Abstract
An underlying theme running through the six articles in this issue relates to pedagogies. Whether about more overt pedagogical practices or identifying and recognising the value of elusively different pedagogical paths, all are about challenging and suspending adherence to accepted universalist principles and practices. The authors adopt different theoretical and methodological approaches to contest accepted pedagogical ways of being and doing climate change, professional practice, documentation, mathematics and language development.
In addition to delegitimising taken-for-granted ideas such as climate change being ‘too abstract’ for young children, the first article by Tonya Rooney, Mindy Blaise and Felicity Royds, ‘With shadows, dust and mud: Activating weathering-with pedagogies in early childhood’, shows how it is possible for educators and young children to be engaged in meaningful pedagogical work that makes ‘climate change more connected and immediate for young children’. The authors and children create new approaches they call ‘weathering-with pedagogies’, which are ways of learning with weather while walking that include ‘shadowing-with’, ‘muddying’ and ‘dusting-with’. These pedagogies involve practices such as ‘stumbling across’ and ‘muddling along’ with tensions and uncertainties. While grounded in more-than-human theories, they also reflect a practice of care and new ways of engaging with climate change.
In the second article, ‘Love as an act of resistance: Ethical subversion in early childhood professional practice in England’, Lynette Morris introduces a new construct of professional caring practice called ‘ethical subversion’. Rule-bending or rule-breaking is not a simple matter of making a rational decision: ethical subversion involves reason and emotion, producing what Morris calls ‘acts of loving disobedience’. These acts are purposeful, performed by experienced practitioners who have ‘a deep understanding of risk and the critical implications of their rule-bending’. Notwithstanding the tension brought by conflicting theoretical, legislative and powerful hegemonic discourses, Morris uses a Foucauldian discourse analysis to explore how practitioners negotiated this ethical and emotion-laden territory. Even though they were aware of ethical boundaries, the practitioners dismissed these in preference for a moral commitment to relational, individualistic and responsible care.
The third and fourth articles bring different perspectives to the concept of documentation. In the third article, ‘What is documentation doing? Early childhood education teachers shifting from and between the meanings and actions of documentation practices’, Jo Albin-Clark aims to generate new resources to think about the documentation practices that operate within the narratives of assessment and accountability in England. She draws on new-materialist theories to provide agential readings of documentation that produce movements of resistance and creation. These movements provide spaces for teachers to work with and against the narratives of assessment and accountability, enabling pedagogical work to be imbued with political and ethical intent, and providing opportunities for more relational and ethical assessment practices.
Pedagogical documentation is the focus of the fourth article, ‘Pedagogical documentation and systematic quality work in early childhood: Comparing practices in Western Australia and Sweden’, written by Libby Lee-Hammond and Lise-Lotte Bjervås. The authors investigate the use of pedagogical documentation in the two contexts, noting that while pedagogical documentation has been associated with providing high-quality learning environments for children, it is enacted very differently in each context. Unlike Western Australia, which does not have a tradition of using pedagogical documentation, Swedish preschools have used pedagogical documentation for more than 30 years. Consistent with the preschool curriculum, the Swedish educators understood quality as working with the children to document learning processes to support their growth and learning, and to review their own practice. This related to the setting as a whole rather than individual children. Alternatively, most of the educators from Western Australia talked about documenting children’s content knowledge as evidence of learning, and supporting them as individuals to achieve the required goals.
Continuing the theme of pedagogies, and influenced by an outcome-driven culture, the fifth article by Lin Chen, ‘An ontology of off-task behavior in a number activity: The body, space-time, and mathematics’, addresses the content area of mathematics. Chen challenges the accepted practice of understanding mathematics learning as rational, emphasising the irrational dimension instead. To do this, Chen uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of refrain to expose a young child’s embodied relations with mathematics, and the power and potential of ‘mathematical living in the moment’. The ontological analysis of the off-task behaviour is, in Chen’s words, ‘a political and ethical move to avoid homogenizing and thus disenfranchising young learners of mathematics’. The move provides a strategy for adopting a more democratic approach to mathematics learning.
The final article, ‘Putting Arendt, Bakhtin and atmosphere to work: Exploring different paths concerning the language development of multilingual children’, by Katrine Giæver and Liz Jones, continues the focus on pedagogies by considering more inventive ways of supporting the language of children from Norwegian ethnic minority heritages. The authors use the philosophical work of Arendt and theorisations from Bakhtin simultaneously with ideas about atmosphere to question the predictability and linearity of language development. As a member of classroom culture, atmosphere adds vitality and makes room for the unanticipated, obscure and unknown.
In this issue the colloquium is contributed by Joohi Lee and Joo Ok Lee and is titled: The challenges of using one’s body as a reference: “Is it higher than my sitting height?”.
The book review is provided by Pool Ip Dong, who considers Rethinking Early Literacies: Reading and Rewriting Worlds (Routledge, 2018), written by Mariana Souto-Manning and Haeny S Yoon.
Happy reading!