CIEC colloquium: Reflections on Beyond Quality at 25 years

Abstract

In this colloquium, the authors of Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care, which was published 25 years ago, reflect on the book's core arguments about the ‘problem with quality’, the neoliberal origins of ‘the age of quality’ and the book's impact.

Introduction to the colloquium

This colloquium is a reflection on a book by its three authors. The book is Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care, and the occasion is the 25th anniversary of its initial publication in 1999. What is our excuse for this indulgence? The book has resonated with so many in the early childhood community and generated considerable interest. As well as three English-language editions with more than 13,000 sales, it has been translated into 12 other languages, while according to Google Scholar the book has over 2,600 citations. The book's themes, too, remain topical: we still live in an age of quality, in which quality is ‘what everyone wants to offer, and everyone wants to have’ (Dahlberg et al., 2013: 4).

But just as ‘quality’ remains very much with us, so too does the ‘problem with quality’, the book's main theme. We summarised the problem in the foreword to the book's third edition:

Could the concept and practice of quality welcome and include context and values, subjectivity and multiple perspectives, complexity and uncertainty, participation and argumentation? And if so, how? Without convincing answers, quality seemed to lead down a dangerous road, contributing to two disturbing processes: the increasing standardisation and regulation of modern life (which is accompanied by a rhetoric of individualism, diversity and choice) and the substitution of democratic politics by managerial practice (accompanied by a rhetoric of participation, listening and empowerment). (2013: xiii)

The book's conclusion about the problem was clear: ‘the concept and language of quality cannot accommodate issues such as diversity, and multiple perspectives, contextual specificity and subjectivity. To do that we must go beyond the concept of quality’ (2013: 7). ‘Quality’ cannot accommodate these issues because it is not a neutral term; the concept of ‘quality’ is inscribed with values and assumptions, not only universality and objectivity, but also stability, certainty and closure – values and assumptions incompatible with welcoming context, diversity, subjectivity and multiplicity. Indeed, ‘quality’ is a socially constructed concept with a very particular meaning: conformity to expert-derived norms that are presumed to be universal, objective and stable. As such, ‘it is a technology of regulation, providing a powerful tool for management to govern at a distance through the setting and measurement of norms of performance’ (2013: xv).

Practicing ‘quality’ is, therefore, a choice and not a necessity. By all means, we concluded, choose to use the concept. But then recognise you’ve made a political choice, a choice with consequences, a choice for which you take responsibility. In short, don’t take ‘quality’ for granted.

‘Quality’ is often used in evaluation, another theme of the book. The publishers of the Italian edition, Reggio Children, altered the book's subtitle from our original Postmodern Perspectives to Languages of Evaluation – a title we, as authors, liked and adopted for later English editions. The book offers an other language of evaluation, contrasting with the language of quality, what we termed ‘meaning making’, a language that

foregrounds deepening understanding of the pedagogical work and other projects of the institution, leading to the possibility of making a judgment of value about these projects. If the ‘discourse of quality’ can be seen as part of a wider movement of quantification and objectivity intended to reduce or exclude the role of personal judgment, with its attendant problems of partiality and prejudice, self-interest and inconsistency, the ‘discourse of meaning making’ can be seen as reclaiming the idea of judgment – but understood now to be a discursive act, always made in relationship with others. (2013: 92)

The book offered an example of pedagogical documentation as a meaning-making process, providing what we think is a useful introduction to this method of working.

Beyond these central themes, the problem with ‘quality’ and languages of evaluation, the book contains a number of other themes. It explores the importance of paradigm, situating ‘quality’ and ‘meaning making’ as the products of different paradigms – modernity and postmodernity respectively. It examines the role of social construction in creating images of the child and early childhood institutions, images that are immensely productive of policy, provision and practice. It offers insights into the pedagogical work in the municipal schools of Reggio Emilia, as well as into the important ‘Stockholm project’ and innovative curriculum development with First Nations communities in Canada.

Looking back over 25 years, we can see more clearly that the book is part of something much larger, a burgeoning movement resisting and contesting a powerful discourse that has dominated early childhood for a generation or more. This Anglo-American discourse, spread globally through the English language, is inscribed with an instrumental, managerial and economistic rationality that has advocated early childhood education and care as a solution to a range of problems – provided only that correct ‘human technologies’ are applied at the right time and in the correct manner. It is a discourse that one of us has termed the ‘Story of Quality and High Returns’ (Moss, 2014).

One reason for the book's relative success has been its resonance with members of that growing resistance movement. It brings critical thinking to bear on the Story of Quality and High Returns. And it also holds out hope that there are alternative narratives, alternatives that are richer, more complex and more satisfying, alternatives that hold out the prospect of getting beyond quality and everything it stands for.

