Abstract
Drawing on a range of personal caregiver experiences and risk analysis frameworks, this paper offers a critical reflection on related policy and practices in the U.S., focusing particularly on risk and it's impact on early childhood education. It develops a critique of the taken for granted imperative to protect children from any and all risks, and of how in the classroom context that is conflated with the idea of protecting teachers and children from real and potential risks. It addresses the complexities of on-going anxiety in the U.S. about the relationships between children and adults in popular teaching settings, and the new categories of risk vulnerability that these discourses have generated.
Introduction
In today’s Hawaii, it is virtually impossible to find a playground space at an elementary public school that has a playground structure(s) that is available for children to actively play on. After a rash of playground-related injuries in the past several years, followed closely by numerous liability-related law suits, the State thought it better to simply close off each structure with bright yellow crime-scene tape, until a later time when the State could send out a crew to dismantle and remove each piece of equipment without replacing any of it (Johnson, 2013).
In another school-related story, I recently met with a small group of fourth-grade teachers, and we discussed how they could implement some environmental education curriculum that we were collectively planning. During our discussion on environmental education and biodiversity, I got excited about the possibility of including coral reef walks as part of some experiential learning activities. My excitement was quickly tempered as the teachers informed me that teachers were NOT allowed to bring any students into the ocean because a student in a nearby school district had drowned several years back during a similar field-trip activity. The unfortunate death of that child disallows 180,000 other children each year from experiencing ocean life in a place where all of them are surrounded by the ocean. In my last story about life in schools, I’m told by more and more male teachers and principals alike that male teachers are systematically placed in the upper grades so that ‘they are protected’ from any accusations about why a male would want to be interacting with young children in the first place.
I start with these stories as each deals with a topic of special interest to me and probably to fellow educators, the notion of risk – here risk management and risk anxiety. These stories speak to a new age, an age in which ‘the social spaces occupied by adults and children have changed, not just in place but in character, and the spaces previously allocated to fixed identities of adults, and children, and families have transmogrified’ (Jenks, 1996: 104). It is the last story I presented that is of special interest to me since it is a story about ‘no touch’ and the implications of that policy for teachers and children alike (Johnson, 1997).
In their early childhood textbook, The Young Child: Development from Prebirth through age Eight, Puckett et al. (2008) indicate that, The importance of touch and the [infant's] need for it have been of interest to researchers for years. Lack of soothing tactile sensations during infancy has been associated with delays in cognitive and affective development … in addition to the sheer pleasure experienced by both infant and caregiver that hugging rocking caressing, and patting bring, these experiences provide the infant with tactile stimulation that is essential to perceptual and sensory development. (p. 120)
Years ago in our local evening paper, a story was released with the following headline, School Breaks Up Excess Hugging. In this story, we are informed that teachers at this particular school in Minnesota are ‘telling students to just say no to hugs … teachers are doling out reprimands to students caught hugging in the hallway and they are punished with detention if caught three times in a day or four times a week.’ Near the end of the article the principal shares, ‘We don't have a hugging epidemic because we’ve clamped down on that … it has a tendency to change the atmosphere in school.’ These recently distributed stories of touch are narratives that claim, among other things, the following: • the most appropriate way to touch school-age children is with two fingers (index and forefinger) and only on the outside of the shoulder; • men can’t change diapers in child care; • two teachers have to be in the room when a diaper is being changed; • teachers must wear protective gloves during toileting procedures (i.e., changing diapers); and, • video cameras are appropriate ways to monitor the daily interactions of teachers and children.
In recent interrogations of risk management and culture, research illustrates the ‘insidious nature of risk and risk management’ and the ways that this discourse is re-distributing risk, knowingly shifting it from state to self through various forms of governmentality (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1990; Suaalii, 1999). As the stories I shared earlier illustrate, we witness this ‘re-distribution of risk’ in primary education with the growing popularity of ‘no touch’ policies such as the installation of video-camera surveillance techniques (Nanny Cam), no-male diaper changing in child care, disallowing children from sitting on caregiver laps, no hugging children on campus, and teaching caregivers how to appropriately touch/not touch children in their care.
