Abstract
The study of popular culture and children has a long and intimate relationship in many fields within the humanities and social sciences, yet in the applied field of Early Childhood Education and Care, the relationship is rather fraught. Employing a Foucauldian genealogical approach, I trace the ways in which intellectual traditions and discourses (i.e. history, politics, and sacrosanct values of European aesthetics and childhood innocence) have shaped contemporary understandings and debates in the field. With attention to Foucault’s concepts of power/knowledge couplet, and discursive archives, my focus in on how these axiomatic “myths” have assembled as “regimes of truth.” I thus argue for the need for the field of Early Childhood Education and Care to engage in and consider more contextualized, nuanced, and empirically oriented studies of young children and their engagement with consumer culture.
Introduction
A central contemporary tension in the field of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) globally, is how practitioners and teacher educators should address young children’s interest in consumer culture. For instance, “Should teachers include media and popular culture in ECEC programs” and “Should media and learning be addressed in ECEC teacher education programs”? “If so, how? And more generally, “What is the value of popular culture in young children’s social and emotional lives?” Answers to these questions have come from researchers outside of ECEC, from developmental and educational psychologists studying children in labs, and sometimes (but less often) from socioculturally inclined researchers working in literacy studies and childhood studies. Within the field, they are answered in practice by early childhood teachers, and teacher education instructors, whose beliefs are often informed by program ideologies and various educational philosophies (Henward, 2012), but also can be based on folk theories (Ritter, 2016) reflective of their own sociocultural location (Seiter, 1999). Rarely are they answered by early childhood researchers (as defined by discipline), who are also teacher educators. As I will show, this has significant implications for how media research is understood in practice within the field of ECEC.
As a media researcher concerned with the educative and social worlds of children, I have noticed that in classrooms, homes, and in other contexts children occupy, there is often great anxiety about children and their engagement with media culture (Henward, 2015a). At ECEC research conferences, particularly in presentations of media, popular, and consumer culture, this anxiety is palpable. Among scholars and researchers who call ECEC home, it seems it has become rather common to raise concerns about the appropriateness of popular culture for young children. These concerns range from curiosity and skepticism, to heated conversations that show outright distain and animosity. Through a cursory reflection of my experiences at conferences, I have noticed some rough patterns; in developmental circles people were often concerned with popular culture “taking over” childhood, hindering children’s learning in school, and causing adverse effects on the physical and neurological development of children. And discussions at conferences within more critical circles were typically no less concerned about the harmful role of media in the lives of young children, though there, people often took issue with commercialization of childhood, and children being interpellated (Althusser, 1971) by sexist, racist, and classist messages in some media. In question and answer sessions following empirical presentations, I noticed it was not uncommon for people, (including ECEC researchers) to offer personal stories and testimonies of why their children were not allowed to play or watch princesses, or watch Disney (and somehow it
One of the necessary tasks of post-structural research, particularly in the pragmatically and developmentally oriented field of early ECEC, is to elucidate how theoretical models concerned with power and language and which emphasize ruptures, tensions, inconsistencies, and instability operationalize in everyday life. In this article, I focus on media research in the field of ECEC, to investigate how existing constructions, history, politics, and sacrosanct values, have configured as knowledge in the debate of young children and media. My central concern, following McClure (2011) is how “mythic speech substitutes for meaning” (p. 129) in the field’s understandings of children and media studies. Thus, I employ a Foucauldian discursive, genealogical approach to examine what historical and socially constructed conditions produce contemporary discourses of children and media, and in turn how discursive formations operate in the field as knowledge. I am concerned with the authoritative claims of the field, particularly developmental stage theory. But I also take issue with sociocultural constructions of childhood, and the “preferred” aesthetics of childhood and early childhood education programs in the United States which are reflective of middle-class, Eurocentric perspectives. My focus is how these discourses cohesively organize in the manner of what Foucault has called “regimes of truth” (Gore, 1995). I consider statements as discourses, “constituted by a group of sequences of signs, in so far as they are statements, that is, in so far as they can be assigned particular modalities of existence” (Foucault, 1972: 107) and the way they operate in the ECEC field and the power/knowledge nexus that is inherent in the construction (Popkewitz and Brennan, 1998). These “depoliticized discourses function to naturalize socially constructed concepts” (McClure, 2011: 129). As I show, these “truths”: are also actively policed in the daily interactions that comprise the ECEC academy.