‘Beyond Quality’ was very much a collective effort over several years by the three of us, and followed an earlier publication – Valuing Quality in Early Childhood Services (Moss and Pence, 1994) – to which we all contributed. This colloquium is, by contrast, three discrete reflections, each by a different author. A more individualistic approach reflects, in part, the different directions we have each taken since the book was first published – in our work, our interests and our perspectives. It reflects, too, the geographical separation between us, coming as we do from Sweden, England and Canada. But it also reflects a shortage of time to exchange, discuss, disagree and come to new understandings.

A final word: if you have any reactions or reflections to offer on Beyond Quality, 25 years on, we would love to hear from you. You can contact us via [e-mail].

Beyond Quality: Responding to the neoliberal discourse affecting education in SwedenGunilla Dahlberg

Beyond Quality is in part the product of a particular historical moment in Sweden's history and provides both a critique of a politico-economic regime holding increasing sway in the country and the outlines of an alternative to its rationales and processes. My own story starts 20 years before Beyond Quality's publication, at the 1979 American Educational Research Association conference, where our Swedish research group Curriculum and Cultural Reproduction gave an invited address. A young scholar told me afterwards that she had money from a large American foundation, and that because Sweden had very ‘high quality’ early childhood education (ECE), she wanted advice about her research question: ‘What is the minimum standard a preschool must have before children are harmed?’ I could not believe that someone could ask such a cynical question.

By then Sweden had been building a public ECE system for a decade or more, as part of a welfare state characterised by community building and a transformative democracy. The ECE system was seen as a public good and a right for all children, and many citizens and researchers had been engaged in this endeavour. I answered the young scholar that ‘We don’t ask such a question. We struggle to make our preschools [centres for one-to six-year-olds] as good as possible for children's everyday lives.’ This may sound naïve, but it contested the question's assumed economistic idea of ECE and its absence of any thoughtful connection to pedagogical work and its goals.

Reflecting back, my answer was also a reaction to political changes that were underway internationally. By the early 1980s, as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher came to power in the US and the UK, our research group began to see indications of how the discourse of neoliberalism along with New Public Management (NPM), its way of governance, was spreading through Sweden; concepts such as total quality control, public choice and human capital had begun to enter the educational system (Broady, 1984). We could observe how the ideology and economistic language of neoliberalism slipped into the administration of preschools, and then into their pedagogical practices. Preschools were also infiltrated by market logic: many began to market themselves, while parents were increasingly labelled ‘customers’ and ‘service users’, ‘services’ being a new concept in Sweden when talking about preschools. ‘Quality’ also appeared, to be evaluated by measuring ‘customer satisfaction’, while an array of rating scales began to circulate through the preschool system.

Decentralisation: From governing through rules to governing through goals

Research in the 1970s and 1980s, based on social investment paradigms and cost–benefit analyses, had shown that ECE in Sweden was good for economic growth, the economy of families and equality between men and women (Dahlberg et al., 1991). Despite this, demands for assessing productivity and effectiveness through quantitative measurement increased in the 1990s, and actually ‘colonised’ pedagogical discussions and practices. Some of us countered that the neoliberal and NPM discourse, with its associated methods and management models, were unsuited to the goals and conditions of Sweden's ECE system. Preschools (and schools), we argued, are not ‘goods’ to be sold to customers on a market; they are institutions for the cultivation and upbringing of new generations, undertaking symbolic and cultural activities that sustain and renew culture and society (Dahlberg et al., 1991; Dahlberg and Åsén, 1994). As complex institutions they should be governed and assessed in ways commensurate with their political, ontological, epistemological and ethical positions.

Other changes were also underway in Sweden. Early childhood education had previously been governed by rules, such as setting child:staff ratios and space standards for children. Now, under neoliberalism and NPM, there was a transition to management by goals, decentralisation and deregulation. Yet, this decentralisation led back to centralisation through the use of various quality assurance methods; at the time, we described this as the ‘paradox of decentralization’ (Weiler, 1990), as centralised control re-entered through new instruments of evaluation. Strengthening democracy and trust in professionals, combined with more diversity and creativity in the system, might have been the proclaimed intent; the reality was more standards, criteria, tests and scales to evaluate ‘quality’, along with mistrust of those who were supposed to implement the reforms, in particular the pedagogues.

Since then, ‘quality assurance’ and action at a distance, this particular ‘language of assessment and evaluation’, has intruded further into ECE in Sweden and globally. An industry of measurement has grown, becoming ‘the monster in the classroom’ (Lewin, 2023), a quality assurance monster intently focused on outcomes. Where have processes gone? They have become a black box, while schoolification and the subjugation of children's subjectivities, potentialities and desires earlier and earlier in life through tests, measurements and numbers have surged (Dahlberg et al., 1991).

