Abstract
The first issue of this year comes just over a year after the beginning of the pandemic that has resolutely changed our lives. Many countries are now into their ‘second wave’, some even in a third. Young children and their families have been learning online for the duration of the pandemic in many countries and have only seen their friends in screen-mediated interactions. Parents have come to a new appreciation of the amazing and professional job that their child’s early childhood teacher has been doing throughout their career.
At this transformative juncture of our lives, it is relevant to ask: What have we learned as a consequence of living out this pandemic? Will we rethink how we ‘do’ early childhood education or will the ‘new normal’ take us back to the same old ways of thinking (Iorio and Yelland, forthcoming)? We have opportunities now to create new learning scenarios that build on a vision of the child as a capable citizen of the now: ‘The child is not a citizen of the future; he is a citizen from the very first moment of life and also the most important citizen because he represents and brings the “possible”’ (Rinaldi, 2006: p 135).
This comes at a time of heightened tensions across the globe – most recently, the invasion of the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, USA, where sadly five people lost their lives. Rising inequality permeates our lives, racial tensions have increased, and the impacts of climate change, manifested in extreme weather conditions, impact severely on the lives of so many people. And, in all this, a conservative government in Australia put into place policy measures that were designed to meet the common good, albeit as a response to market forces and the economy. As Giamminuti (forthcoming) notes: In the face of a global pandemic that threatens every aspect of life as we know it, a neoliberal government abandoned its arguably abstruse and punitive approach to funding early childhood education and care, a sector that is overwhelmingly driven by marketplace values and economic discourses, in favour of the relatively unheard of – the common good.
Unfortunately, the government did not continue with this initiative as it did with other sectors of the economy but, for one brief moment in time, preschool education was free to all those citizens who wanted to send their children to early childhood centres, and we had a glimpse of what might be.
While the articles in this issue have been online for some time now, their topics seem strangely pertinent to our contemporary experiences and dilemmas. In the first article, ‘Towards a re-conceptualisation of risk in early childhood education’, Mandy Cooke, Sandie Wong and Frances Press explore children engaged in risk-taking and argue for a broader view of the term – one that is aligned with a holistic approach to early childhood education.
Then, Nina Odegard, in ‘Making a bricolage: An immanent process of experimentation’, draws on ‘a new materialist paradigm to explore bricolaging data from an early childhood research project through an immanent ethical lens’. Odegard contends that ‘bricolaging data’ facilitates researchers’ ability to connect data and ideas in new and dynamic ways. She discusses how the bricoleur can engage with their data, creating narratives that both disrupt and challenge dominant pedagogical discourses.
In ‘Governing “disadvantage” through readiness: A Foucauldian policy genealogy of funded nursery places for two-year-olds’, Siew Fung Lee critically examines how the UK policy of funded nursery places (FNP), which was designed to support children in disadvantaged areas, has in fact limited educational outcomes for them and also resulted in increased governance. Her Foucauldian analysis sets out ‘the ways in which FNP constitutes and deploys techniques for governing “disadvantage”’ – specifically, how ‘disadvantage’ is constructed as a ‘problem of the population’, which, in turn, is subject to particular subjectivities and practices. While her analysis is based on the UK experience, it has implications for other countries in terms of addressing issues arising out of inequality.
In the next article, Bethany Wilinsky explores ‘Making up teachers: Pre-kindergarten policy and teachers’ lived experiences’ by interrogating policy in the USA. Bethany considers a new pre-kindergarten (pre-K) policy in Lakeville, Wisconsin. This policy defined the pre-K professional in specific ways and had the impact of shaping ‘teachers’ subjectivities by creating new norms and boundaries around how teachers were to be and act as pre-K professionals, which they took or resisted in particular ways’.
In ‘Lingering in an attitude of research: The critical potential of quotidien practices in early childhood education’, Suallyn Mitchelmore examines the critical potential of everyday practices in early childhood settings for research. Her article ‘builds on a growing body of pedagogical research that challenges researchers “to use theory to think with data” and create new concepts that are born out of the possibilities of the theory/practice relationship’. This article reveals how our everyday practices and research are symbiotic and generate new ideas and theories that are both meaningful and more relevant to our lives.
The final article, by Alison Hooper, Rena Hallam and Christine Skrobot, is entitled ‘“Our quality is a little bit different”: How family childcare providers who participate in a Quality Rating and Improvement System and receive childcare subsidy define quality’. The research reported on in this article builds on research about family childcare quality from the perspective of the childcare provider. Family childcare providers were asked to define quality and what it might look like in practice. The data resulted in four themes emerging: relationships, supporting children’s learning, the physical and temporal environment, and personal professionalism. The authors then consider how quality improvement initiatives and professional learning might be designed to support and engage family childcare providers in their quest for quality.
We also have a colloquium by Dana Frantz Bentley entitled ‘Pocket treasures and magical unicorns: The persistence of story in a time of pandemic’, reflecting on her teaching, and a book review by Andre Kurowski of Transforming Early Childhood in England: Towards a Democratic Education, edited by Claire Cameron and Peter Moss.