In keeping with a Foucauldian genealogical tradition, which is inherently deconstructive in its approach (Arribas-Ayllon and Walkerdine, 2008), this article attempts to untether these well-worn constructions, with the purpose of creating space to build anew (Derrida, 2017). In this case, I propose a consideration of childhood not tightly bound by disciplinary politics or pervasive but unfounded myths of childhood. Thus, I conclude with a discussion of the importance of an anthropologically ambivalent perspectives and methods in studying children and media (Tobin and Henward, 2011), which I argue hold possibility of moving the field of ECEC forward in better understanding the lived realities of children, their social worlds, and the study of children and media in the 21st century. Before I begin, however, there needs to be clarity in what I mean by media and consumer culture.
Definitional clarity: consumer culture, media culture, popular culture
Here, popular culture and media culture is defined as a form of consumer culture; it includes multiplatform cultural objects and topics which are consumed and negotiated by children in their lives (Vasquez, 2005). Media culture includes not only digital devices but also mass media characters on shoes, the sanctioned (and forbidden) songs children sing (Grace and Tobin, 1998), the movies they watch, the Internet games they play, and most recently, the YouTube tutorials of children and adults making slime, as well as YouTube videos of “unboxing” toys (Marsh, 2016). While children have always been born into commercial and consumer culture (Cook, 2008), with the rise of technology, it is perhaps more visible than ever before (Thompson, 2015). It is far from unusual to see children in stores, parks, on trains and busses, and in their homes, and even in some preschool programs engaging with some form of mobile device, playing with a Barbie, or pouring over a character themed book from their favorite television show (Huh, 2015).
But as Dyson (2015) asserts “Popular culture is not a textual genre like superhero comics, televised sport reports or rap songs. If popular culture were easily objectified and neatly contained, it would not pose such a complex challenge for educators” (p. 462). Indeed, media culture has definitional complexities as it often comprises multi- and cross-platform “super systems,” where each text promotes consumption of an additional text to “enable more intimate access to the narrative and characters” (Grimes, 2008: 122). In illustrating this, I turn to the popular computer game Minecraft, which was originally a sandbox video game, created by Swedish game developer Markus Persson. While primarily and originally an online interactive game, the brand also includes a clothing line, instructional books, Lego building products, and candy and food products featuring “creepers.” Young children engage with media through a convergence of these various texts and platforms, in acts of both production and consumption. Minecraft instructional videos and songs are produced and consumed by adult, child, and youth fans on YouTube (Ito et al., 2009; Jenkins, 2006). Further evading and obscuring definitional clarity in media is the fact that when children play online games, they interact in a form of “transmedia,” participating in online sites that feature media characters and associated everyday consumer goods with online games, apps, and websites “in complex mergers of childhood cultures, digital literacies, consumer practices, and corporate agendas” (Wohlwend, 2017: 2).
While recognizing differences between “material culture of children,” that is, items that children make themselves or adapt into their own culture from the adult world that have a different use to that intended by the adult manufacturer, and “material culture of childhood i.e. commercial products produced for children” (Wohlwend, 2017); in this article, I care not to stress the distinction. Here, I am concerned with the role that both forms of consumer products play in the larger field of ECEC.
Why Foucault?
Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and re-copied many times (Foucault, 1978: 139).
In this article, I employ Foucauldian discourse analysis, specifically approaches that can be considered genealogical to trace the relationship between discursive practices, power, and knowledge. As a deconstructive method, genealogical approaches are predicated on a social constructionist foundation, which recognizes knowledge as created, not discovered, discursively produced in context, and therefore always contingent. This perspective also recognizes the impossibility of absolute and universal knowledge. By its nature, Foucauldian analysis resists formality, yet operates on general concepts or principles (Arribas-Ayllon and Walkerdine, 2008; Jørgensen and Phillips, 2002; Popkewitz and Brennan, 1998).
Arribas-Ayllon and Walkerdine (2008) outline three main principals or concepts of discourse analysis which I find helpful in my analysis of children, media, and the field of ECEC:
Finally, a disclaimer: In keeping with post-structural theory I see my process of analysis of “always interpretive, always contingent, always a version or a reading from some theoretical, epistemological or ethical standpoint” (Wetherall, 2001: 384 in Graham, 2005). My own theoretical, epistemological, and ethical standpoints, while carefully considered, are nevertheless like any discourse and discursive formation historically constructed and thus tied to power/knowledge.