There is nothing neutral and innocent about this ‘quality assurance’ process. Numbers construct and govern how we think, what we hope for, the ways we act – and hence us as subjects, as human beings. Over time, too, we have seen how the neoliberal discourse has changed the construction of the human subject in Sweden, from the social self of the original Swedish welfare state towards an entrepreneurial self – a self who is flexible and autonomous, free to choose, but also having to take individual responsibility for individual choices and risks (Dahlberg, 1998, 2003; Rose, 1999). We have become a society where each person must maximise her/his own resources by being assessed, compared, predicted, controlled and followed up, and moreover, must want this. It is a career as entrepreneur of the self, a career that must begin early – in the preschool.

Seeking alternative languages of evaluation: In dialogue with Reggio Emilia

In this situation some of us asked what else we could do than just criticise. Were there ways of contesting the neoliberal subject and neoliberalism's logic? The Stockholm Project: Pedagogy in a Changing World, begun in 1993 in collaboration with Reggio Emilia, and described in Beyond Quality, was from the start a form of resistance to these neoliberal changes. Reggio Emilia and post-structural theory inspired us to make change happen in pedagogical practice together with pedagogues, parents, managers and politicians in the urban municipality in which the project took place.

Through collaborative work, we understood that Reggio Emilia, like us (and the reconceptualising early childhood education movement (RECE) – first conference in 1991) had begun to challenge the decontextualised and universalised child of traditional developmental psychology through different theoretical and philosophical perspectives (Dahlberg, 1985). Reggio, too, was challenging neoliberal philosophy and models of governing (Cagliari et al., 2016). They had created a participatory culture in which politicians together with children, teachers and citizens were collectively engaged in the renewal of ECE in their city.

Pedagogical documentation: Another language of evaluation

Through our dialogue with Reggio Emilia, we came to understand how they had reconceptualised the idea of evaluation through their work with pedagogical documentation and a pedagogy of listening (Rinaldi, 2001). Beyond Quality describes how the pedagogues in Reggio systematically and rigorously follow and visualise, through documentation, children's and pedagogues’ learning strategies and meaning-making as a way of providing a space for democratic debate and valuation. It discusses how pedagogical documentation can also be used as a way for challenging dominant discourses, and opening for other discourses. It emphasises that documentation is never neutral, because the production of knowledge is always related to power, as Michel Foucault has made us aware of. And the book argues that documentation lays the base for engagement and dialogue, for an ethics of encounter, and for constructing networks and forums in which documentation of processes can offer all involved moments of democracy.

However, in our encounter with Reggio's serious way of following and tracing processes, colleagues and I found that there is always something that slips between the fingers when wanting to describe what you are doing. Encouraged by Deleuze's book Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, in which Deleuze writes that ‘A Life’ is carried by events, we have explored pedagogical documentation as a transformative force, produced and collectively articulated and effected here-and-now in the event (Dahlberg and Elfström, 2014). Brian Massumi writes, following Baruch Spinoza and Alfred North Whitehead, that we are always in the middle of the event, in the immediacy that is an experience of activity: ‘Something's doing … Something's happening … in the midst of it … What's middling in all immediacy is “an experience of activity”… ”change taking place is a unique content of experience”… “the basic matter of the world” … all this is felt’ (Massumi, 2011: 1–3).

As documentation is connected to a listening-with, it can meet the event and work with and through other elements in the milieu, in the relational field of potentiality. It can then function as a trigger that taps into children's desire and vitality, the very intensity of the event that is felt. Hence, in the same way that children, pedagogues and things can function as triggers, documentation can function as an active element, a transformative force, for the direction and constitution of what happens – though not every event is goal-directed, for that would be a form of stealing from the children and the pedagogues the power of acting and knowing (Manning, 2020a). It is rather a process, in which both a child and a pedagogue, in indefinite form, are researchers of life and makers of worlds, though more so the children, as they are not yet so constrained by categorisations and representations.

This has led us to ask if it is the case that Reggio Emilia, through working for 60 years with ideas such as the intelligent child, the hundred languages, experimentation, research and pedagogical documentation, has been able to affirm and embrace that which is felt in the event. What Erin Manning (2016) has called the minor gestures and their power to fashion relations, and their capacity to open up for new modes of experience, manners of expression, and new relations. A kind of artfulness, in which the pedagogue's affirmative way of working with multiple listening to what is already moving, makes it possible to take advantage of the intensity and vitality of the event. In A Pragmatics of the Useless (2020b), Manning brings in Whitehead's radical empiricism that refuses to place the human at the centre, and asks, ‘where has subjectivity gone?’