Risk management is a structured process to minimize potential liability, avoid harm to clients, stabilize insurance costs, and protect an agency from ruinous financial losses. Most companies have policy statements on risk management, and in fact, I assume all of us work in institutions with a Risk Management office. For instance, the Risk Management and Insurance Department at the University of Iowa is responsible for administering risk management and insurance programs in compliance with the University of Iowa and State Board of Regents’ risk management policies and procedures.
These particular offices have typically developed a risk management program meant to: • identify risks; • analyze and evaluate the risks; • control or eliminate the risks; • protect the agency and the consumers of its services; and • manage any failures.
The formal redistribution of risk repositions the early childhood, primary, and secondary teacher(s) with new technologies (Johnson, 2000b) for disciplining the body as she/he is now afforded refined techniques of ‘self- and social observation and judgment made possible through modern measurements-allow[ing] self-examination and self-limitation to seem normal’ (Wagener, 1998). Given the earlier examples of ‘no touch,’ it is not difficult to anticipate how this redistribution of risk works, especially when teachers and caregivers are now forced to sit through mandatory in-service sessions to learn how to ‘handle liabilities, apply defensible charting techniques, minimize risk through identification and analysis, and consider their place in the volatile world.’ All of this is on top of everything else that teachers are expected to do in this global age of new appropriations and accountability (i.e., following Common Core curriculum, teaching to standards, conducting IEPs, authentically assessing all the students via developmentally appropriate portfolio approaches, etc.). These typically easy-to-use professional development models claim to help teachers manage risks. The following three disciplining techniques, the nanny cam, latex gloves, and the ‘two-finger touch,’ are presented as illustrative examples of larger, now common disciplinary techniques in early childhood education.
Nanny Cam
Know Your Nanny is ‘committed to helping parents nationwide take every step possible to ensure the safety and well-being of their children while under the care of another’ BECAUSE, as they advertise ‘WORKING MOM’S NEED TO KNOW MORE’ (http://www.knowyournanny.com). In a similar fashion, another popular multimedia monitoring technology is Kinderview, which advertises In our busy society, families face many challenges. KinderView is here to help. We put technology to good use by allowing parents to see their children even when they can't be with them! Our innovative internet viewing system allows parents, and other authorized users (such as grandparents), to safely and easily view real-time images of their children from a childcare center equipped with a KinderView viewing system. Our service provides parents with peace of mind, and the assurance that their precious children are in good hands. We are confident that after touring our website, you will understand why we are so proud of the service we provide! (http://www.kinderview.com/)
Seeing your child
KinderView.com provides users with color images of their children that update automatically. Parents and family members can better understand a child’s progress and development. KinderView.com provides the opportunity to observe the activities and interactions of a child, as they advertise: Users gain peace of mind from seeing that their child is being cared for by a caring and reputable team of child care professionals. Kinderized centers are, in effect, inviting parents to ‘stop by anytime’ to visit their child and see the daily interaction between the children and teachers. KinderView.com helps Users to better appreciate the efforts of childcare providers. (http://www.kinderview.com/) increased parental trust; trouble-free and dependable service; and security which exceeds military and financial standards.
New multimedia technologies offer new ways of seeing children, new ways of observing and understanding them and us, and new ways of cataloguing what we see, what we hear, and what we know. In a later section, I’ll discuss how this relates to regulatory ways that we normalize the field of early childhood education (ECE) for teachers, parents, and children alike.
Latex gloves
When 14-year-old Ryan White contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion in 1984, the boy and his family were soon under that wrath of seemingly all of the citizens of Kokomo, Indiana. For instance, neighbors refused to shake his hand or use the bathroom after him. Rumors circulated that he deliberately spat on vegetables at the grocery story to spread the disease, and when he attended church, he and his family were asked to sit in a special pew so members could avoid his coughs (Tomes, 1998). Only when he and his family moved to another town did his life calm down substantially. Yet, even today, after a long period of public health education which helped to ‘educate a whole generation about the limitations of the gospel of germs in the age of AIDS … there is no denying that many Americans continue to fear this disease irrationally’ (Tomes, 1998: 257). This notion of irrationality intrigues me as I consider public health policies for protective glove wearing in the early childhood center during toileting procedures.
