Abstract
This article traces the travelling of neo-liberal learning discourses through and between international and local political documents and practices. It does so by focusing on professionalism in Norway’s Early Childhood Education and Care. The investigation explores how particular discourses are taken up, merged and transformed in relation to the Norwegian tradition of child-centred pedagogy. Here, neo-liberal discourses can be seen as travelling through political and economic policies, as identified in documents and white papers produced locally and centrally. This travelling is further traced through the discursive positioning of professional pedagogues, as they talk about children’s transition from ‘barnehage1’ (kindergarten) to school. The analysis shows how neo-liberal learning discourses appropriate and merge with traditional Nordic discourses of self-responsibility and independence, regulating spaces for professional positions in new, largely unnoticed ways in Norway.
Keywords
Introduction
In this article, we explore how Nordic discourses of learning in early childhood education and care (ECEC) (barnehage) are influenced by travelling neo-liberal discourses and how they affect pedagogical professional practices from informal towards formal learning. This challenge brings in and transfers certain epistemologies and domains of power into the barnehage (kindergarten) landscape, which might regulate spaces for professional becoming(s) (Ball, 2003). We are concerned with how knowledge transfer (KT) (Ozga, 2007), as part of learning discourses, negotiates knowledge production by reshaping structures and learning systems in barnehager in Norway.
The concept of travelling discourses (Bal, 2002; Ozga and Jones, 2006) is used here as a framework to explore how national and international policy documents reconstruct, reshape and reposition professionals through statements about transition to school. A focus on travelling allows us to map and identify how emerging international political learning discourses are introduced by, for example, Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) and then received and revised by national states. In ECEC, Ryan and Grieshaber (2005) argue that pedagogical institutions have changed so that workers and goods are transferred across national boundaries, reducing the individual state’s autonomy with regard to educational policy. Formal or prescribed standards that attempt to define levels of knowledge competencies across locations and inscriptions can be searched for in educational practices such as curriculum documents, assessment instruments and accountability systems (Ball, 2003). Our investigation is mapping forms of inscriptions of internationally and nationally travelling educational discourses. In this article, we investigate how KT of formal learning discourses repositions professionals by ‘moving […] between historical periods, and between geographically dispersed academic communities’ (Bal, 2002: 24).
To trace and investigate the expansion of these knowledge movements involves methodically mapping the routes from one historical site to another and charting the transformations that occur at various locations in the field of ECEC. One critical question is how an increased focus on formal learning in ECEC, initiated by politicians, discipline and reposition professionals’ practices (Ozga and Jones, 2006). Here, improved performance seems to be driven by competing discourses searching for different evidence and outcomes connected to quality (Braathe and Otterstad, 2014; Urban, 2008). Discourses around quality and professionalism tend to merge in ECEC (Urban, 2008), a phenomenon that is also present in Norway (Braathe and Otterstad, 2013). Official policy documents addressing good quality seem to tighten the regulation of institutions (Otterstad et al., 2015), establishing a certain discursive truth of professionalism (KD St. melding nr 41. 2008–2009, St. melding 24, 2012–2013). Hence, what needs to be questioned on a structural level is how ‘standards and rules of reason through which the child and the teacher are made as objects of scrutiny, interpretations, and administration’ (Popkewitz, 2004: 248) contribute to produce and perform professionalism. As such, attention in this article is focused on how professionals and children are subjectified through political texts as standards 2 for barnehage improvement (Ball, 2003; Osgood, 2009; Ozga, 2009; Popkewitz, 2004) when the political issue is transition to school.
This article gives an overview of the Nordic social pedagogical tradition of promoting children’s rights to participate and influence curriculum content and pedagogical events in barnehager. We describe the Nordic political scene in terms of the influence of travelling and transnational KT discourses as inscribed in political documents as evidence-based knowledge towards more direct forms of instruction as formal learning practices in ECEC:
KT is linked to evidence informed policy-making because it supports policy-driven evaluation rather than curiosity-driven research: i.e., policy-makers define problems and seek evidence of the impact of interventions; because it requires a focus on lessons learned from research (i.e., the identification of and agreement about what should be transferred); and because it constitutes practitioners as recipients of transferred knowledge, rather than actors who mediate or generate knowledge independently. (Ozga, 2007: 66)
This is used to illustrate how neo-liberal discourses are appropriated and merge with the traditional Nordic child-centred discourses of self-responsibility and independence. The last section of this article presents an analysis of the discursive positioning of ECEC professionals by the appropriation of transnational travelling discourses of learning in relation to transition to school. We start by conceptualizing tendencies of neo-liberalism in early childhood internationally and locally in Norway.
Neo-liberalism as travelling discourse
Critical educational researchers encounter enterprise politics on a transnational scale by investigating how neo-liberal policies and principles are enabling the market to operate effectively and are leading citizens to consumerism (Ozga, 2009). Neo-liberalism is here understood as a form of thought that reduces all social relations to economic relations; as Foucault (2008) says, neo-liberalism ‘is a matter of making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, into what could be called the formative power of society’ (p. 148). According to Rose (2008), neo-liberal discourses ‘control the workers as machines’ (p. 451) by plugging the professional teachers into a language they resist (Ozga, 2009). Ailwood (2008), for example, argues that neo-liberal policies are transforming early education into an institution that emphasizes the production of flexible, self-governing, lifelong learners. Furthermore, Brown (2009) says that early childhood educators worry that policymakers’ emphasis on students’ performance in academic tests (as the marker of a successful education system) will limit children’s learning experiences to the skills and knowledge found in those tests. That means acquiring predefined knowledge and skills instead of qualification as children who can participate in un-bounded environments.