This is not a search for any pre-existing notion of subjectivity. Rather, Manning's question concerns a collective individuation and a pragmatic account of what makes a difference become resolutely more-than human. She states that at every turn the question is not ‘who did this?’, but ‘what ecology of practices fashioned the conditions for its doings?’ To do so, she proposes to work with an affirmative politics of emergent subjectivity. Like Massumi proposes above, she says that we always happen in the middle, through immediation, in which the body is always a world: ‘Not first a thought, then an action, then a result, but a middling … Not first a body, then a world, but a worlding through which bodying emerges’ (Manning, 2020b: 33).

This is a reconstruction of the pragmatic scene of didactics. It is an immanent didactics that has border-crossed the idea of action at a distance, in which the classroom space is manipulated from outside by measurements and procedures constructed by others, as if the children and pedagogues were disembodied subjects handling an object (Dahlberg, 2016; Massumi, 2002). It's about staying alive (Novosel and Dahlberg, 2021; Stern, 2010) through creating new ways of being together, that may widen our existential horizons through researching and experimenting with critical questions, without solutions already given. Like Gilles Deleuze has formulated so engagingly in the book Dialogues written with Claire Parnet,

If you are not allowed to invent your questions from all over the place, from never mind where, if people pour them into you, you haven’t much to say. While others, and while each child is bringing in her/his lot, a becoming is sketched out between the different perspectives. Then a block starts moving, a block which no longer belongs to anyone, but is ‘between’ everyone. Like a little boat which children let slip and loose, and is stolen by others. (Deleuze and Parnet, 1977: 7)

To accomplish this, pedagogues need to install themselves in the work, together with the children, through following the dynamic signs and traces that unfold (or are blocked) in the event. With further inspiration from Manning's work the following questions may be asked: What is happening here? What kinds of experiences are produced? What new thoughts and actions are arising between children, teachers and materials? What new perceptions and affects are opening in our bodies? This is a language that goes ‘beyond quality’, with its false dichotomy between process and outcome, and that transgresses social investment thinking and its standard-based performance assessments, which since the late 1980s have intruded into pedagogical work through the logic of neoliberalism and New Public Management.

Actually, it opens for Felix Guattari's ethico-aesthetic paradigm (1995; see also Dahlberg, 2016), in which he stresses the importance of responding to the event, since it holds the possibility for creativity of thought as a potential bearer of new constellations of universes of existence. Without this, he argues, we will not be able to solve any of the enormous environmental, social and mental problems that we face in the twenty-first century.

Getting beyond ‘quality’: Very urgent, very difficult and quite possible Peter Moss

Central to the book is a simple idea: ‘quality’ is a choice not a necessity. You don’t have to work with the concept, though you may choose to do so. One modest aim in writing the book was to make people and organisations think twice before using ‘quality’, to put a stutter (to use Nikolas Rose's metaphor) in the dominant narrative. We did not call for the concept to be abandoned; but rather for its use to be a deliberate choice, a political choice, made with an awareness that there are other ways of talking about what is important to us. (Dahlberg et al., 2013: x)

I want to reflect on these words from the ‘Authors’ introduction’ to the third edition of the English-language version of Beyond Quality. Twenty-five years on from the book's initial publication, I still attempt to work with this ‘simple idea’, choosing not to talk or write about ‘quality’ – except when writing critically about it. I have also dug deeper into the problem with quality, which lies at the heart of the book, as well as my own antipathy, almost visceral, to the word and the concept it represents. Yet in doing so, it has seemed like ploughing a lonely furrow, as the cacophony of voices talking ‘quality’ seems to become ever more deafening, with precious little recognition that ‘quality’ is ‘a choice not a necessity’. Whether in reports from international organisations, policy documents from governments or the publications of researchers, there are few signs of ‘people and organisations think[ing] twice before using’ the term.

Quality, neoliberalism and new public management

Why is this? Why has it proven so hard to treat ‘quality’ as a deliberate choice, let alone discard it altogether? Why is it so difficult to drop the word, and find ‘other ways of talking about what is important to us’? One reason, perhaps the uppermost, is that ‘quality’ is an integral part of our neoliberal age and an important technology in a constituent element of that age – ‘new public management’ (NPM). NPM has been termed the ‘neoliberal way of management’ (Vabø, 2009: 2), and described as ‘the reform of the public and non-profit private sectors based around the importation and application of management methods from private business, inscribed with the ethos of competition, the logic of the market and the demands of customers’ (Roberts-Holmes and Moss, 2021: 24). NPM's modus operandi includes the setting of explicit standards and the measurement of performance against these standards – ‘quality’ in a nutshell, with its will to establish conformity to norm and its belief this can be done objectively, with certainty and ignoring context.

