Abstract
As this issue of Global Studies of Childhood goes to press, major political parties in the United States are endorsing presidential nominees to run for office in what is turning out to be one of the most divisive elections in recent memory. At the heart of these highly charged political debates are important questions about belonging, responsibility and ethics, and about how these are represented and contested in the life in the world’s most prosperous nation. But these are questions with which all nations grapple – whether in the processes of political and social change, the formalized structures and practices of institutions such as schooling and education or in the public and private cultural politics of everyday life. They are also questions with profound implications for children and childhood, which remains a site of contestation and potential transformation.
As a number of articles in this issue illustrate, questions about entitlements to be and belong are intricately connected to the ways in which childhood is represented, understood and managed. Just as children are subject to the effects of political and social dynamics, they are also simultaneously active, agentive participants in social life. As Karen Guo and Carmen Dalli (this issue), drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, observe, ‘children’s participation in everyday routines and activities can be seen as rational repetitions of experiences that children choose to undertake and repeat, thus (potentially) producing change’. This is not to suggest that children mindlessly mimic and thereby reproduce that which they observe through their experience of everyday life, but rather that their subjectivities and social belongings are being actively constituted through their negotiation of power, desire and agency in dialogue with social and cultural norms. For Guo and Dalli, whose study focused on two Chinese immigrant children in an English-speaking early childhood centre in New Zealand, agency is not merely a ‘naturally-occurring impetus’, but rather it is an important means by which children ‘establish and maintain a sense of belonging’. The child participants in Guo and Dalli’s study are motivated by a desire to create bonds of friendship and belonging and employ a range of agentive strategies for navigating their cultural identities within their early childhood centre.
The article by Tina Stratigos explores the role of power and desire in young children’s navigations of the politics of belonging in Australian family day-care settings. Informed by concepts of assemblage and desire in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Stratigos analyses how processes of categorization function in one child’s navigation of the politics of belonging. Her findings offer an important counterpoint to developmentalist notions of childhood as developing sequentially through a series of stages, showing instead how a child’s desire and agency come into play in the dynamic processes of categorization through which young children’s belongings are in part constituted.
Lisa Minicozzi takes up questions of agency and autonomy from the perspective of early childhood educators working in the kindergarten programme of a suburban New York school. Her three-stage interviews with four teachers explore the tensions created by accountability discourse and its material effects, as teachers struggle to navigate the professional demands whose requirements sit at odds with their understandings of developmentally appropriate practice. Her study highlights concerns about how early childhood educators can maintain a focus on meeting the broad needs of children in their early years of schooling, in light of demands for a competition-driven focus on academic achievement that has emerged from the standards movement. Despite concerns about the detrimental effects of pre-packaged curricula and accountability measures in the classroom, she argues that appropriately supported teachers with well-developed understandings of the broad range of children’s needs can continue to make a difference by providing joyful and imaginative learning experiences.
Ethics and responsibility are central concerns in the articles by both Anna Palmer and Natasha Wardman. Palmer’s study, conducted in a Swedish preschool, analyses how ethical dilemmas emerge in the context of a learning project in which children’s ‘relations to the city’ are explored. Drawing on posthuman and immanent theory in the work of Haraway and Puig de la Bellacosa, as well as philosophers of ethics such as Levinas and Bauman, Palmer is concerned with the ways that ‘things, technology, humans and discourses are mutually involved in the production of ethical dilemmas’ (this issue) in her study site. In Palmer’s study, preschool children learning about tall buildings around the world shift from a mathematical and scientific focus on measuring and comparing details to initiating and engaging in dialogue about ethical issues that emerge as their own experience intersects with new images and information they encounter. This in turn presents ethical dilemmas for teachers in the preschool, who find themselves learning with the children about how difficult questions and troubling situations can be explored and renegotiated in meaningful ways.