Taken further, discourses of economic neo-liberalism forces move away from Nordic egalitarianism into individual competition and ‘trainability’ (Haugen, 2010). In a Norwegian location, neo-liberal discourses have been identified as a utility understanding of ECEC. Here, the significance and value of barnehager are connected to improving Norway’s competition with other OECD countries (Braathe and Otterstad, 2010; Otterstad and Braathe, 2009; Otterstad and Rhedding-Jones, 2011; Röthle, 2008; Vislie, 2008). Economic indicators and standards can reposition the professional into reorganizing time and space of the pedagogical work in the barnehage. This potential shift might produce new views of children’s participation, autonomy, freedom and choice as a formal learning paradigm insisting on assessing and controlling the individual child.
Vislie (2008) claims that education as a travelling discourse is ‘becoming a transnational domain of policy and practice’ (p. 170), indicating that the Nordic social pedagogical framework in ECEC seems to be losing the battle. Hence, the implications of international neo-liberal discourses might force preschool teachers in a Nordic location to become better positioned by ‘preparing for schooling’ discourses through teaching and trainability practices. On the other hand, OECD (Starting Strong II, 2006) says the Nordic countries should resist the discourse of readiness for schooling. This signals a possible struggle against the neo-liberal travelling discourses that professionals may not desire or are ambivalent towards.
Inscribing the study
This project draws on data from two main sources. First, we analyse early childhood policy documents and an evaluation report of the curriculum framework document. Second, we focus on data from two focus group discussions in order to illustrate the possible discursive positioning(s) of professionals in barnehager and early schooling. We map, investigate and analyse inscriptions of learning discourses in ECEC mainly in political documents such as Starting Strong (OECD, 2006), The Norwegian Curriculum Framework Plan (2011), a governmental white paper, St. meld. no. 41, On Quality (2009) and the evaluation report of The Curriculum Framework Plan for Barnehage, Everybody counts more (Østrem et al., 2009). These official documents establish perspectives from which economic, political and cultural changes in pedagogical argumentation about learning can be located. Additionally, we have ‘gathered professionals’ to join focus groups/collective conversations (Kamperelis and Dimitriadis, 2013). We have deliberately not followed the pioneers’ (Merton and Kendell, 1956/1990 in Kamperelis and Dimitriadis, 2013: 8) instructive four-step 3 process for conducting focus group interviews. We have in the focus group conversations assembled professionals’ expressions of social, discursive and material practices, through producing and reproducing generative words discussing and elaborating on the transition between barnehager and early schooling. We are not locating any specific truth in the individual joining these groups, based on a cognitivist approach interpreting participants’ motivation, attitudes and beliefs. We do not see the self (the professionals involved in our study and ourselves as researchers) as unified, coherent, autonomous and non-contradictory persons. That is why we move away from theories connected to personal attributions. From our views, self is produced through social, historical, discursive and material practices that are constantly working on the subject – figuring and reconfiguring subjects in and by multiple discourses and social practices, their effects and the ways they intersect, transverse and challenge one another. This self is always already the social. As such, we do not assume a truth out there, which shall reflect the expressions in our data to be efficiently excavated, reported and applied.
Positioning language
As mentioned, the methodological approach is based on analysis of policy documents and an evaluation report. One of the aspirations is critically to map and analyse KT concerning learning and transition from barnehage to school, in the chosen texts, both policy documents and expression from the focus groups/collective conversations. The theoretical perspective taken here is that language is not neutral, but carries logic, materiality, culture and history. Policy documents have as their mandate to conduct generalized description from different perspectives of pedagogical work, written anonymously, although its content can produce new pedagogical directions for the barnehage landscape. Our argument for conducting text-analysis builds on arguing that analysis of professional language in policy documents can contribute to unpack the discursive language produced. We do not limit the analysis to a search for meaning making, but look at its functions, how texts figure and reconfigure professionals into certain discursive domains. Such a consideration is supported by Foucault (1972) who claims that texts/talks create ideas and inscriptions for professional practice. According to Foucault (1972), the basic elements of discourse are statements, and statements are always located in relation to the materials of other statements, and therefore come into a position to claim ‘truth’, although truths are of minimal interest here. As Foucault (1972) says, a statement becomes ‘a function that cuts across a domain of structures and possible unities, and which reveals them with concrete content, in time and space’ (p. 15).
Similarly, conversations negotiate professionally acceptable ways of thinking and acting that feed back into language with refracted meanings (Foucault, 1991). Following Foucault’s principle of discontinuity opens for us ways of being concerned with not only specific meanings of words but also the speakers of those words (experts, politicians and professionals). Such an analysis traces new discursive regimes, which bring with them new forms of power and authority. To try out these ideas, we combined the text analyses with focus group conversations with involved professionals from barnehager and early schooling.
We will not compare different statements from the policy document analysis and the focus group conversations; we were particularly sensitive to the participants’ use of language in the focus groups, which illustrate discursive production, distribution and organization of professional positioning(s) and practices.