As such, ‘quality’ is an example of how, under neoliberalism, technical practice has become first practice in ECE (and, of course, in much else besides). Leave it to the experts to define standards and determine how to measure performance; then let managers use that measure to govern services, and the children and adults within them. Treat ‘quality’, in short, as a ‘human technology’, one of those ‘technologies of government … imbued with aspirations for the shaping of conduct in the hope of producing certain desired effects and averting certain undesired events’ (Rose, 1999: 52). But first practice in ECE (and in much else besides) should be politics and ethics. That was the contention of a book – Ethics and Politics in Early Childhood Education – written with Gunilla Dahlberg (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005) after Beyond Quality. Technical practice, how to do things well, matters: but it should follow from, not precede, politics and ethics.

We need to distinguish here between subjects. If I fly in an aeroplane, I am all for technical practice to be first practice, guaranteeing I am being flown in a ‘quality’ product. I say this because there should be one correct technical answer to producing a good aeroplane, an answer that is universally agreed by experts and applies irrespective of cultural, historical, political or social context – in this respect, it should make no difference where I fly. In short, when it comes to flying in aeroplanes, I want universal standards and objective, certain and decontextualised measurement of performance.

But doing education is different to flying in an aeroplane. As Loris Malaguzzi put it pedagogy is ‘always a political discourse whether we know it or not … it clearly means working with political choices’ (Cagliari et al., 2016: 267). For there is no one correct technical answer to defining and producing a good education, no objective, certain and decontextualised standard of performance. There are only political choices to political questions, political because there are many possible and often conflicting answers to vital questions about education, such as ‘what is our image of the child?’, ‘what are the purposes of education?’, ‘what do we mean by “education” or “care”?’, or ‘what are the fundamental values and ethics of education?’ Early childhood education, all education, is therefore inherently political and contestable. To search for ‘quality’ in education is to misunderstand the subject, seeking universal standards and expert consensus where none exist. Aeroplanes and education are essentially different!

‘Beyond quality’ to story-telling

If it's become clearer to me that getting ‘beyond quality’ is partly about repoliticising education and talking about making political choices, it has also become clearer that it is also about the stories we tell about ECE, and the vocabulary we use to create those stories. In Transformative Change and Real Utopias in Early Childhood Education (Moss, 2014), I dwelt on the importance of stories as the way we make and communicate meaning; they are ‘the means by which we navigate the world’ (Monbiot, 2017). In that book, I argued that ECE was dominated by a particular story, what I called ‘the Story of Quality and High Returns’. It is, I wrote,

a story of control and calculation, technology and measurement that, in a nutshell, goes like this. Find, invest in and apply the correct human technologies – aka ‘quality’ – during early childhood and you will get high returns on investment including improved education, employment and earnings and reduced social problems … Invest early and invest smartly and we will all live happily ever after in a world of more of the same – only more so. (Moss, 2014: 3)

Getting ‘beyond quality’ calls for putting a stutter in this dominant narrative, and for telling new stories (as well as reclaiming some old ones). For, as Monbiot (2017) concludes, ‘the only thing that can displace a story is a story’. This chimes with the remit of the book series ‘Contesting Early Childhood’ (www.routledge.com/Contesting-Early-Childhood/book-series/SE0623), co-edited by myself and Gunilla Dahlberg for a number of years, which ‘questions the current dominant discourses surrounding early childhood and offers instead alternative narratives of an area that is now made up of a multitude of perspectives and debates’.

My contribution to this project of alternative storytelling has been to offer, in the Transformative Change book, what I call the ‘story of democracy, experimentation and potentiality’. This is a story of

an education built upon and inscribed with two fundamental values – democracy and experimentation – and a belief in the endless and unknowable potentialities of people and the institutions they create … It is a story that attaches the utmost importance to early childhood education, but for reasons quite different from the story of quality and high returns. (Moss, 2014: 5)

As well as setting out ideas about a good education, based explicitly on political choices to political questions, this story suggests how to get ‘beyond quality’ in our everyday language and dialogue. So instead of talking about ‘quality early childhood education’, which renders political choices invisible behind the bland mask of ‘quality’, we can use one or more of the salient choices we have made – for example, ‘democracy, experimentation and potentiality’ – to name and signify the kind of education we desire and to talk about ‘what is important to us’.

The passing of the neoliberal hegemony?

