The negation of babysitting: Deconstruction and care in early childhood

Abstract

In April 2020, during the COVID-19 Pandemic, New Zealand media reports revealed competing discourses of care in education. Specifically, the media narrated an apparent resistance to care evident in a primary and secondary teacher resistance to a return to school. While the resistance was clearly and explicitly concerned with care for teachers and their communities, at the same time a negation of caring occurred in the positioning of babysitting and caregiving as unreasonable activities for teachers. In this paper these different discourses are explored through a deconstruction of care. The first section of this paper explores deconstruction through a range of texts that explain and explore Derrida’s thinking. The paper then presents a positioning of care through one news media article. An analysis of one text that speaks to the meaning and problem of care in early childhood provides not just a reading of care in and as education, but also a reading of deconstruction as care. Through a reading of deconstruction as care, this paper offers an understanding of the positioning of caring in relation to teaching. Taking deconstruction as more than an attempt to make a case for caring (the saving of caring so to speak), this paper also takes up the challenge of the relationship between caring and not-caring, or the uncaring. Caring in relation to uncaring provides a way past the prescription and exploitation of caring as teaching and recognises the limits of a professionalisation of caring for practices of care. In the sense that deconstruction is care, the paper concludes with a re-imagining of teacher education through deconstruction.

In April 2020, during the COVID-19 Pandemic, New Zealand media reports revealed competing discourses of care in education. Specifically, the media narrated an apparent resistance to care evident in a primary and secondary teacher resistance to a return to school. While the resistance was clearly and explicitly concerned with care for teachers and their communities, at the same time a negation of caring occurred in the positioning of babysitting and caregiving as unreasonable activities for teachers.

In this paper these different discourses are explored through a deconstruction of care. The first section explores deconstruction through a range of texts that explain, explore and practice Derrida’s thinking within different disciplines. The paper then presents a positioning of care through one news media article. The media piece refers to an open letter to the Government written by a primary school principal in the weeks leading to the reopening of schools in Aotearoa New Zealand once the nation was satisfied that it had sufficiently stemmed the spread of COVID-19. The final section engages with deconstruction as care in order to explore the possibilities of different ways of thinking about babysitting and care.

The reopening of schools had followed the closure of early childhood centres and schools on March 25, when the nation was in alert level 4 (New Zealand Government, 2020). The first case of COVID-19 was reported on February 28, 2020. Government restrictions began on March 14 with requirements for self-isolation for anyone entering the borders. By March 19 borders had closed to non-residents and citizens, and on March 21 the 4-level alert system was introduced. The country moved from alert level 4 to level 3 on April 27, allowing for the reopening of schools and centres (New Zealand Government, 2020). Concerns regarding the reopening of schools and centres were widely published in the 2 weeks preceding the government’s detailing of the requirements for educational institutions in levels 3 and 2 (New Zealand Government, 2020). Since the first case in Aotearoa New Zealand there have been 1991 total cases including 25 deaths (Ministry of Health, 2020).

In engaging with these events, the principal’s letter and associated news media article provide a text for understanding a prevalent view of care, early childhood education, childhood and importantly contributes to the critical study of, and debates about, the professionalisation of early childhood teaching (see for instance Dalli and Urban, 2010; May, 2019; Osgood, 2012; Plotz, 2001). An analysis of one text that speaks to the meaning and problem of care in early childhood provides not just a reading of care in and as education, but also a reading of deconstruction as care. In other words, deconstruction as care is presented as a response to an attitude to care that is evident in the principal’s text. At times this paper reads and feels like polemic – it certainly felt like polemic as it was being written. However, setting up a polemic is not the point here. There’s no intention to get offsides with principals and teachers by arguing that they more or less willfully denigrate caring through their approach to babysitting.