Tensions in the field
Implicitly or explicitly, studies of young children and their engagement with consumer culture in ECEC must confront the question of media influence: How and to what degree does media affect children? This is often referred to as the debate of structure and agency (Buckingham and Sefton-Green, 2003). In this question, there is often an assumption and positioning of media as a powerful, malevolent, harmful influence, and children as innocent, vulnerable and easily manipulated (Grace and Henward, 2013; Henward, 2015; Henward and MacGillivray, 2014; Tobin and Henward, 2011). While media scholars working with youth and adolescence (Alvermann, 2002) have identified more nuanced camps and perspectives related to media paradigms and degree of influence, ECEC often draws influence from two distinct camps (which often divide by schools of research, and more often than not, disciplinary homes). While I will return to this debate, in genealogical fashion, I will first address underpinning that are rarely questioned in ECEC which serve to structure and authenticate these various positions.
How children became “children”: historical construction of childhood
It is impossible to talk about children and media culture without acknowledging how the field of ECEC views the concept of children. In doing so I, following Foucault (1972), attempt to “tackle the ideological function of a science in order to reveal and modify it” and “question it as a discursive formation” (p. 205) to more closely reveal the ways in which objects and subjects (children, childhood, and media) come to be “known” in ECEC.
In ECEC, children are regarded as innocent and vulnerable and simultaneously impish, creative protagonists, who are fanciful, and playfully full of wonder (McClure, 2011). The pervasiveness of this conceptualization of a universal, ahistorical, cherubic, innocent, Rousseauian child (Cross, 2004), who must be protected from malevolent harm at all cost, is well known (Grieshaber and McArdle, 2010). Yet, these axiomatic concepts of children and childhood are more accurately a social construction that both reflect and produce certain understandings of childhood (James et al., 1998; Prout, 2011). The innocent, usually White and middle-class child (Cross, 2004; Walkerdine, 1998), is a “protected species” within the “protected state” of childhood (Jackson and Scott, 1999: 86). As Henry Jenkins (1998) notes, too often our culture imagines childhood as a utopian space separate from adult cares and worries, free from sexuality, outside of social divisions, closer to nature and the primitive world, more fluid in its identity and its access to the realms of imagination, beyond historical change, more just, pure and innocent, and in the end waiting to be corrupted or protected by adults. (p. 3–4)
This underpinning assumes that to engage in a “natural” childhood, children must remain free from corrupting influences, and one of the most contemporarily salient is media. Yet, media risk and the associated anxiety, rather than infringing, more accurately help to construct and reinforce the concept of childhood, by “maintaining [sic] its boundaries—the specific risks from which children must be protected serve to define the characteristics of childhood and the nature of children themselves” (Jackson and Scott, 1999: 87). In ECEC, Woodrow (1999) notes that pervasive images of childhood innocence such as these have “tended to lurk as self-evident truths, encompassing a set of assumptions about shared values in relation to children and childhood, parents and parenting, education and schooling” (paragraph 1). While this is not limited to teacher education, it is reinforced by many ECEC teacher education texts and often alive and well in implicit theories of teacher candidates (Spodek, 1988).
The construct of children as innocents, vulnerable, and impressionable has long been a central trope, or more accurately a discursive function, that operates within the structure agency debate. In this debate, scholars writing from the media effects paradigm (Buckingham and Sefton-Green, 2003), typically associated with developmental psychological approaches, are less sure of children’s ability to interpret and resist media. But curiously, media effects scholars also hail from a diametrically opposing tradition of critical Neo-Marxist and Frankfurt schools. These particular critical cultural scholars are concerned with the ways mass media often conveys racist, classist, and sexist messages and promotes consumerism through sophisticated marketing tactics, from which children cannot resist (Schor, 2014). Employing textual, theoretical, and historical analyses to the study of media, these scholars posit that media ideologically hails subjects. These textual analyses are then applied to children (Giroux and Pollock, 2010; Steinberg, 2011) who, at young impressionable ages, are assumed to internalize and reproduce these ideologies, ultimately developing a “false consciousness” (Adorno, 1967). While Neo-Marxist and Frankfurt approaches (albeit stripped of ideological neo-Marxist analysis) are influential in popular media, particularly in liberal circles (i.e. panics of consumerism and anxieties of young girl’s princess culture (Orenstein, 2012), they often are not as influential as developmental approaches in ECEC. Thus, this is where I place my focus.