I mentioned my ‘almost visceral’ antipathy to the concept of and, indeed, the very term ‘quality’. I don’t just contest the word, I positively dislike it: for its contribution to the neoliberal reduction of education to the economic, the technical, the standardised and the managerial; for its stultifying effect on what should be a rich and varied medley of narratives; for sucking the life out from a democratic politics of education; and for hobbling ‘the ability to see the unknown and therefore to distance ourselves from what is already known, opening up to new possibilities of thinking that are not limited to the “naturalization” of solutions that come from a unifying vision of education’ (Nóvoa, 2018: 551). I would happily see the word consigned to the linguistic dustbin.

But that seems unlikely to happen any time soon. Since 1999, the use of ‘quality’ has if anything proliferated rather than reduced – and only very rarely, I suspect, as a deliberate choice. So 25 years on, and faced by the book's apparent failure to encourage people to think twice before using ‘quality’, does Beyond Quality still matter and, if so, why? It might, after all, be argued that an enhanced appreciation of the entanglement of ‘quality’ with neoliberalism makes the prospect of getting beyond ‘quality’ more unlikely. Taking on the neoliberal hegemony is, to put it mildly, a tough order.

But not impossible. In fact, the prospects for getting ‘beyond quality’ are better than they might seem, better indeed than 25 years ago. The necessity for thinking ‘beyond quality’ is urgent. For a convincing case can be made for the passing of the neoliberal era. Hegemonic projects, both ideologies and movements, rise and fall. Neoliberalism as such a project has lost both credibility and legitimacy; as Jens Beckert (2020: 322) argues, neoliberalism's ‘promises did not survive the test of the real world. Today, they are largely exhausted’. Yet at the same time, ‘there are currently no politically strong narratives that would point to alternatives to the neoliberal logic of competition, markets, and coercion in ways that are firmly guided by the principles of social justice and a democratic polity’ (Beckert, 2020: 327). Or as Antonio Gramsci (1971: 276) put it, 90 years ago at another time of crises, ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’.

The task before us, therefore, is to assist the birth of the new, ‘to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable’ (Friedman, 1962/1982: ix) – and not only alternative policies, but also alternative stories and alternative language. A small, but important, part of this process, it seems to me, is to get ‘beyond quality’, to understand its meaning and its uses and its dangers, and to consign it to its place as a valuable tool of technical practice in fields where that should be first practice – like aeroplanes.

In this context, I think our book Beyond Quality still matters as part of that process of understanding the nature and workings of the neoliberal hegemony; for analysing the role of ‘quality’ in that project as one particular ‘language of evaluation’, a language situated within a particular paradigmatic position and inscribed with particular values and assumptions; and for opening up to the possibility of other ‘languages of evaluation’, with other paradigmatic positions, values and assumptions, and working with different technical practices. Beyond Quality matters because it affirms the possibility of being protagonists who can develop alternatives and make political choices – and that because of that, other worlds are possible.

Beyond Quality and a tale of three early childhood projectsAlan Pence

This colloquium commences with a quote from the authors’ introduction to the third edition of Beyond Quality: ‘Could the concept and practice of quality welcome and include context and values, subjectivity and multiple perspectives, complexity and uncertainty, participation and argumentation?’ Addressing these challenges, transforming the essence and application of ‘quality’, was central for the three projects that I briefly describe here. The use of ‘quality’ in these initiatives represents what the introduction to this article calls ‘a political choice’, but it was as much a pragmatic choice: the need to use a certain password, ‘quality’, in order to secure funding to engage in transformative practice.

These three ‘interlocking stories’ began with a call from a First Nations Indigenous Tribal Council in northern Canada. The call highlighted a question and concern the Council had regarding their then early childhood training programme: ‘What of us is in here? Our values and image of the child and society?’ Analysis indicated virtually nothing. A similar question and concern arises for the term ‘early childhood quality’. What can ‘quality’ possibly mean if it does not ‘include us’ – if it does not take into account the context, the culture and the complexities of this place, these children and these families?

Herein lies a fundamental problem with how ‘quality’ in Early Childhood Education, Care and Development (ECD) is typically operationalised: ‘quality’ is externally defined and driven, while moving ‘beyond quality’ opens up to endogenous definitions – to other worlds of understanding, doing and being that lie beyond colonisation and WEIRD (‘Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic’) definitions of ‘normal/desirable’ (Henrich, 2020).

The First Nations Partnerships Program (FNPP; www.fnpp.org), described below, and its efforts to create space for other perspectives about ‘quality’, was early into its multiple-Councils’ partnerships (1989–2008) when planning began for the book Valuing Quality in Early Childhood Services (Moss and Pence, 1994). One chapter in that book described FNPP's community-supportive culture and context-sensitive generative curriculum approach (Pence and McCallum, 1994).