Through a reading of deconstruction as care, this paper offers an understanding of the positioning of caring in relation to teaching. Impoverished views of childhood and care, their negation as un-educational or un-teacherly, and their association with babysitting as a pejorative occupation of little worth and/or esteem, is uncritically transmitted and amplified in the news media, public debate and professional discourses. Deconstruction offers a way, or ways, of engaging with care so as to make sense of and open up such views and to enrich care and caring. Taking deconstruction as more than an attempt to make a case for caring (the saving of caring so to speak), this paper also takes up the challenge of the relationship between caring and not-caring, or the uncaring. Caring in relation to uncaring provides a way past the prescription and exploitation of caring as teaching and recognises the limits of a professionalisation of caring for practices of care. In the sense that deconstruction is care, the paper concludes with a re-imagining of teacher resistance through deconstruction.

Deconstruction

Derrida’s work can be seen as an invitation to get into the work of caring in education. For an analysis of care, Derrida’s work can be seen to disrupt perceived hierarchical traditions (Vismann, 2005), traditions that become more apparent when a school principal refers to care and caring in negative or even hostile terms. With disruption in mind, this first section engages briefly with deconstruction through attention to notions of critique, exploration, exclusion, openness and justice. It works with a selection of texts on deconstruction from across disciplinary applications including law, religious studies, hospitality and education in order to make a case for deconstruction. The aim here is to explore different senses of deconstruction, across disciplinary contexts, that inform or guide a deconstruction of care in education, rather than to present an authoritative transdisciplinary positioning of deconstruction.

In Without Alibi (Derrida, 2002: 204) draws out the idea of deconstruction in relation to the idea of critique. Deconstruction is explored as ‘an unconditional right to ask critical questions’. A critical question can contribute to an opening up of thinking about things – seeing and relating to things differently. Deconstruction also asks critical questions of critique, particularly where critique is seen to close down discussion rather than open them up. In other words, deconstruction is not the kind of critique that establishes new hierarchies and exclusions, or limits differences in seeing and relating. In an interview with Juelskjær and Schwennesen (2012), Karen Barad explains ‘deconstruction is not about taking things apart in order to take them down, but on the contrary, about examining the foundations of certain concepts and ideas, seeing how contingency operates to secure the “foundations” of concepts we cannot live without, and using that contingency to open up other possible meanings/matterings’ (p. 14). Barad explains critique is ‘too formulaic, too predictable’ (Juelskjær and Schwennesen, 2012: 14).

Also, very importantly, it forgets the necessary mutual exclusions that are constitutive of phenomena, and buys into and enacts a linear temporality that closes down rather than opens up what is to come. Critique may provide some important insights at first glance, but critique isn’t an acceptable stopping point of analysis. It isn’t sufficient, and often times it isn’t at all helpful politically. The presumed exterior and oftentimes superior positionality of critique doesn’t have the kind of political traction that is so needed (Juelskjær and Schwennesen, 2012: 14).

In this sense deconstruction is concerned with the idea of the question as an unconditional interest in an unknown answer. When questions are asked regarding phenomena, deconstruction is concerned with the ways in which a truth is already presumed in the asking of a question (Nietzsche, 1979). The formulation of any question contains much to deconstruct. The road to a ‘real’, surprisingly unknown, answer is always barred by the asking of the question and its particular formation and purpose (explained by Derrida as an aporia or, the obstructed pathway). When questions concerning care and education are asked, there are conditions in place regarding what can be asked and the purpose of asking. These conditions create exclusions. For instance, care may be excluded when asking questions about education, when and where care is presumed to be distinct from education in its essence. Exclusions also operate in questions of care – exclusions that predetermined what is considered as uncaring or not related to care. Some understandings and practices of care may be included, and others excluded, through the particularity of any question about care in and as education.

The task in deconstruction is ‘to do justice to what is excluded by what is present . . . an affirmation of what is excluded and forgotten’ (Biesta, 2014: 38). In engaging with the exclusion of meaning, deconstruction is also concerned with the politics of exclusion – which institutions have sovereignty over what can and cannot be talked about as education and care, how sovereignty has been secured, and what relationships are denied by excluding that which is not acceptable to the sovereign subject (Peters, 2004; Senatore, 2011).

As noted above, a concern for exclusions may include any apparent exclusion of care in and as education. There is a deeper exclusion to consider in the formulation of care – care is configured in an opposition to that which is the unsaid uncaring or careless and this unsaid uncaring includes that which is excluded in the professionalisation, vocationalisation and credentialisation of care in a care economy. In other words, while care can be excluded by those who determine what counts as education, those who determine what counts as care also engage in exclusions. The former opposition (the care and education opposition) is considered in the next two sections, while the latter is addressed in the concluding section.