Several years ago, when the close adherence to the blood-borne pathogens standard began, that particular topic seemed to pull in the most conference participants when I presented at most regional early education professional development meetings. My greatest local professional competition in the past several years has been the blood-borne pathogens standard and brain research. Between the medical epidemiologists and the neurologists there is little room anymore in the field for people like me who are attempting to proactively work against trivial issues such as ‘no touch.’ Hence my interest in the links to apparatuses of ‘biopolitic’ in neo-liberal societies – the efforts on the part of the state and other agencies to discipline and normalize citizens.
While reviewing several different companies advertising for these protective technologies, notions of risk readily make themselves evident. Some examples are outlined below.
My interests in latex gloves lie not in the necessity of these gloves for protection but in the bio-political discourse surrounding the phenomenon. As the advertising slogans profess, the ‘reason for wearing gloves is to provide barrier protection from hazardous substances; infectious materials, or contaminated items or surfaces.’ It is the ‘hazardous’ caregiver, the ‘infectious’ teacher, and the ‘contaminated surface’ of the child that I wish to problematize and intellectually interrogate.
‘Two-finger’ touch
Like many of the ‘good touch/bad touch’ curricula which have flooded the early childhood and elementary fields and coaching practices in the past 15 years, many of the teachers I work with today have been instructed by various ‘child advocacy’ agencies about how they are to correctly touch children in their care (Field, 1999). Extending only their forefinger and their middle finger and tucking all other fingers and the thumb close to their palm, many teachers today are told to use the two-finger touch when they ‘have’ to touch children, and when they do touch, ONLY touch on the outside of the child’s upper shoulder area. This touch is meant to protect both the teacher/caregiver and the child. Both parties should clearly see and feel that the sacred bathing suit zone, which the ‘good touch/bad touch’ curricula works to protect and keep safe, has not been violated with these extended two fingers. The two-finger touch, a touch which amasses all of a few square inches of skin for the toucher/teacher and even less for the recipient/child speaks boldly to how we are now expected to nurture our students. It is with this disciplining technology that as a teacher I am to physically nurture my students and help make them feel good in the world. This same brave new world which wreaks of havoc, the world of school shootings, the world of hand guns, knives, violence prevention, and aggression reduction curricula, the world of scripted mediation-training for children on the playground, is all going to somehow be a better world when our teachers are providing nurturing, warm, supportive touching for these children with the same two fingers the Boy Scout places over his heart while solemnly swearing to uphold the sacred code of the scouts.
I wonder what code we are upholding with those same two fingers? What are we training our teachers to believe in while we collectively subject them to this type of professional development advice. What are we ultimately teaching all those children we subject to these various disciplinary techniques? And now with this technology, the medical epidemiologists and the neurologists introduced earlier in our story have much needed assistance from another of their close colleagues, the pathologist, an expert who reads bodies like no one else. The apparatuses of biopolitics, the efforts on the part of the state and other agencies to discipline and normalize citizens while extending their reach and continuing to contain the field, providing redundant, easy-to-implement technologies which somehow keep both children and their adult caregivers more risk free than technologies of the past.
Reading a body of literature
Normative nature of early childhood education
Early childhood education (ECE) operates distinctly, like most mass education systems, quite conservatively. In concert with large organizational structures, the field of ECE operates with a seemingly high need for redundancy, especially as that relates to high reliability theory. The field which would proudly and boldly advocate for individualistic curriculum and authentic assessment, which would claim that part of the ultimate goal of high-quality pedagogy is meeting all of the developmental needs of each child (whole child) on that child’s terms, and which brags about safeguarding the child’s rights, then, in a theoretical oppositional manner, utilizes redundant organizational designs so that ‘the system as a whole can limit the failings of the people within it’ (Heimann, 1997: 102).
To spread the word to the masses, we have to operate under that guise so that we can easily train the hundreds of thousands of caregivers and the millions of anxious parents of young children to collectively recognize and spout off ‘developmentally appropriate practices’ in a united, choral response. Together then, we know that young children and the programs within which they spend most of their early lives are somehow safe and sound. Just as Heimann (1997) notes in his text Acceptable Risks, we’ve created a ‘culture of reliability,’ which systematically regulates by inducing ‘proper socialization of subordinates [to] … enhance safety by encouraging uniform and appropriate responses by field level operators’ (p. 9).