The FNPP experience was an important focus for a University of Victoria (UVic) ECD Canadian Summer Institute held in 1994. It was attended by two key UNICEF staff, which led to UNICEF's support for 25 international attendees from several global regions to participate in 1995. These institutes in turn led UNICEF to ask me to launch similar seminars in the Majority (Developing) World. In 1997 one ECD Seminar was held for SE Asia/Pacific participants and another for Africa. With support from the World Bank as well as UNICEF, the Seminar series morphed into several interrelated initiatives focused on ECD Capacity Development in Africa. The broader implications of this international work was discussed in chapter 8 of Beyond Quality: ‘Minority directions in the Majority World: Threats and possibilities’.

In turn, the multiple systems and generative approach that was used in Africa were employed in the Investigating Quality (IQ) Project. This began with a request from the British Columbia (BC) provincial government in 2005, with funding that continued for over a decade (Pence, 2021). Investigating Quality, with its Beyond Quality and Valuing Quality underpinnings, facilitated a major ECD policy change in BC and fostered many significant practice and research innovations more broadly.

In British Columbia, Canada, and Africa these initiatives continue to stimulate new growth, new developments and new leaders. They are three ‘Beyond’ stories.

Three ‘Beyond’ stories

First Nations Partnerships Program (FNPP)

The FNPP began with a phone call ‘out of the blue’ in 1989. The caller was the Indigenous Executive Director of a Tribal Council in Saskatchewan. He wished to discuss concerns the Council had about an ECD post-secondary programme it was currently offering and its desire to work with a new partner to ensure that the values, understandings and complex socio-historical dynamics of life in their communities would be part of a university-accredited programme delivered on-site in their communities. This was to prove a first for the Council and for UVic.

With such clarity of purpose, and with the Tribal Council firmly in the ‘driver's seat’, the opportunity to co-construct an alternative to conventional, colonially based practices in ‘higher’ education was not to be missed and a partnership was formed. Both partners agreed that singular, Western knowledge would not achieve the desired, context-relevant outcomes. Adding other sources of knowledge opened the door for complexity, contestation and argumentation. It allowed ‘quality’, relevance, ownership and empowerment to interact. One key source would be knowledge from the community – typically, but not exclusively, knowledge from respected Elders. With a diverse ‘pool’ of knowledge sources, students could consider and then ‘generate’ their own understandings and practices, to be followed by contextually sensitive evaluations.

An external evaluation, led by a nationally recognised Elder familiar with the Council communities, concluded that not only had the programme exceeded expectations regarding student completion rates ¹ and demonstrated competence, but that the most significant outcome was a change in the communities’ image of themselves as capable contributors to their own students’ learning (Jette, 1993). This central finding opened a much broader discussion about the possibilities of, and ways of understanding, ‘quality’ in ECD – moving beyond a micro-focus to consider broader societal implications.

Interestingly, at the same time that the Indigenous evaluator was finding a remarkable increase in communities’ image of themselves as competent, a commonly used ECD ‘quality’ checkmark tool was finding a decrease in ‘quality’ scores within the programme. Somewhat surprised, an assessment of those scores found they were the result of staff taking the initiative to enhance the ‘Indigenisation’ of their early childhood spaces, resulting in some materials and experiences being supplanted by others which were not encompassed by the Western instrument. That variance between exogenous and endogenous indicators became food for a useful ‘quality’/‘beyond quality’ discussion.

These early 1990s generative curriculum and community development experiences coincided with discussions Peter Moss and I were having about the need to rethink many aspects of ECD globally. These discussions formed the basis for the 1994 volume, Valuing Quality. The FNPP, and certain discussions taking place in developing Valuing Quality and subsequently Beyond Quality, contributed to the shaping of what became a ‘set’ of ECD capacity development initiatives in Africa that commenced in the mid-1990s.

ECD in Africa: Seminars, conference series, ECDVU and AS&I

As noted, ECD capacity development work in Africa in many respects grew out of earlier ECD Summer Institutes as well as learnings from the generatively focused FNPP. The FNPP and various evolving initiatives within Africa enabled ideas discussed within Valuing Quality and Beyond Quality to be more fully explored and operationally addressed across different cultures and Majority World contexts.

While the FNPP had focused on relatively small communities within a typically rural Tribal Council structure, the work in Africa engaged country-identified leaders from central governments, post-secondary institutions, national networks and non-governmental organisations, as well as smaller ‘units’ within each, such as regional and local governments, and local training institutions. These contextually sensitive, community-involving initiatives frequently encountered very different international currents of thought and action – currents that often had little regard for context, culture or diversity with claims that their externally formulated approaches represented ‘quality’. Enhancing bottom-up power and challenging long-standing (and still common) ‘colonial’ top-down dynamics were central objectives of the Africa work.