In observing and revealing exclusions that occur in, for instance, determining the meaning of both education and care, deconstruction also engages with openness to multiplicity. No ‘amount of reading a text will fully exhaust all the possible meanings of a text’ (Sheehan, 2000: 137). That inexhaustibility establishes the openness and unpredictability of any essential meaning for education and care.

In openness and unpredictability, writers on deconstruction recognise the productive potential of ‘new’ ethical relationships. Deconstruction makes this possible through ‘unlimited and relentless’ observation and questioning (Vismann, 2005: 8), a never ending practice of openness to the conceptual and experiential impossibilities that are typically suppressed or oppressed in a climate of evidence-based progress, standards and professional codification in care and education systems. Deconstruction as care is a limitless responsibility (Sheehan, 2000).

However, deconstruction is not about inverting a perceived hierarchy (Sheehan, 2000: 122). The point is not to insert the previously excluded into a primary position. Deconstruction is often misunderstood as a technique of negation, rather than a ‘philosophy of affirmation’ (Naas, 2005: 11), through which care-full critique engages in ‘reception’. As a kind of receiving, here is the experience of hospitality (Derrida, 2000) – or in this context, of the caring for care. Given this attention to deconstruction as care, deconstruction has something to offer when care and education appear to have something of a falling out in the public domain.

An apparent refusal to care

On April 16, 2020, the New Zealand Herald ran a story with the headline: ‘Teachers angry that they are being asked to become “babysitters”’ (Collins, 2020). April 16 was some 3 weeks into what was, in Aotearoa New Zealand, a level four lockdown response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Schools and early childhood centres were closed. Teachers were working from their homes to support parents and children – providing some sense of educational continuity as well as relief for parents now faced with a new complex arrangement of roles and responsibilities in their employment and unemployment. By the time the Herald ran this story, however, the nation and indeed the world (World Health Organisation, 2020), was recognising the relative success of its response to the pandemic and was beginning to strategise measures to open up sectors of the education system in order to support a moderate and regulated return to work for selected parents – parents who would then need their children to also return to school or early childhood centre.

In the NZ Herald, Collins (2020) reported:

Teachers are reacting angrily to new rules for level 3 of the coronavirus alert system which they say will place them at risk and will make them just ‘babysitters’. Bruce Cunningham, principal of Belmont Primary School on Auckland’s North Shore, said he ‘fielded over a dozen emails, texts or phone calls from my staff, and none of them were positive’ after Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern unveiled the new rules. ‘I am disappointed that teachers, support staff and principals are being used as what seems to me as caregivers/babysitters for students whose parents move back to the workforce,’ he said in an open letter to Education Minister Chris Hipkins and ministry head Iona Holsted. He said that the Prime Minister said that school bubbles would help the Government undertake contact tracing, ‘as if it is ok to use teachers and children as sacrificial lambs’. Secondary Principals’ Council chair James Morris said the new rules would turn high schools into ‘de-facto daycare’. If most of the teachers are deployed doing the distance learning, that will mean that it’s probably most efficient for the students in those classes to just be supervised while they carry on with their distance learning. The school becomes a de-facto daycare. . . . Cunningham said his teachers all wanted to get back to their classrooms, but they wanted to be safe to protect other members of their families. They wanted at least to have hand sanitiser available, but it was not available from the school’s usual supplier, Office Max. ‘We really want to go back, we are missing the kids,’ he said. ‘But we just want to make sure that we’re safe because we don’t want to expose our families when we come back home.’

Teachers do not want to be exposed, exploited and sacrificed as babysitters in daycare. Here daycare can be regarded as an inclusive term for all early childhood education. In Aotearoa New Zealand daycare is indeed one term for early childhood education, often interchangeable with childcare. Daycare and childcare are terms that operate within the politics of early childhood and have served to create hierarchies, divisions and tensions in the early childhood teaching profession (May, 2019; Osgood, 2012; Plotz, 2001). One such tension appears around the other term of interest here: babysitting.