Natasha Wardman’s article interrogates the way that the concept of responsibility is constructed in education policy documents concerned with student conduct, welfare and values. Wardman argues that the idealized subject of Australian education policy is persistently imagined in neoliberal terms – as an accountable and self-regulating citizen whose active participation in civic life is defined by consumption and future workforce participation. Examining key education policy documents, she shows how the language and ideals used by government in reference to responsibility are largely reliant on ‘economic validation and neoconservative discourses that emphasise standardisation, conformity, discipline and docility through self-governance’ (Wardman, this volume). For Wardman, whose understanding of ethical responsibility is informed by the work of Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler, the predominance of neoliberal versions of responsibility undermines other forms of responsibility that are predicated on unconditional responses to, care for and recognition of the other.
For a number of authors in this issue, the centrality of normative perspectives in both cultural and educational sites emerges as a concern in the politics of belonging and socially just practices. The representation of belonging emerges as a concern in Christopher Drew’s multimodal discourse analysis of television advertisements featuring families with same-sex parents. Drew’s article shows how advertising functions to construct social imaginaries ‘of what it means to be a member of a same-sex family at the turn of the 21st Century’ (Drew, this volume). For Drew, whose work is informed by Foucauldian scholarship concerned with childhood normativity, television advertising idealizes and promotes same-sex parented families according to deeply conservative norms of gender and social class. That being the case, he argues that the terms by which same-sex parented families are rendered visible within broader narratives of family do not ‘necessarily hail an era of increased acceptance of diversity of childhood or parenthood subjectivities’.
In their interrogation of cross-cultural teaching experiences, Samara Madrid, Nikki Baldwin and Shashidar Belbase’s article, Feeling Culture, explores the emotional experiences of early childhood educators from the United States during a teaching visit to a Nepalese preschool. Drawing on qualitative data generated using a variety of techniques, these authors identify how the emotional experiences of teachers in her study are shaped by discourses of the ‘privileged Westerner’ and ‘marginalized Other’. These discourses, they argue, together with a largely uncritical fervour for their own American-based educational ideals, prevented the visiting teachers from recognizing and critically examining their own ethnocentric views about early childhood education. Rather than coming to a greater understanding of ‘how their emotional responses are embedded in their national identities and cultural ideologies’, the cross-cultural teaching experience was drawn upon as an experiential justification for their pre-existing stereotypes and preferred teaching practices.
The colloquium by Samantha Punch picks up some similar themes in a discussion of what Punch argues is a significant gap between ‘academic discourse of childhood studies and arenas of policy and practice’. Punch highlights three aspects of what she sees as the multi-disciplinary, rather than inter-disciplinary, nature of childhood studies. The first of these pertains to the tendency for studies of childhood to maintain a disciplinary-specific focus. She points out, for example, the tendency for studies of childhood within distinct disciplines such as geography or sociology to publish predominantly in specific journals catering primarily to their disciplines and to similarly to situate their work largely in dialogue with others working in their own disciplinary field. She also considers how such tendencies are an effect of broader professional, institutional and sectoral constraints within which scholars of childhood must operate, as well as a consequence of theoretical and disciplinary-specific assumptions, nomenclatures and conventions. Second, she points to tensions and disjunctures in the theoretical constructs typically associated with childhood studies and their translation into policy and practice. Third, Punch highlights the need for greater dialogue between scholars of Majority and Minority World childhoods. She considers how asymmetries of power and resources, as well as cultural specificities, present a range of complexities that require new approaches to crossing disciplinary and geopolitical borders in the study of childhoods.
Tamara Cumming’s review of Global Perspectives on Human Capital in Early Childhood Education: Reconceptualizing Theory, Policy, and Practice, edited by Lightfoot-Rueda and Peach, draws our attention to the global contexts of education and critiques of human capital discourse ‘at a time where early childhood education, and children, are the focus of intense regulatory and rhetorical attention’ (Cumming, this issue).
In multiple ways, the contributors to this issue direct our attention to questions about entitlements to be and belong, about the conceptual and constitutive functions of agency and about responsibility and ethical dialogues in a variety of educational, policy and disciplinary contexts. These important issues are critical to our understandings of childhood and children’s experiences, just as they are played out in the broader events shaping world debates.