The ECD capacity development activities in Africa evolved sequentially, each initiative opening up possibilities for another. They shared a certain ‘DNA’: each embraced a commitment to promoting and supporting local understanding, local leadership and local capacity (Pence et al., 2023). The first Africa-wide ECD Conference (held in 1999 in Kampala, Uganda) had the title: Showcasing Early Childhood Care and Development Innovation and Application in Africa. That conference, and three subsequent ones (2002, 2005, 2009), featured African keynote speakers, but with a wide range of other presenters.

After the inaugural 1999 conference, the World Bank announced funding for the development of a hybrid (online and face-to-face) ECD Leadership and Capacity Development initiative: the ECD Virtual University (ECDVU; 2001–2017). The idea of a ‘virtual university’ grew out of the successes experienced with the African ECD Seminars. The seminars had brought together ECD leaders from many countries, opening intra-African pathways for sharing and learning that went beyond dominant North to South knowledge transfer processes.

These activities led in 2008 to the launch of an African Scholars and Institutions Initiative (AS&I), created as a forum to support not only African-based but African-led research in context-relevant ECD and enhance academic capacity in Africa. Seven different forums, with 8 to 18 participants at each, took place in various regions of Africa (2008–2018). Some led to draft, multiple-institution proposals that sought funding to move submissions. However, funds were never found for such African-led initiatives, while externally driven, non–African-led research projects remained active in many countries.

Shortly after the AS&I forums were launched, Arnett (2008) published a critique of the American Psychological Association (APA) literature. He made the case that the research published in APA journals is based on a ‘small corner [the US] of the human population’ (p. 602). He also noted that less than 1% of the subjects in the thousands of studies reviewed were in Africa, with no African lead authors. A 2021 follow-up study confirmed little had changed since. This absence of African voices exists despite projections that by 2050 40% of the world's children will live in Africa (World Economic Forum, 2020)!

The various ways that ‘quality’ for the majority of children in the world might be defined is but one of many unanswered questions in the ECD literature. The answers to that question lie ‘beyond quality’ – beyond the literature Joseph Henrich and colleagues describe as coming from WEIRD populations: populations that are ‘frequent outliers’ globally (Henrich et al., 2010: 1).

These ECD capacity development ‘lessons learned’ in Africa became centrally important when a new opportunity arose, this time in Canada.

Investigating quality (IQ)

The IQ Project was also the result of an invitation, this time from the British Columbia (BC) Ministry for Child and Family Development (MCFD). The request was to address the question of ‘quality’ in BC's early childhood services. Again, ‘quality’ appeared as a key term and ‘politically’ the term could not be ignored. Fortunately, by this time, 2005, both Valuing Quality and Beyond Quality had been well received and ‘Reconceptualising Early Childhood Education’ had become a significant scholarly stream within the early childhood literature.

The co-leads for IQ, myself and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, saw the intent of the IQ Project to be transformative and consistent with Beyond Quality aspirations. As such it was important to allay fears of change anticipated across the systems and structures that made up the ECD eco-system in BC. Successful transformers globally became key presenters for a series of eleven, three-to-five day ‘IQ forums’ held between 2006 and 2009 (see Pence, 2021). Each forum included sessions tailored for different parts of the eco-system: government policy and regulatory bodies; education and training institutions; early childhood professional associations; early childhood frontline care providers; researchers; and interested individuals from communities. The intent was to allow each part to hear from the same globally significant leaders in order to create harmonised reverberations that would allow for and reinforce systemic change. The intent was not to create a top-down, uniform way of doing things, but instead to promote an approach to ECD that was open to contestation and responsive to diverse contexts, cultures and conditions across the province.

Overlapping IQ's first two phases (2005–2009), the BC government undertook to develop a new ECD policy document, that came to be called BC's Early Learning Framework (ELF) (Government of British Columbia, 2008, 2019). The timing provided the opportunity for IQ to help shape this new policy. The Ministry of Education subsequently contracted the IQ ‘team’ to coordinate the implementation of the ELF, which included a focus on pedagogical documentation.

As the IQ Project's funding stretched beyond the initial four years, the Project became not just one ‘story’, but many. The IQ Project is now engaged with second- and third-generation actors, those brought into the ‘IQ family’ through earlier participant-leaders. With each ‘generation’ new influences and directions can be seen and felt, but in the words of one ‘first generation’ leader, the Executive Director of BC's ECE Professional Association, ‘You can see IQ DNA across the province!’ (Gawlick, 2020).

These three ‘beyond stories’ are not ended: their ‘DNA’ continues to influence new initiatives. Going ‘beyond quality’ is a continuing journey, undertaken by new generations that opens up new vistas and new ways of understanding.