Early childhood teaching has been labelled glorified babysitting both in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally, in the academic and public domains. Glorified babysitting is a term that some early childhood teachers and early childhood academics have rallied against in Aotearoa New Zealand and around the world (see for instance Hogan, 2012; Moloney and Pope, 2015). The resistance to glorification of babysitting helps to reveal the exploitation of early childhood teachers and children in the public apparatus. Early childhood centre working conditions for children and adults are a matter of significant concern – evident most recently in Aotearoa New Zealand in an early learning action plan that at least recognises that a debate exists regarding qualities of centre environment and organisational culture (Ministry of Education, 2019).

However, here in the resistance of teachers to being called glorified babysitters, as with the principal’s letter on teacher anxiety and resistance, is a failure to recognise the implications of positioning babysitting as less than early childhood teaching – when babysitting comes after glorified in this way, it underscores the remarkable absence of any glory in babysitting and maintains an ordering of both adult and child. The teacher is the sovereign subject in this educational hierarchy, determining what counts as education. The carer comes next, determining what counts as care. And then comes the babysitter. The babysitter can claim to neither teach nor care in this configuration but must at the same time make possible the authority of those who are licensed to teach and those who licensed to care by the very fact of their exclusion from teaching and caring as professions.

This positioning of babysitting, however loose, casual, or unintentional is highly ‘deconstructable’ for the limits of care and education discourses – whether regarded as contending or mutually inclusive discourses. As inclusive discourses the early childhood profession has been built on the apparent legitimacy of claims that education is always an act and ethic of care (Noddings, 2013; Smith et al., 2000). In early childhood education, or early childhood education and care, or early childhood care and education, or in educare even, the opposition is evidently care and education although the politics of joining the terms into an alliance at the same time has been argued for on account of the apparent synergies rather than oppositions. The debates regarding the professional roles of teachers as both teachers and carers contribute to on-going quality-oriented policy interventions and to the formation of professional gate-keeping for the teaching profession. The case for a high quality and well-funded early childhood sector is made on the grounds that education and care are necessarily indistinct as concepts and practices (see for instance Smith et al., 2000). Yet, any suggestion ‘that early education should incorporate both care and education, and that the environment must carefully blend the two together implies that education and care are indeed distinct’ (Gibbons, 2007).

While recognising that any distinctions of care and education can and have been challenged, the purpose here is to challenge and resist the professional hierarchicalisation of care through exploring the professionalisation of education in the early years – a professionalisation that is symbolised by the very term: ‘early childhood education’. I am not rejecting or negating these terms and/or promoting other terms as better. I am working with the terms in order to keep them in play and in order to keep space open for making sense of them. Where hierarchies can be inverted, and keep in mind that this is not deconstruction (Sheehan, 2000), care is built up as a particular authority in which those who have particular knowledge regarding care, and caring practices, assume a new status – the status that was once occupied by a knowledge of teaching regarded as superior, and of more esteem and value, to that of a knowledge of care.

If care is valued, and is embedded in the teacher and learner relationship, that’s arguably fortunate considering the teaching profession’s guiding document in New Zealand, Our Code Our Standards (Education Council, 2017), refers to care just the once, and this in relation to the country’s binding Treaty of Waitangi. While well-being is referred to four times in emphasising a teacher responsibility for learners, the idea of care being integral to education is very distant. Hence, any 21st century teacher in Aotearoa New Zealand, guided by the standards and code at least, may not reasonably be expected to have an open and inquiring relationship to care – caring for care in order to understand what care might mean as an essential dimension of being a teacher. Care is not there in the text, which talks a terse language of professionalism, discipline and standardisation as a discourse of ethical behaviour (Education Council, 2017). And so, it is arguably unsurprising that care in spirit seems absent when babysitting is diminished in an open letter to the government and in the ensuing media coverage. This diminishing of the work of babysitters denigrates and undermines a whole population of workers. Denigrating babysitting refuses babysitters a voice – a policing of babysitting and care (Rancière, 2010) through the denial of any claims to sovereignty. The undermining at the same time, through its association with daycare, refuses the entire early childhood sector.