In her pivotal work Lupton (1999) noted that the centrality of risk discourse in relation to pregnancy (‘No touch’) can be linked to apparatuses of ‘biopolitics’ in neo-liberal societies, efforts on the part of the state and other agencies to discipline and normalize citizens, to render them docile and productive bodies. One of these apparatuses, that of normalization, involves gathering information about populations and sub-populations and subjecting it to statistical analyses. Through normalization, individuals may be compared to others, their attributes assessed according to whether they fall within the norm or outside it. If found to fall outside the norm, people are routinely encouraged (or sometimes coerced) to engage in practices that bring them closer to the norm. (Lupton, 1999: 61)
Alongside the normative static nature of early childhood and elementary education in reigning in and controlling all potential risks, is the notion of how else to control for risks and risky business in early education. The management of health, safety, and environmental risks associated with the care and teaching of young children has become more and more complex. The various agencies that child services and education fall under are ‘confronted with a seemingly unlimited number of risks and they have limited resources for managing such risks’ (Menkes and Frey, 1987: 9). A principal found in regulatory risk management is the concept de minimus risk, which states, The law does not concern itself with trifles … accordingly risks considered trifling can be eliminated from regulatory consideration. Risks that are considered too small in risk regulation and management de minimus risk refers to the understanding that some risks are too small to be of societal concern. (Menkes and Frey, 1987: 9)
Rereading the field as part of risk society
That risk has been thrust upon the field of early education is clear. Less clear is precisely how the field has reacted to notions of risk and how it will continue to address risk theory and its relationship to a changing discipline. Some of the more innovative risk theorists, Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, suggest we ‘have to begin to think in a new way about the world we live in, to find a new language to describe what is happening to us’ (Franklin, 1998: 1). They would suggest a transition out of and away from traditional attempts to conquer the natural world, the world that once was. In a political manner, attempting to maintain the natural world is a form of resistance to change. This notion builds on an idealized notion of community and encourages efforts to bring back the traditional family, reconstruct strong neighborhoods and reassert a kind of commonsense morality to hold it all together. It offers a way of imagining a secure society … based on how people should live and on the obligations they should feel towards each other. (Franklin, 1998: 2) takes the reality of everyday life as its starting point, recognizing that we need a new language to describe what is happening to us. This language is not yet formulated, but it has to be a language that resonates with our experience and can take us forward into the unknown, opening up the possibility of living creatively with risk and uncertainty. (Franklin, 1998, p. 2)
Grove-White illustrates that we need a ‘shared recognition of new forms of risk and uncertainty and a political commitment to widening the political process to include public participation in decisions about risk’ (Franklin, 1998: 4). The shared recognition might help us all more fully recognize and understand the implications of genetic intervention by science and industry, and exactly how ‘superbugs are immune to antibiotics.’ Risk society refuses to let us write off risks as simple fate as it presses us to politically ‘confront the ‘consequences of our actions, and with the consequences … of our pride and inability to recognize and respect the fragility of the world we seek to control’ (Franklin, 1998: 4) as we take action and critically intervene.
As fundamentally more activist in perspective, risk society pushes us to make decisions. In her book, The Politics of Risk Society, Franklin (1998) notes that, Risk society is more demanding. It demands active participation through all layers of social, political and economic activity. Here risks are not just moments of danger as we forge forward: they are the process itself. To engage with this process, we need a new public policy … [which] includes direct and continuous dialogue between the public, experts, and politicians about the decisions which lead to risks being taken. (Franklin, 1998: 8) is not simply a matter of fate but a matter of decisions and options, science and politics, industries, markets and capital. This is not an outside risk but a risk generated right inside each person’s life and inside a variety of institutions … we can no longer take traditional securities for granted. The less we rely on traditional securities, the more risks we have to negotiate. The more risks, the more decisions and choices we have to make (Beck, 1998: 10). Nature becomes permeated by industrialization and as tradition is dissolved, new types of incalculability emerge and we move into a new stage of risk, manufactured uncertainty. Now manufactured uncertainty means that risk has become an inescapable part of our lives and everybody is facing unknown and barely calculable risks. Risk becomes another word for ‘nobody knows.’ We no longer choose to take risks, we have them thrust upon us. We are living on a ledge—in a random risk society, from which nobody can escape. Our society has become riddled with risks. Calculating and managing risks which nobody really knows has become one of our main preoccupations. (Beck, 1998: 12)
Who are we in this, continuously (re)written, ‘body’ of literature?