Locating the focus group conversations
The focus groups were conducted in two different locations in Norway: one urban centre and one provincial town; participants were drawn from teachers and assistants (untrained staff) from both barnehager and primary schools. In the provincial town, a key person in one of the focus groups selected and organized a group of participants from both institutions. This person had earlier been involved in a research project with one of the researchers in this project. Nine participants joined this group, while six persons participated in the urban centre group. The urban centre focus group organized themselves after the researchers contacted one of them. All of these personnel are involved in transition from barnehage to primary school, and the transcripts have been translated from Norwegian to English by the authors. Questions were not submitted in advance to the participants, nor was there a guide of questions at hand.
The focus group conversations have the status of microanalysis, which limits the narratives to be conceived as tendencies and illustrations of the ongoing discursive pressure of transforming professionals to become formal educators in Norwegian barnehager, which is a discursive shifting practice. Our selected extracts from the focus group conversations are used to explore what logics and power effects formal learning can have when transition to school is the thematic focus. We never wanted to give the reader a full insight into the varieties of themes and critiques the focus group participants raised during our conversations; we were mostly interested in their views and arguments regarding transition to school practices.
With respect to validity, we follow Lather’s (1993) claim that ‘… validity is an incitement to discourse’ and our analysis aims to avoid making people representatives of their subjective statements (p. 673). We therefore advocate a shift from viewing statements as personal to searching instead for structures, signs and social material relations. However, at the same time, we search for what frames our perspective, indicating ‘a shift from seeing what terms our seeing, spaces of constructed visibility and incitements to see, which constitute power/knowledge’ (Lather, 1993: 675). We continue to investigate how learning discourses (both formal and informal) historically are positioned in ECEC in Norway.
Changing Nordic pedagogical discourses of learning
In Norway, every child has the right to attend a barnehage. Around half of the barnehager are community driven, while the rest belong to the private sector. The Norwegian government supports all the barnehager financially regardless of whether public or private, and parents’ contributions are means-tested. Like many other countries (e.g. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Sweden), Norway has introduced a national curriculum for ECEC. The Curriculum Framework Plan (2006/2011) and the Barnehage Act (KD Barnehage Loven (Law) no. 64, 2006/2011) regulate the pedagogical content of play, care, bildung
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and learning in all barnehager in the nation state of Norway. Some central characteristics of the ideal of a good Nordic childhood are articulated according to Kristjánsson (2006) as
naturalness of childhood; equity and egalitarianism; democracy defined as lived experience for children; freedom, conceptualized as autonomy to play and to develop one’s own self; emancipation, or liberation from over-supervision and over-control by adults; warm and co-operative social relationship with adults and peers; and solidarity with Nordicness, or connecting with Nordic heritage through consistent enactment of distinct cultural tradition. (Cited in Wagner and Einarsdottir, 2008: 265)
These ideas shall be reflected through the pedagogues’ pedagogical praxis, which through its implementation is intended to realize the ideal of the good Nordic childhood. As such, the ideology of lifelong learning (Braathe and Otterstad, 2012; OECD, 2012) can challenge and regulate the good Nordic childhood construction. We are of course aware of not constructing Nordicness into a romantic and fixed idealistic discourse. Ideas around democratic rights are, for example, by Grindheim (2014: 310, quoted in Brogaard Clausen, 2015: 358), proposed ‘not to be a settled system or a defined way of governing a community’. Democracy is connected to the Nordic social pedagogic tradition, which is seen as a way of life where equality, solidarity and a good life are important ideals and always changeable and shifting.
Learning discourses in the barnehage have historically been presented and promoted in connection with play and social participation discourses (KD, 2006: 54). Learning was perceived primarily as belonging to school disciplines such as mathematics and reading and writing (Johansson, 2007). Alvestad’s (2004) Norwegian research makes a distinction between formal and informal learning activities in terms of the traditional school as focused on formal teacher-initiated learning, versus the traditional barnehage focus on informal, child-initiated learning. She notes that in the barnehage, ‘learning is closely related to socialization, care and development of the whole child’ (Alvestad, 2004: 84). Traditionally, the barnehage learning discourses have focused on minimizing formal learning, especially for younger children (Barne – og familiedepartementet (BFD), 1995). In contrast to the clear goal structure of formal learning, informal learning, according to Alvestad (2004),
… covers more the spontaneous activities and actions and is associated with more immediate and unplanned so-called ‘here and now situations’ during the day. Informal learning is connected with the interaction between children and adults in care situations and in play. (p. 84)
In the revised 2006/2011 Curriculum Framework Plan, care, play and learning are still listed in this order. However, in the white paper on Quality in Early Childhood no. 41 (KD, St. melding 2008–2009), learning, in the sense of formal learning, is given greater weight. This shift in emphasis is inscribed in the white paper as the promotion of ‘learning strategies, learning standards, and learning indicators’. Some examples taken from the St. meld. no. 41 underline this:
… when nearly all children attend the barnehage, it is important that the staff are aware of what and how children learn due to their age, to actively influence individuals development. Knowledge about children’s learning strategies are necessary to understand children’s development progress. (p. 61; our translation)
Under the title ‘Goals for the quality in early childhood and care’, new indicators and good quality are intertwined in the official steering document:
… new indicators shall be developed, information about achieved goals will be extracted through yearly statistics, periodic assessment, examinations and reports from local communities. (p. 15)
Furthermore,
… specific indicators tied to the development of staff competence, and the quality of the learning environment shall be developed. (St. meld. no. 41, p. 41)
Terminologies such as learning strategies, indicators, assessment and competencies are also recognizable internationally in Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). These travelling concepts have not been as visible in the past as they are today in Norway, especially in ECEC, as they now are so visible through the policy documents’ chosen language.