In many developmentally oriented media studies, children’s ability to interpret media is predicated on developmental stage theory, which assumes a universal and rather predictable sequences of growth and change in children during the first 9 years of life (Copple and Bredekamp, 2009). Media studies from this tradition typically use quasi-experimental methods in which children (often in labs) are given iPad, video games, or other consumer products (Tobin and Henward, 2011). The children are then observed and possibly interviewed. Findings from these studies position children as lacking in cognitive development and sophistication as they have not developed “key information-processing skills to achieve ‘mature’ comprehension” (Singer and Singer, 2001: 378). They specify that “until these capacities are developed, children cannot reflect upon or understand the consequences of violent behavior, and therefore are vulnerable to the images of media, especially when the images are violent” (Daly and Perez, 2009: paragraph 5). In these studies, children are not considered to have the cognitive capacity to resist harmful messages often around 8 years old.
These well-worn discourses have found a home in ECEC, which has long been influenced by developmental psychology. Since the early 19th century, developmental stage theory has both defined and dominated the field of ECEC, resulting in widely accepted and largely unquestioned psychological and developmental discourses of child and childhood. ECEC, by discipline home, and in some cases institutional/organizational location, is aligned less with education schools and often associated with health, human development, and family studies (Bloch, 1992). Theoretically, while elementary education embraces symbolic or interpretivist, critical, sociocultural, post-modern, and post-structural paradigms in schools of education, the field of early childhood is intimately tied to a knowledge base that favors “psychology, child development, and embraces largely positivist and empirical-analytic paradigms in theory and method” (Bloch, 1992). This well-established knowledge base structures and regulates much of the knowledge, practice, and research in the field (Cannella et al., 2007).
Foucault was concerned with the regulation of people, bodies, and ideas. But he was also concerned with how these came to be and were given power in society. Foucault (1972) notes that every education system is a political means of maintaining or modifying “the appropriateness with the knowledge and power they bring with them” (p. 41). For Foucault (1982), techniques of power in everyday society serve to normalize discourses and ultimately control how we think and talk about certain ideas. Knowledge is not something internal to a person, but is an assembled, externally given and structured set of “claims,” or as Foucault would have it, “statements” (Graham, 2011). Following Foucault, I consider knowledge in ECEC with regard to media as a product of discursive formation. Jansen (2008) notes that discursive formations have four indispensable characteristics; these are that “statements refer to the same object, are enunciated in the same way, share a common system of conceptualizations and have similar subjects or theories.” These overlapping and complementary discourses which are understood to occur in “a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation” (Foucault, 1972: 38).
Foucault articulates that within the exercise of power are multiple sites or points where knowledge is formed. Conversely, he writes, every established piece of knowledge permits and in turn assures the exercise of power (Foucault, 1984). Foucault (1980) notes, power is not one’s domination over the other or that of a group or a class over others, rather power must be analyzed as something which circulates, which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never in anybody’s hands. (p. 98 in Gore, 2003)
For example, the reification of children’s knowledge of media as a universally harmful agent is a statement that can be better understood as a discursive formation that assembles various discourses of childhood, innocence, developing, and “becoming.” And when well-worn discourses are repeated and obscure research, they in turn structure the knowledge that is permitted in the field. These dominant paradigms of epistemes function to uphold power relationships (Foucault, 1977). As I will later address, this has significant consequences for how we understand children.
Popular Culture as Pedagogy and Curriculum
A second related debate involving the role of popular culture in schools is concerned with their instructional and pedagogical use. Should schools, many of whom are facing increasing regulations and pressures, spend precious instructional time in learning and embracing new media? Should popular culture be used in schools and if so how?
Scholars working in popular culture studies (Storey, 2018), media studies (Buckingham, 2015; Jenkins and Ito, 2015), literacy studies (Alvermann, 2002; Dyson, 1997, 2015; Evans, 2011; Marsh, 1999; Moje et al., 2004; Simmons, 2014; Wohlwend, 2017; Yoon, 2018) informal learning (Henward, 2015b), and digital learning (Hatzigianni, 2018) consider the incorporation of popular cultural texts and themes as salient pedagogical approaches and worthy topics of curriculum in schools. Typically employing ethnographic and highly contextualized qualitative methods, these scholars embrace symbolic or interpretivist, critical, post-modern, and post-structural traditions to recognized the social and cultural world of children and commercial media as a profound influence on, and a connection to, the education practices of children. These researchers are concerned with media as a site of consumption but also with production (Ito et al., 2009; Jenkins, 2006) with the recognition that children’s racialized and class identities configure in their engagement and are accounted for in their meaning making practices (Willett et al., 2009).