Deconstruction and the beautiful risk of care

The undermining of the work of babysitters (and caregivers and early childhood teachers) also represents a pedagogical problem in the sense that to refuse caregiving and babysitting in this way creates a narrowing and prescribing of what it means to be a real teacher – a teacher who may care, even as an intentional dimension of their teaching practice, but who cannot be named caregiver or babysitter. In a principal’s text on education, babysitting is named so that it can take its proper place in the pedagogical order of things and keep teaching in its proper place at the top of that order. The teacher is the pedagogue, the babysitter merely sits, takes up space, occupies the space left by a more important adult who wishes to employ a simulation of an adult for a period of time in order to attend to other desires and responsibilities.

Here the concern is that care as education is being overlooked. However, at the same time, the task is to not also overlook the possibilities of care as education overlooking more exclusions – the professionalisation of care, in other words, also warrants deconstruction. Doing justice to care cannot be achieved by essentialising care – to borrow from Biesta (2014), the attention here is to the beautiful risk of care.

In this final section the task is to take up deconstruction as care and some thoughts on who cares. Disruption of the understanding of babysitting as something that a real teacher does not do provides understanding of the limits of educational thinking and the production of educational relationships that establish particular obstructions to the ethical encounters between baby/child/learner, and sitter/adult/teacher. In the study of law, Sheehan (2000) explores deconstruction as care and respect, and through which an idea or term, in this case babysitting, is opened up. In taking up a particular text, the task is not, Sheehan argues, to set up an entire set of positions – for instance the position of teachers regarding the position of care.

Deconstruction as care takes up the task of resisting the fixing of dualisms (Taylor, 2013). To work with deconstruction as care, in this paper, recognises the educational exclusions of care in the structuring of professional knowledge in early childhood. As noted above, to take care with dualisms of care and to reveal the ways in which care is excluded in educational thinking, also runs the risk of replacing dualisms with dualisms. In other words, to care about care through deconstruction involves recognising and resisting care as some kind of truth that positions some things as care and other things as not care. The point to this care is not to suggest that in caring about care anything goes, as if deconstruction can then allow all forms of abuse and neglect in order to do justice to that which is excluded by the presence of care. The point to deconstruction is to notice, recognise and respond to the structuring of care in particular ways and this includes the structuring of care in an inferior relation to education, as well as the structuring of care as education. The use of notice, recognise and respond is an intentional nod to the early childhood curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand (Ministry of Education, 2017) as a weave of concepts and relationships that can be enriched through an understanding of Derrida’s work in deconstruction. I’d like to go further and suggest that the spirit and essence of Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 2017) is deconstructive on account of its intentional resistance of prescription of curriculum and its tendency to speak in typically open terms regarding curriculum, care, learning, education, teaching and so on and so forth. I am not arguing that Te Whāriki is beyond deconstruction, but rather that it takes up deconstruction in its approach and relationship to knowledge and practice. Evidence of this openness can be seen in the frequency with which the curriculum refers to the concept of diversity. And in thinking about diversity, to care for diversity, it is important to consider how the hierarchies of care and education, and of teaching, caring and babysitting require deconstruction in relation to the appearance of gender in the ordering of professional hierarchies.

Sheehan (2000: 104) proposes an ‘interesting and difficult theoretical question is how the silencing of women has shaped language to render it unfit to express women’s point view, and how this language might nevertheless be used to reclaim the history of the women whose silencing has shaped it’. Babysitting may be an exemplar of the silencing of women and also an opportunity to engage in reclamation of caring and teaching. The positioning of babysitting is a clear and unambiguous failure to recognise the subjectivity of the babysitter. The marginalisation of the babysitter at the same time is an invitation to question the subjectivity of the teacher in relation to learner and to consider the nature of responsibilities for the other that emerge in this particular configuration of the teacher that does not care nor babysit.