This challenges how the professional pedagogues of the Nordic countries traditionally have created learning environments in order to promote children’s curiosity, imagination and creativity. Children’s participation, as presented in the revised 2006/2011 Curriculum Framework Plan, underlines that children have a right to influence and participate in decision-making concerning their own daily life. As agents, children are entitled to be listened to and actively participate in planning and evaluating the barnehage activities. This view resonates with how Jensen (2009) regards professional pedagogical work in the Nordic countries:
The Nordic model’s emphasis on children’s participation, democracy, autonomy and freedom requires a lot of the children, because they are seen as agents in their own learning processes, and as competent persons who are assumed to engage actively in the surrounding world. (p. 17)
In the OECD’s Starting Strong II (2006), this Nordic notion of pedagogical work is defined as a social pedagogical tradition.
Social pedagogical discourses are threatened
Social pedagogical traditions, as mentioned earlier, encourage play, positive relationships, curiosity and the desire for meaning making based on activities that value both children and teachers in co-constructive environments. A holistic approach to an Early Childhood Education Programme traditionally resists a ‘school preparation approach’ (Jensen, 2009) as the Nordic countries have often opposed introducing formal learning standards too early in children’s lives. Although researchers emphasize that it is difficult to trace explicit theoretical approaches of learning built into the Norwegian and Swedish Framework plans for ECEC (Alvestad and Berge, 2009), evaluation reports from both countries reflect a strengthened pressure on formal learning issues (Østrem et al., 2009: 159). Everybody counts more, the evaluation report (Østrem et al., 2009), reports a shift in professional preschool teachers’ attention to children’s number skills since an increased focus on numeracy was introduced in the revised curriculum framework in 2006. This strengthening of formal learning can at the same time locally and globally be read as influenced by discourses of learning for instrumental acquisition of knowledge and skills, with tight connectedness to testability (Grek, 2009).
Consequently, professionals now can become less concerned with care- and play-related activities, and they can appear to prioritize assessment and documentation of children’s formal learning skills (Østrem et al., 2009). These tensions can be illustrated from the focus group conversation where a preschool teacher says,
We are concerned about following […] the children’s interests, so, when we are out of the barnehage for example [on a weekly excursion], we have been looking for letters and numbers and such. So after all we are a bit aware, too, but it is very much based on the children’s interests that we do it.
It seems that such a discursive shift, from free playing to formal learning, happens so fast that professionals in preschool education and in practice seem to lose track of what is going on. Johansson (2007) points to these political tendencies and encourages preschool teachers to find alternative ways of pedagogy to resist school discourses in the barnehage. He argues that as long as schools and local communities together formulate the pedagogical content in line with international politics, the power position of professional educators in universities and university colleges can be diminished. Röthle (2008) warns us against believing that traditionally constructed professional pedagogical theories and practice will continue to be accepted in today and tomorrow’s barnehage. Historically, the preschool pedagogues have influenced politics and practice by defining the barnehagen’s pedagogy, negotiating the Curriculum Framework Plan and influencing the politics. Now, however, economist and neo-liberal thinking, as argued for above, is travelling transnationally and becoming more dominant locally in the Nordic countries responding to quality and lifelong learning demands. This shift towards neo-liberalism emphasizes a turning point from values of the past towards increase in weight on formal learning discourses in barnehager. A close reading of the OECD’s construction of learning raises the question of what the underlying agendas are. As we see from the focus group conversations, we infer that the various professionals’ talk does not always fit into the OECD’s construction of the traditional Nordic social pedagogical discourse, which sees children as agents in their own learning processes. We have earlier been concerned with how KT (Ozga, 2007) negotiates and reshapes structures and knowledge production in barnehager, which from the focus group conversations seems to become a threatening of the Nordic social pedagogical discourses.
Promoting lifelong learners
Vislie (2008) is critical of how education has become ‘a transnational domain of policy and practice’ (p. 161). According to Vislie, the OECD policy programme highlights lifelong learning as skills, outcomes on tests, international benchmarking and cross-country comparisons. Haugen (2010) also claims that the rhetoric of lifelong learning underpins ‘an understanding that everything changes so fast that there is a constant need to change to be a productive and participating citizen’ (p. 379). Similarly, Walkerdine (2003) and Rose (1999), among others, explain that discourses related to an impetus for governing modern life, as can be found in the OECD policy programmes (2001, 2006, 2012), are based on the virtue of self-reliance (autonomy, self-regulation, efficacy and so on) and reflect mainstream and conservative psychology (as cognitivism) or sociology (as neo-liberalism). Rose (1999), in particular, argues that self-reliance carries the burden of individual choice which conceals the broader social context in which jobs for life have disappeared, leaving instead the fiction of ‘lifelong learning’.