Popular culture is employed pedagogically in the classroom in the form of multiliteracies (Alvermann, 2002), as a type of funds of knowledge (Henward, 2015a; Dickie and Shuker, 2014; Gonzalez et al., 2006; Hedges, 2011; Karabon, 2017), or through critical literacy approaches which focuses on language and literacy use to exercise power and to enhance everyday life in schools and within their communities as a lived practice with the intent of question practices of privilege and injustice. Occasionally these traditions converge, such as when hip hop pedagogies are employed in school (Samy Alim, 2007). These approaches, while shown to be effective in early elementary school, are rarely picked up in preschools (notable exceptions: Comber, 2001; Vasquez, 2014).
While some ECEC care centers serving children 0–5 years have embraced forms of media, they often include technological platforms (iPad, computers, and smartboards) which are recognized as an “integral learning tool for promoting the social linguistic, and cognitive development of young children” (Gimbert and Cristol, 2004). Media in these spaces is often narrowly defined and rarely includes children’s culture or their interest in media culture that is not self-consciously or overtly educational (i.e. Sesame Street games, commercial digital literacy programs such as Starfall and other media that aims to enhance children’s literacy and numeracy; notable exceptions include Comber, 2013; Karabon, 2017; Marsh, 1999; Wohlwend, 2017). As such, incorporation of children’s culture (particularly low-status popular culture) is often not the focus. As Dyson (2015) succinctly articulates, in ECEC remains the ever-present question “What is the educational point of allowing children to bring toys
Given the wealth of pedagogical approaches in elementary and secondary settings, on the surface, the reluctance of ECEC seems surprising. Yet, accounting for the developmental alliance of ECEC, it is less so. While the developmental focus of the field is acknowledged and can be questioned in some circles, what often remains under the radar is the sacrosanct cultural codes and aesthetics of US early childhood. From a Foucauldian perspective, these codes and practices are predicated on discursive assemblages which construct appropriate practices of curriculum and pedagogy in ECEC.
For those unfamiliar, there are practices and approaches that are preferred in the highly stratified US ECEC system, which comprises programs differing in approaches, philosophies, and designs which “vary greatly in terms of teachers’ salaries, tuition costs and levels of public subsidy” (Seiter, 1999: 241). European inspired approaches (i.e. Montessori, Reggio Emilia, Waldorf, and Froebelian kindergartens), typically occupy the top echelon in the United States. In these European programs, there is an aesthetic that is consciously (Tarr, 2008) or unconsciously preferred (Seiter, 1999), represented, and conveyed through “carefully prepared, aesthetically pleasing environments that serve as a pedagogical tool” (Edwards, 2002: 2), which include philosophy-specific materials. For example, Froebelian kindergartens have yarn balls and wooden cylinder gifts, Reggio Emilia approaches typically endorse natural and recycled materials in artmaking, Montessori approaches include wooden and glass materials, and Waldorf schools are known for their wooden faceless dolls, play silk scarves, and Beeswax crayons. Preferred materials in each of these high-status programs are non-commercialized, perhaps consciously so (Seiter, 1999).
As critical scholars, most notably Michael Apple (1996), have noted, the dismissal of popular culture in school can be understood as an expression of cultural politics. In this way, these materials, while central to pedagogical and curricular processes from a socio-symbolic perspective, which attends to the “the use of objects, the meaning and value attached to them” (Prochner et al., 2008: 189) are also markers of status.
Foucault’s power knowledge couplet has been operationalized through work of sociologist and social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, who investigates the relation of intellectual production to social practice (Popkewitz and Brennan, 1998). My analytic concern here is not with Bourdieu per say, but the ways in which he shows that Foucauldian discursive formations are normalized as cultural codes. Drawing on Foucault, Bourdieu (1984) maintains that schools valorize preferred cultural codes that reflect the tastes and dispositions of those in power by what they encourage and also what is left out. As cultural studies scholars note, middle-class parents (and teachers) often emphasize toys for children with certain aesthetics (Cross, 2004). In ECEC, these aesthetics reflect and privilege approaches which are not only classed but also Eurocentric. As they reinforce historical constructions of childhood, they often remain undetected and above reproach. Yet, perhaps more insidiously, they serve to reinforce deeply seated class biases and unquestioned and prevalent Eurocentric aesthetics in the field of early childhood. European models in ECEC, while democratic in orientation in Europe, must be recognized in the United States as status-laden influential spaces and thus can substantially influence cultural codes in the larger field.