Here we are looking for care as a ‘mode of thought that seeks to break the bonds of our either/or thinking, releasing repressed and constrained content to flow where it will’ (Sheehan, 2000: 124). The challenge is to regard this deconstruction of teaching and caring as working with and supporting (rather than undermining and negating) the necessary and hard fought for positioning of care within early childhood curriculum and pedagogical practice. In other words, a deconstruction fails if it is taken as a negation of the professionalisation of care. That might sound a bit odd given the concerns regarding the professionalisation of care indicated above. The point to remember is that deconstruction does not seek to invert hierarchies, so the task is to address the hierarchicalisation of care and caring professions – not the care nor the profession. The point to deconstruction is not to engage in finger pointing and assigning of blame (Sheehan, 2000), and neither impractical or indulgent (see for instance Campolo, 1985, Sheehan, 2000, for an overview of these and other critiques of deconstruction). The intention is to take responsibility. And for that, I would like to finish with a few thoughts on teacher education and the responsibilities that teacher education might explore the deconstruction of care and an openness to babysitting.

Conclusions for teacher education

Public letters and news media articles on being a teacher and not a babysitter position teaching and caring in particular ways, and reinforce particular limits around the nature, purpose and practice of teaching. Such public letters demand an inferiority for the caregiver and babysitter, determine what can be seen to be present as a caring and or educational relationship, and curate the practices of care and education. This paper has explored the limits of such thinking through the concept and practice of deconstruction, with a focus on notions of exclusion, openness, justice and sovereignty.

Teacher education has a responsibility for the curation of the practices of care and education. Responsibility here does not mean assigning blame to teacher education, but rather to explore how teacher education might care for care. This includes a care-full study of teaching through the ways in which the news media contributes both specifically, as with the case of the above text, and generally, to the construction of the teaching profession and to practices of teaching and caring.

Within wider social and political structures and systems, teacher education has a responsibility for the student teacher’s view of teaching and education, caring and learning and babysitting. This includes a responsibility for exploring the low status to caring in an ordering of relations that establishes the conditions and values of teaching as above caring. Teacher education has a responsibility for exploring the exploitation of caring and babysitting through exploration of the perceived distinctions between care, education and babysitting and through an openness to the inexhaustible understandings of care, education and babysitting. A principal’s letter then presents a problem for teacher education to disrupt not just for teachers who wish to challenge the idea that teaching is not about babysitting, but for teachers who wish to disrupt the idea that care and education establish the authority and responsibility of the carer and teacher over the child and learner.

Teacher education as a professionalised journey contributes to the governing of philosophies, politics and pedagogies of care in the early years, establishing what can be said, by whom, and in what way. Governments employ teacher education to contribute to a professional identity and professional knowledge. In so doing, teacher education contributes to the determining of who has a voice, and who should remain silent. However, ‘excluded, or more accurately, repressed meanings can never be eliminated from the text completely and are always capable of returning to unsettle the coherence of the authorised meaning – no voice is ever truly silenced’ (Sheehan, 2000: 125). Babysitting then cannot be silenced. The task of teacher education is not to emancipate the babysitter, but to emancipate itself from the systemic oppression of care and babysitting in the systems of higher education (see for instance Kamuf, 2004).

Through an openness to deconstruction, a caring teacher education welcomes and cares for babysitting. How does teacher education work with the student teacher’s attention to this kind of welcoming? How also does teacher education work with student teachers to understand the ways in which the rules of curriculum and pedagogy make it possible to dismiss and/or exclude? A teacher educator, ‘if she is to have any claim on her students’ thoughtful attention beyond the impoverished authority of the expert who can impart a body of knowledge and thus produce satisfied student consumers, it is a claim . . . based on a . . . complex assumption of responsibility that cannot be reduced to or divided between theory and practice’ (O’Byrne, 2005: 407–408).

This principle of resistance is at work in the professor’s role as a teacher, and it is as relevant in kindergarten as it is for college students. What Derrida advocates is a pedagogy which, though structured and involving a long introduction to the history of philosophy, is essentially a pedagogy without a project. It is a pedagogy that not only struggles to hold open a space – for non-instrumental thinking, for action – that might otherwise be filled with the concerns of economics, science and technology but is also attuned to the fact that this involves a new approach to the student’s own conception of her goals, her projects, her self (O’Byrne, 2005: 406).