Norwegian early childhood and care institutions have historically moved from being private charity initiatives to becoming accessible to all children. They have been transformed from being institutions based on an oral tradition to becoming an influential base for reinforcing children’s rights to lifelong learning (KD, 2006–2007 St. meld. no. 16). In Norway, ECEC has been co-opted to a lifelong learning paradigm since 2006, and ECEC is now included in the Ministry of Education (KD, 2006), along with schooling. Lifelong learning has been given an increased significance in Norwegian barnehage, which represents a shift towards focus on individuals’ choice. In the next section of the article, we present excerpts from focus group conversations to exemplify and elaborate on these discursive changes we have presented.
Readings of focus group statements
Since our framework is searching for the neo-liberal influence on ECEC in Norway, this project also aims to uncover and analyse the nature of pedagogical discourses by looking for the kind of ‘outcomes’ and ‘results-based’ pedagogy that are valued by neo-liberal systems of thought. In this respect, national and international political documents frame the statements in the focus group conversations. The aim is to hear the political voices expressed in shared talks through focus group conversations drawing on how these were inscribed in the selected policy documents.
Framing dominant discourses
The policy document, From the eldest to the youngest (KD, 2008), states that local authorities are supposed to initiate and formalize transition from barnehager and primary schools, although it has not yet happened everywhere. Good transition processes are regarded as one of four main important aspects for children’s school achievements, as stated in KD Kunnskapsløftet (2006a) (Knowledge promotion):
Good and systematic cooperation between the barnehage and primary schools, primary and secondary and further education shall contribute to facilitate the transition between the different stages in the education. (p. 6)
The focus group conversations were about transition from barnehage to school, a theme traced in three governmental documents (KD, 2008, 2008–2009, 2010: 8). In the focus group conversations, we mapped two major discourses inscribing this theme, which frame our analysis. The first discourse, individual and social responsibility, emphasizes democratization and is visible in how teachers in school and barnehage talk about preparing children for schooling within a child-centred social pedagogical discourse. The second discourse, assessment, time limits and special needs, links to neo-liberalism and emphasizes dilemmas of time, descriptions of children as teachable (Fendler, 2001) and the professionals’ trainability (Haugen, 2010). The project investigates how descriptions of practice inscribe tensions from these competing discourses to change the professional into ‘a producer of planning, teaching, organization, distribution and assessment of pedagogical practices’ (Otterstad, 2009: 394).
Competing and merging discourses
In the provincial city group, the teachers had started a pre-project to formalize transition processes. In discussing school-readiness, a schoolteacher reports her advice to children starting school:
You should manage to dress yourselves, go to the toilet and to be independent. Tidy your schoolbag and look after your things. If you can recognize your name that is fine, but if you are uninterested let it go. If you want to read and write you can do that but you should be independent regarding your own tasks.
A preschool teacher expresses almost the same sentiment concerning what the schoolteachers expect:
I mean that the children should know how to take care of themselves. That they look after their things and that they are able to listen to the adults, and do all the practical things, so everything goes smoothly.
The schoolteachers’ and the preschool teachers’ statements may reflect the Nordic social child-centred pedagogic tradition. Discourses of self-responsibility and independence reproduce a necessity to cope with practical tasks and to listen to the teacher, all inscriptions of informal learning. The argumentation here may be connected to a well-known Norwegian dictum: encourage children to become individually self-regulated and independent, with social awareness and responsibility. Discourses about encouraging children’s self-responsibility are connected to schoolteachers’ use of time, and the implications of such links may have effects on preschool teachers’ and schoolteachers’ argumentations in terms of transition processes. The schoolteachers’ time seems to be occupied by organizing and distributing teaching connected to the goals in the curriculum. At the same time, they prioritize working with independent children who are socially adjusted. As teachers, they want co-operation from children who are prepared for schooling and voice inscriptions from discourses that encourage children’s self-responsibility.
As our project was specifically investigating how transition to school was practised, researcher 1 asked the preschool teachers about their work in the barnehage:
Do you teach any reading or writing?
Yes. We teach the children numbers and letters but we do not teach them to read and write.
We played a lot of cards … and it became very popular and through this the children learnt a lot. We could see that they, who were not used to playing cards at home and didn’t know how to play, learnt a lot related to numbers and such.
The discussion on learning raised pedagogical and ethical questions as to how much, and what kind of, learning is right to impose on the children in the barnehage in the name of preparing for school. We drew the distinction between informal and formal learning and asked whether it is formal learning that is the challenge. These tensions come to the surface when one of the preschool teachers in the focus group says,
There has, of course been more focus on [formal] learning, and we have organized a group of only five-year-old children as a separate section in the barnehage. So we think we have a very good opportunity to organize learning activities because the five-year-olds are so interested, and as we now are co-operating [with the school], we can get to know what they are doing and we can lay the ground so we can focus on these things in the barnehage. … [A]nd we have been to a course related to mathematics and have taken this to the barnehage.