These cultural codes impact subjectivity of social actors; in ECEC, it structures not only structures preferred types of knowledge but also, in a way, shapes the subjectivities of the children (Grace and Henward, 2013) as well as the subjectivities of the teachers who engage with the materials. The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power (Foucault, 1980: 52). As Glenda MacNaughton (2005) writes, “power is a relationship of struggle over how we use truths and build discourses about normality to produce and regulate ourselves” (p. 30). As both Foucault (1972) and Bourdieu (1984) note, this power is diffused; it operates through the unconscious day-to-day practices of individuals, reinforced and authenticated by our daily discursive practices as “regimes of truth” (Gore, 1995). Foucault’s “theorization of the constitutive and disciplinary properties of discursive practices within socio-political relations of power is a demonstration of
Foucault notes that one way this happens is through the use of systems or “archives” of knowledge. Archives he notes, are accumulated power/knowledge banks in which statements are compared and reasoned. For example, when empirical knowledge from other traditions is presented which suggest children as savvy, subversive, or any departure from accepted constructions, or when one argues for the inclusion of plastic popular culture, media culture, and commercialized materials over sacrosanct natural, quality, handmade materials, these archives are accessed by social actors. Through conversations, conference presentations, and daily interchanges in the field, certain accepted and normalized ECEC knowledge are authenticated by these archives. To argue otherwise means to deny children’s as innocent, fanciful, and emotionally sacred (Zelizer, 1994), which in a field highly invested in children’s innocence (Jenkins, 1999), is tantamount to blasphemy. These daily conversations are forms of indirect control (Nader, 2017); in ECEC, they constrain what can be said and how it can be said (Foucault, 1972)
So where do we go from here? Directions and possibilities
Foucauldian discourse analysis, specifically with a genealogical approach, can be productive for the field of ECEC as it allows us to uncover how a particular discourse (such as media effects) acquires the status of “scientific” and how the developmental underpinnings of the field and the corresponding social construction of a middle-class version of childhood create conditions that operate as truths (Ball, 2012). Graham (2008) reminds us that an important reason why meaning systems are so stable is that many of our understandings of the world are naturalized; as she notes, we view them not as an understanding of the world, but as our world. Discourse analysis, which demonstrates the “negative consequences of particular fixations of meaning,” allows us to unsettle prevailing systems (Ball, 2012) that construct our field. From a poststructuralist perspective, these systems are structures, which are not given, nor natural: they are an accomplishment of social construction. These constructions are built by and in ways that benefit or privilege particular groups, ways of thinking, and ways of being (Ball, 2012).
In ECEC, we must consider otherwise through interrogative dissection and textually and anthropologically rendering the familiar strange, as these axiomatic truths have very real consequences for children and education. As James Kincaid (2000) notes, as a society we have constructed the idea of what it means to be a child, with little recognition of the reality in which children live (Jenkins, 1998). Continuing to live and operate in prevailing discursive formations of media culture, innocence, and the eternal hope for a sanctified childhood, or conversely relying on protective discourses predicated on “developmental lacking” (Grace and Henward, 2013), does little to move the field forward and better understand the lived realities of children. I suggest instead that the field of ECEC, much like closely aligned fields of literacy studies, centers anthropological approaches to media research. These approaches, agnostic in orientation, do not adopt perspectives of media as inherently good or bad. Instead, anthropological methods such as ethnography approach media and popular culture as cultural products that are consumed, produced, and given meaning. As ECEC researchers, we must allow children to show us their meaning of the materials, which are constantly in flux and continually altered by social actors. Yet, in keeping with Foucault’s caveat that “everything is dangerous” as well as his concern of modernist, humanist approaches (Foucault, 1972), I see particular strength in post-structurally oriented studies of media, engagement, and children’s learning. Their epistemological focus on the instability, the temporary, the contingent, the conflicting, and multiple meanings of children can allow possibilities beyond well-worn paradigms that serve adult interests, but rarely those of children.
As children continue to engage with media in new and unimagined and everchanging ways, and related fields such as digital play continue to expand, we must expand too. This article has implications for ECEC not only in the United States but also in global contexts, as the discursive formations that normalize this approach, whether it be developmental discourses, constructions of childhood, and influence of European programs, are far from contained. The status and normalization of preferred European models have been well-documented by critical and postcolonial scholars assumptions in a field that is becoming increasingly global (Johnson, 2000). Noting that the US ECEC system has substantial impact in China (Tobin et al., 2009) and the Pacific (Henward et al., in press-a, in press-b), more empirical studies are needed in investigating taken-for-granted understandings of childhood, particularly in a variety of countries and contexts. This approach, both methodologically and theoretically, is one way we in ECEC can move closer to children’s meaning and enhance the field’s understandings of their figured and social worlds.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.