In this late-modern period, personal actions and personal aspirations take on a different form. The previously centered, continuous self of modernity becomes more of a reflexive project involving disparate interactional plans rendered coherent through a revisable narrative of self identity. And in the same manner that institutions hold together through the ingenious practice of ‘crisis management’, the reflexive project of the self sustains through the artfully renewable strategies of auto/biographical stories. (Jenks, 1996: 104)
If, as Giddens argues, ‘risk refers to a world we are both exploring, and seeking to normalize and control’ (Giddens, 1998: 27), then in light of my participation in a risk society, I must politically take a certain stance for my own well-being and the well-being of those I have relationships with, including children, teachers, caregivers, children I coach, family and friends. As science and technology continue to intrude more and more into my life, in risk society I have to have a much more dialogic or engaged relationship with science and technology than used to be the case. We cannot simply accept the findings which scientists produce. Whenever someone decides what to eat, what to have for breakfast, whether to drink decaffeinated or ordinary coffee, that person makes a decision in the context of conflicting, changeable scientific and technological information. There is no way out of this situation – we are all caught up in it, even if we choose to proceed ‘as if in ignorance.’ (Giddens, 1998: 32)
Identity has a history (Sarup, 1996: 14) and the collective identities of teachers of young children have to be recognized as historically, recognizably different today, identities marked by an era of no touch. Gone then, in my reading of the field and the identities of those I know and those I teach, is the notion of the nurturant caregiver, the warm, loving, caring person I knew well, part of that person was me, part was my colleagues who interacted with children very much like me. My initial read of the identity of each of these people tended to be a dispassionate, nostalgic, fate-filled traditional rendition. A read dominated by resistance to natural phenomena and an attempt to then naively and romantically seek that which is lost. Tradition is hard to break! Rereading these identities via risk theory, I have more hope that dialogical interactions with colleagues like those of you reading this narrative will proactively and politically reposition each of us as people who critically contribute to how we think about modern life (Fox, 1999).
Respective of Foucault, ‘discipline produces a new sort of individual self’ (Calhoun, 1994: 9). This self operates in the new risk society, a self-governed and governing by new technologies of the teacher/self, technologies that I can incorporate into my pedagogical practices, knowingly submit to and abide by in a natural, non- resistant manner. Or, in a kind of opposition to a ‘culture of contentment,’ I can and do recognize the discourse of risk society, and so these technologies can and will be positioned differently: I can question their usefulness to my teaching practices, their assistance to me as an administrator, their assistance to and for the children I care for, and their assistance to the larger field of early education. Referring again to Jane Franklin’s commentary, I’m recognizing that ‘risk society is more demanding. It demands active participation through all layers of social, political and economic activity.’ I’m also attempting to understand that old theoretical distinctions are being transcended in Latour’s hybrid world of today (Latour, 1995). In concert with Beck’s outlook on the complexity of this risk society, I understand more how ‘risks are man-made hybrids. They include and combine politics, ethics, mathematics, mass media, technologies, cultural definitions and precepts’ (Beck, 1998: 11). ‘Risks are not just moments of danger as we forge forward: they are the process itself’ (Woollacott, 1998a: 49).
As I personally ‘forge forward’ with further study of ‘no touch’ and risk theory, which are individually and collectively interrogating different aspects of risk society – studying processes, policies, and procedures that impact the many different students and other professionals which we work with in our respective institutions and disciplines – I am not attempting to simply be involved in ‘evaluating and suitably managing, such that all [risks] may be predicted and countered, so risks, accidents and insecurities are minimized or prevented altogether’ (Fox, 1999). Instead, I am taking up the ‘more difficult task of thinking fundamentally against the normalization of the epistemological and institutional forms of our political modernity’ (Scott, 1999: 20).
Before closing, I’d like to take a moment to pay homage one last time to our medical colleagues, those professionals who, during the early days of the child study movement and in the recent past with neuroscience advancements, have really placed early education firmly on the theoretical map as only science and scientists can. Several pages back the epidemiologists and neurologists were joined in this story by another of their close colleagues, the pathologist –’who reads bodies like no one else.’ It would be fitting to complete this tale, to study the body of ECE, this rigid cadaver, with a visit from one more medical specialist, the forensic pathologist. Clearly only she/he can tell us, with any informed degree of certainty, exactly what happened to cause the death of touch in the care of young children!
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.