Furthermore, one of the teachers responds immediately by identifying a shift in the children’s language and mathematical skills:
I noticed a big difference with the children when I started this year compared to when I started with a first-grade class four years ago. They had significantly different vocabulary and concepts when, for example, we discussed geometric forms. The first day at school, we read a fairy-tale about the pancake that didn’t want to be eaten, and we talked about the circle, and then the square with four corners. They had some words for all the things I asked them, and when I asked them if they meant the thick or the thin they understood … then I can simply build on this and play along with their already understood concepts and words. I had never experienced that before …
When the children have developed different levels of mathematical literacy, the schoolteacher attaches this to the new practice in the barnehage. At the same time, she inscribes ideologies from the revised school curriculum (KD Kunnskapsløftet, 2006a), which represents more specific learning goals than the previous one did 9 years ago (Braathe, 2012). The teachers’ statements therefore reflect new discursive professional becoming(s) embedded in the statements from the focus groups. This is reflected specifically in how they organize children in age grouping for preparing for formal learning.
These professionals’ statements present different competing positions about transition to school, reflecting varying aspects of appropriating and controlling the discourses (Foucault, 1972). An individual and social responsibility discourse represented in the traditional child-centred discourses seems to be challenged by its connection to the discourses of school-effectiveness, readiness and accountability. Such a challenge is mapped as inscription in the policy documents appropriated and used by the newer neo-liberal discourse. This way, neo-liberalism can be hidden behind the child-centred discourses. This appropriation and merging with traditional discourses might regulate spaces for professional positioning. These discourses can be understood as what Rose (2008) describes as ‘enterprise discourses’ (p. 458), which can value readiness for schooling, preparing children for independence by producing flexible, self-governing, lifelong learners. By introducing lifelong learning as an issue in ECEC, the children are prepared to meet the enterprise discourse, which is justified and established in the logic of central ideas such as goals, means and methods (Otterstad, 2009).
Resisting the enterprise discourses
The document, From the oldest to the youngest (KD, 2008: 20), instructs preschool teachers to focus on children’s skills, with specific attention to the need for learning support. Many communities (in Norway) have had positive experiences with transferring information about children from barnehager to schools. Barnehager are therefore required by the Ministry of Education to provide valuable information to schools about individual children’s experiences, learning and activities in the barnehage (KD, 2008: 20–21).
A preschool teacher says that now preparation for school has been organized around a standardized report they fill in. However, at the same time that she tells the primary school teacher about her pedagogical work in the preschool, she implicitly protests against this new reporting discourse, as seen in the following:
I have been focusing on the children’s interests and learning skills, as their luggage. The schoolteachers were astonished about this, because their concerns were on what the children could not do. I don’t know if they have used this at school, but I have sent them [the school teachers] a ‘reading-list’ to inform them of each child’s interests. My assumption is that the school is more concerned with children’s problems. We say that they can sing the song about ‘Captain Sabeltann’. Additionally we write that his [the child’s] greatest interest is the study of earthworms. If this child doesn’t feel comfortable in the first grade, the school can build on his interest [as we indicate]. They [the children] have had a life before school, and they are carrying suitcases full of knowledge.
In this statement, we hear that the preschool teacher formulates a protesting story, resisting the standardization report she now has to fill in, by describing children’s interests and activities from the barnehage. This can be read as her protesting as to how the appropriations and merging with child-centred discourses are regulating her spaces for professional becoming(s). Furthermore, the teachers in school, in her view, focus only on what the children don’t have, meaning what they lack and what they can’t manage to do. Bringing in Foucault’s analysis of discontinuity, the preschool teacher seems reluctant to report children’s individual skills as a new regime of standardization practices. A re-narrativization of this is embedded in doubts and scepticism towards how teachers acquire and wield authorized power.
‘The problematic child’
The evaluation report of the Curriculum Framework Plan from 2006 (Østrem et al., 2009) documents that assessment and testing of children’s language and mathematical skills are rapidly spreading as practice. In Norway and Sweden, two assessment tools are widely used: these are Tidlig Registrering Av Språkutvikling (TRAS; early registration of language development) and Matematikk–Individ–Omgivelser (MIO; mathematics, individual and surroundings). They can be defined as regulatory and bureaucratically recommended tools. They build on ‘the Progress Assessment Chart of social and personal development manual’ (PAC) (Gunzburg, 1974), a tool developed within a special needs discourse from more than 40 years ago. As part of the special needs discourse, the purpose of PAC is to identify deviations from ‘normal’ development, focusing on identifying the ‘problematic child’. The fact that national and local authorities in Norway and Sweden are promoting such valuing and assessment of children in barnehage implies that TRAS and MIO have much influence on the daily work of the teachers involved. We investigated these tensions in the focus group data, which reflects that some teachers are resisting assessment while others value it as good pedagogical practice. What follows indicates this range of responses:
We are supposed to do the assessing.
Who says that you should?
The people in the administration [in the community] … We get tired of all the forms. Why do we register? And for what purposes?
It is OK to use the forms in the barnehage, but I resist sending them to schools.
You have to observe the child also, not only fill in the form.
I know there will be regulations telling us to ‘trase’ [she is making TRAS, the assessment tool, into a verb]. It is very time-consuming to ‘trase’ a child. If we have to register all the children in the barnehage, it will be difficult to find people to conduct such a task … Firstly everybody has to be trained, and, as I am informed, another district in town is now soon the next on the list [to be trained]. The most challenging issue is that the form is not adjusted to children with Norwegian as a second language. There is no tool adjusted to them … Today it is used on every child, also the ones referred to the school psychology service, the ones for whom we have to apply for extra money. We then fill out the TRAS form. We also send it to the school after we have asked the parents for their consent. This is the tool we are using.
