery] but next year I believe we have as little as 50%, so it changes very much year to year … because we [are] a commercial business … [parents] want things in … certain ways … I have a yearly budget … I’ve still got some … left from this year, so I’ll have to use that up now before I start next year.

The nursery room has been completely restaged, so I did the reception room over the summer; the reception room has been zoned into the EYFS reflecting areas [and] the nursery has been rezoned properly. There’s more child-enticing things in there and they don’t even realise that they are accessing what we would think is academic resources.

Hannah is based in the reception class of a fee-paying private school with an attached nursery; the nursery accepts government funding, but the majority of parents purchase additional hours for their children. This excerpt highlights the challenges faced by school leaders to balance some of the budgetary and accountability requirements of schools from a sustainability perspective when school budgets in England have been reported as being squeezed as part of government austerity measures (Bonetti, 2018; Lloyd, 2012; Moss, 2017). Hannah discusses the fluctuating nature of her budgets, making links to nursery occupancy, which in turn is linked to the viability of the classes and commercial needs of the school. Bodies within and through the assemblage provide striations where ‘fixed and variable elements, produces an order and succession of distinct forms’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 556), and these become striated expectations of the classroom, school and leadership practice. This is couched within the expectations of the private nursery/school education, which sets the requirements for budgeting, classroom set-up and resourcing. Lorraine (2005: 174) notes that, within wider assemblages, we must pay heed to the striations which bind and surround us without completely dismantling them as they are ‘the refrains that sustain our homes’. The constant ebb and flow of children from nursery to reception class is part of the modulations and self-regulation which set the expectations from classrooms and pedagogy. Hannah has been influenced by the budget that she has been allocated, and has used this to lead a change in the nursery and reception classrooms to work with staff to rezone and resource them. Lines of flight allow space to become smoothed as the children are unaware of the pedagogical rationale for the rezoning. The flows between striated space and smooth space within these assemblages are not articulations of the benefits of a certain type of leadership; they are an acknowledgement that different situational connections reveal tensions and friction between accountability within commercial markets and ECEC practices. These micropolitical movements to more smooth space note wider leadership capacities which challenge dividual politics by the flow between smooth and striated spaces. In this way, Hannah disorients herself ‘from established spatial norms in order to attend to spaces unfolded in the play of movement’ (Lorraine, 2005: 174). Her leadership subjectivity moves between smooth and striated space, being distributed across a constellation of human and non-human bodies, including commercial needs, budgets, classroom spaces, parent expectations, curricular requirements and the way children access the spaces.

Rose: leading pedagogy

I’m deputy manager and a SENCO [Special Educational Needs Coordinator]. I do sort of take over bits of the running of day-to-day stuff, but the paperwork side is sort of like a manager [role], because we’re such a small setting … I think there is loads of expectations of what a teacher is, from parents who have a big expectation of what their children should do … there are mixed messages from government, so the 30-hours entitlement is supposed to be for parents going back to work … then you have another report which is saying parent interaction and communication skills are the most important thing … so the government haven’t decided on their priorities.

In this excerpt, Rose considered the challenges of being a pedagogical leader. In England, there has been a drive to align ECEC provision to schools, which reflects the influence of human capital theory and societies of control, which framed past policy perceptions of ECEC as inadequate (Lindon et al., 2016). These measures reinforced a new model of ECEC and questioned the role of the Early Years Teacher, as the market requirement for ‘childcare’ becomes a principal factor when funding entitlements are part of the wider assemblage connections (Moss, 2017). Tension within the striated assemblage can be sensed as Rose discusses the mixed policy messages she is experiencing regarding government funding and its links to pedagogy. These have an effect of smoothing the dominant framing of the requirements for working parents to access the 30 hours of entitlement to a more affirmative and holistic pedagogical space of relational interaction and communication. The flux and flow between smooth and striated space is articulated as ‘an infinite succession of linkages and changes in direction’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 574), and these are revealed as Rose considered the job requirements of a deputy manager and SENCO, the expectations parents have about how ECEC teaching should be enacted, funding challenges and the mixed messages from government policy. Within and through ECEC leadership assemblages, these flows present as micropolitical moments, which revealed the striations in leadership role and curricular expectations and how these can be disturbed and smoothed by Rose’s questioning. Lenz Taguchi (2010: 96) notes that ‘any event can introduce change and difference in our practices, but our willingness to let that happen depends on how we think about learning and knowing and our relationship to that which we understand as reality’. As the space is smoothed, Rose can reconfigure her understanding of reality and her potential dividual status as she debates and challenges policy expectations.

Intermission

This article does not close with a conclusion but with an intermission, which represents the ongoing productive connections within and between assemblages that are never finalised and always already processual. Within the articulation of empirical data, I have proposed a reconfiguring of ECEC leadership as a more-than-human distributed subjectivity. This includes connections to policy, market forces, practitioners and children, which explores how spaces are produced and expressed by these human and non-human relations. In turn, this reveals the complexity found within ECEC leadership assemblages – in this instance, English Early Years Teachers. These connected constellations move beyond binarised notions of performative or resistant leaders to provide generative reimaginings of ECEC leadership which transcend traditional views of subjectivity and identity. There are broader ethical and political potentials for employing the conceptual tools of the assemblage, dividuals, and smooth and striated spaces for ECEC leadership, which acknowledges diversity and affords non-human bodies a similar position to human bodies. I argue that this is particularly pertinent in ECEC due to the material nature of ECEC settings (Fairchild, 2017b), and by articulating the methodological device of the assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), I am able to connect wider non-human events to ECEC leadership. This still acknowledges the histories of leadership development (Moss, 2013, 2017) and market models (Lloyd, 2012, 2013) to explore and develop theorisations of posthuman leadership.

Posthuman leadership is not bounded by specific models of leadership, qualifications or national priorities. It is ethically and politically affirmative as it is situated in and through wider assemblage constellations. Ontologically, assemblages pay heed to connections and relationality in societies of control (Deleuze, 1992). This attentiveness to power fluctuations that seeks to striate leadership to fit neo-liberal market/pedagogical models based on human capital theory provides ways to reimagine an affirmative ECEC leader with wider, more-than-human potential rather than a dividual subject to modulations. What is revealed in the four data elements is that spaces are set up and constrained by striated modulations. These macropolitical controls provide comfort and stability (Lenz Taguchi, 2010); this familiarity is needed where markets and policy drive pedagogical expectations. However, smoothness is also a complimentary enactment where micropolitical lines of flight flow within and through ECEC leadership assemblages. These responses to striated control modulations note alternative ways in which ECEC leadership is expressed. The result is an affirmative and generative leadership entanglement which is a more-than-binary response, flowing between policy, markets, pedagogy, leaders and ECEC settings, and revealing complexity and more-than-human situated leadership processes.