We have to prioritise our time. Prepare for fewer activities and plans, and go for good-quality plans. Build on what we are good at. We have to make plans, but we have to evaluate and document, without saying we are short of time. We have to find the time. Therefore, we have to select and plan specific areas of pedagogical content for the children.
The tension revealed in these statements expresses the uneasiness of the teachers regarding the rationale for the assessment.
The travelling transnational discourses relating to the debate on the quality of Norwegian schools can be seen as a result of Norway’s mediocre results in the PISA tests. Finland did very well in these tests, and one of the aspects of Finland’s success from which other countries should learn, according to Norwegian discussions, is their focus on directing resources to children with special needs as early as possible. These discussions, among others, have directed the focus towards identifying these children in the barnehage as a preparation for school. TRAS and MIO have become the tools in this assessment discourse; this comes to the surface in the focus group conversations when we discuss the value effects of the tools:
Can you say if there are some positive experiences making use of TRAS?
Yes when we ‘traser’ we have to look for specific phenomena, to get a clearer picture. You have to observe and through observations you see a lot more than otherwise; it is valuable, but very resource demanding, because you have to be sure that the child masters what you are investigating. You also have to be organized doing observations.
We don’t do enough TRAS to become good enough. Some say that all three-years-olds should be ‘trased’. Everyone in our barnehage is trained, but it is usually the pre-school teachers that have the responsibility. This stands in contradiction to the idea that more than one pedagogue should ‘trase’ [each child]: this might be because it is so time-consuming.
When we asked the teachers in the barnehage how they saw the community administration’s position regarding profiling, the preschool teachers said they experienced pressure. Although their argumentation shifted from accepting and celebrating assessment to resisting it, all agreed that it is time-consuming. The professionals observe and assess the children, meaning that they have to reorganize the institution’s timetable and spaces and sacrifice some activities. When the discussion turns to questioning TRAS as a standardization tool, some of the participants are critical. TRAS is linked to children’s developmental concepts, such as categorizing and ordering. Since TRAS and MIO build on assessment regarding children’s age, children are evaluated regarding specific age-related qualifications and competencies. As a tool, TRAS is regulating in a reductive sense. The teachers’ attentions seem focused on language and mathematical ‘abilities’, privileging the discourse of searching for pupils’ specific ‘trainabilities’ (Haugen, 2010). Assessment is expressed as inadequate as a tool, regarding the cost of the preschool teacher’s time and erosion of their professionalism.
Technologies of assessment
According to Rose (2008), the history of testing was required by, and used by, those wishing to decide who was ‘mentally defective’ (p. 450). Rose states that what is significant is not differentiating persons according to their mental abilities, but creating the technologies to do so. By using TRAS and MIO, the teachers in Norway do employ the technologies of testing and assessing in terms of normalizing and naturalizing children’s subjectivities. Ball (2003), Latour (1987) and Rose (2008) term this ‘a centre of calculation’ (p. 451). Decisions are made in such a centre and instructional issues are created from it, enabling professionals to administer and control the registration of children’s subjectivities in everyday life in institutions such as the barnehage. This may be apprehended as an innocent act from the professional, but Rose (2008) tells us to be alert. If we let the inscribed construction of Nordic child-centred discourses, including ideologies of egalitarianism connected to technologies of assessment and timing, then solidarity and inclusiveness may disappear and an expertise of individual differences and individual differentiation may arise through discourses of regulation and achievement. This challenges solidarity within society by requiring testing and competition reflecting individualism through striving for individual achievement as a discourse in ECEC. Therefore, a political and pedagogical paradox arises when teachers have to deal with costly programmes like TRAS. The teachers have to register and control children’s language skills from the age of 3. The social practice of testing rationalized by the importance of detecting children with special needs as early as possible exposes neo-liberal discourses towards barnehager.
As mentioned above, the OECD’s description of the Nordic countries is that they traditionally build on social pedagogical values. Opposing this is the discourse of the individual’s responsibility for governing themselves (Foucault, 1991; Rose, 1999). This discourse can be heard and identified as travelling geographically into Nordic locations. TRAS and MIO in Norway and Sweden are standardizations, controlling and reorganizing teachers’ pedagogical time to work on the children’s supposed skills. We consider the use of the assessment tools TRAS and MIO as an oversimplifying and reductionist way of de-professionalizing preschool teachers, by forcing them to concentrate on testing and controlling children, embedded in neo-liberal discourses. There is a resistance to this in Norway (Kaurel and Østrem, 2009) that points to the risk of reducing children to investment objects (understood as worthwhile) with reference to the OECD’s use of education as economic indicators.
Early childhood as a formal learning arena
Contemporary political rhetoric highlights the need for good quality barnehage institutions (Otterstad et al., 2015), which are required for building a better prepared workforce for the future (KD, St. melding 41, 2008–2009). The individual teacher is here placed at the centre of ideas that simultaneously constitute demands and opportunities. Professionals are mobilized to embrace a continuous lifelong learner position, by becoming responsible for designing pedagogical content for these demands (Haugen, 2010). The emphasis on economic rationalism is argued for in the Norwegian white paper, On Quality (KD; St. melding nr 41, 2008–2009). A political dilemma examined in the white paper is to strengthen ECEC as a formal learning arena while maintaining its focus on social equalization. From this policy document, the Ministry of Education (KD, 2010: 8) has conducted a revision of the 2006 Curriculum Framework to include children’s own learning and development goals (KD, 2011). Hence, ECEC practitioners in Norway, following Dahlberg and Moss (2005) and Ryan and Grieshaber (2005), are challenged ideologically across borders and cultures. These two studies point to how notions of learning linked to political and economic issues serve as a powerful means of governing by producing new kinds of professional becomings, which might redirect and reconfigure the professionals towards a more outcome-and-results-based pedagogy. To govern is, according to Rose (1999), to ‘shape actions, processes and outcomes in desired directions’ (p. 4). Cannella (1997) illustrates the point of disciplinary and regulatory powers:
… the discourses and actions associated with professional institutions and practices have generated disciplinary and regulatory powers over teachers … Standards have been created through which individuals’ judge and limit themselves, through which they construct a desire to be ‘good’, ‘normal’ or both. (p. 137)
The focus, as well as the pressure, on barnehager to promote formal learning has created discussions among professionals about what should be learned and how this learning can best be organized. Such pedagogy emphasizes efficiency and accountability as dominating discourses, embedded both locally and globally in barnehage practices.
Concluding consideration: A shift to ‘schoolification’
This article has mapped some discourses related to constructed OECD models emphasizing the differences between the Nordic social pedagogical tradition and the school-readiness tradition (Starting Strong II, OECD, 2006: 141). The OECD warns the Nordic countries about a ‘schoolification’ discourse, claiming that
‘Schoolification’ has connotations of taking over early childhood institutions in a colonizing manner. This is not the intention of education ministries, administrators or teachers, who in many countries are strong advocates of learner centred education and active learning methods. (Starting Strong II, OECD, 2006: 62)
Our study reflects tendencies in the Nordic locations to adjust to other transnational travelling discourses of learning than the ones that traditionally have had an impact on ECEC (see also Brogaard Clausen, 2015). From the focus group conversations, we infer that the various professionals’ talk does not always fit into the OECD’s construction of the traditional Nordic social pedagogical discourse, which sees children as agents in their own learning processes. We are sceptical regarding the OECD’s simplified perspectives of still celebrating the Nordic pedagogical tradition as child-centred and as valuing holistic ideas on learning through play. A social pedagogical tradition appears to be an already reduced script in ECEC practices in Norway.
We took in this article as a point of departure KT discourses, described by Ozga (2007: 66), as linked to evidence-informed policy-making constituting practitioners as recipients of transferred knowledge rather than actors who mediate or generate knowledge. This article has identified inscriptions of travelling neo-liberal lifelong learning discourses, as initiated and approved by the Norwegian Ministry of Education. Such KT discourses ask for clear standards, quality improvement through assessment and testing of children’s learning abilities. These inscriptions produce and reproduce pedagogues and children in terms of preparation for readiness for schooling governed through making children teachable and the professionals trainable. Relatedly, Biesta (2005) uses the term learnification. Our investigation indicates that preschool teachers in Norway have to shift their professional position towards seeing children and childhood as investments into economic and neo-liberal rationales. As Brown (2009) says, under neo-liberalism, democracy is no longer a political concept, the economy rules. He claims that public agencies are de-funded and privatized and that the free market takes over, solving and regulating professionals pedagogically and economically. We argue that we can recognize such shifts in Norway too, in terms of a connection to how an economically oriented institution (NOU, 2009: 10) is supporting the Ministry of Education with statistics inscribing economical rationales supporting formal learning. In Norway, TRAS and MIO represent KT technologies inscribing these ideologies.
As resistance, we would alert 5 preschool teachers to argue against these ongoing travelling political tendencies of regulative structures found in many of the governmental white papers and policy documents mentioned here. An advice from the government is to assess all 3-year-olds’ language skills in the barnehage. ECEC is locally changing, framed by travelling discourses of learning and assessment that reproduces school discourses as new inscriptions for children and professionals in barnehager. These inscriptions signify increased weight on fabricating and turning the professional into a producer, distributor and organizer of assessments, learning standards, strategies and learning outcomes. Such inscribed shifts in politics refashion, produce, regulate and reconfigure preschool teachers’ professional becoming to prepare the individualized child as a lifelong learner, required by neo-liberal KT discourses.
To contrast, we question how appropriated travelling concepts of learning and assessment are practised for Norwegian children and professionals in the field of ECEC. We see in the governmental white papers and other policy documents, and in the research participants’ statements, that children are becoming to be thought of as effective recipients of knowledge, on the way to becoming responsible for their own learning positions. This shift, from seeing learning as informal participation to formal individual acquisition, can inscribe cognitivism and neo-liberalism into new barnehage discourses. Here, Norwegian politics can be seen as uncritically following international learning trends, turning professionals into governmentalized domains of expertise by controlling children’s schooling ‘abilities’ as outcomes and re-professionalize professionals to become formal learning producers.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Professor Liz Jones, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, and Professor Yvette Solomon, Manchester Metropolitan University, for assisting in the preparation of this manuscript.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.