(En)tangling anger and equity dreams: RECE promises and pantomimes

Abstract

This response to the question about what we are angry about and what we dream of for young children reflects our work of over 30 years in Australasia. For Kylie in Australia and for Sonja in Aotearoa New Zealand and now also Australia. We direct the RECE common call, for an elevation of children’s rights, to a voice, to a ‘good’ education, and to a ‘good’ life, to the children, families, teachers, educators and communities with whom we live and work. As two RECE scholars, teachers of young children and of their teachers, and as researchers who are concerned with social justice and equity, we focus specifically on what good might mean in relation to education, life and community, through the lens of the current state of early childhood education in Australasia, now and in the future. We highlight some of the critical concerns with the current state of the sector, arguing that there is much to be fighting for, much, as the call for this special edition asks, to be angry about – still. With a specific focus on the crucial connections between early childhood education and teachers’ understandings and experiences of their own gendered and cultural wellbeing, we draw on our prior and current research to urge an ongoing questioning as we and the sector traverse these precarious areas that undoubtedly affect the inclusiveness and ‘goodness’ of teachers’ and children’s lives and learning.

Introduction

The Reconceptualising Early Childhood Education (RECE) space is a complex and complicated one. In some ways it is a spaceless-placeless organism that was conceived by academics as an opportunity to speak, listen and learn with others through alternative, disruptive theories and thinkers to push against and pull apart developmentally appropriate practice, developmental ideologies and quantitative-centric research. It was seen as a ‘safe’ space to be otherwise and to be proactive in early childhood practice and research. Many years on, RECE is perhaps seen as a bounded space through the annual conference, seminars and engagements. While these opportunities allow people to meet and engage with ideas, they are often extended relational places and spaces where dialogue, debate, critical (re)thinking occurs through reading scholarship produced by reconceptualist scholars or zoom/email/text interactions. RECE in all its different shapes has helped to deconstruct, (re)imagine and (re)create our thinking, wiring and pedagogical practice we are left troubled by the question: How has 30 years of this work impacted the structures and politics of early childhood education classrooms, preservice teaching, policy development, frameworks and curriculum?

When we engage with our own work and look to our Aotearoa New Zealand and Australian contexts, developmental ideologies, neuroscience and neoliberal policies remain foundational in early childhood education. Quality assurance programs continue to tell such fairytales as that all children, families and educators will have access to equal and fair environments, for instance. They promise quality education, and classrooms that ostensibly erase gender, sexuality, race, culture, class, ability and religion as issues of concern, with exclusionary and violent impacts on people. In this paper we question these promises. Through our own research and practices over the past 30 years, we consider ways that we might move beyond the anger, beyond the dream, to some form of practice when we reach the brink to which our anger might lead us. Anger in itself, perhaps, is not what is necessary, we suggest. Instead, we consider what it might take for us to enter into the cracks of opportunity that moving past being angry opens up, to enact pedagogies and research that uplift, inspire, enthuse and bring diversities together? What other ways might offer spaces for change, when we conceptualise the space of early childhood education in actually multiple ways? In our own research, we focus on strongly philosophical feminist poststructuralist notions that engage with equity and social justice through gender (Kylie) and cultural otherness (Sonja). The dialogue that follows arises as we consider how we became invited into the field, how we’ve been influenced in our own positionings (and by whom), and how these positionings now drive us to push beyond the liminalities in which we work, and are confronted, to partner with diversity and adversity in ways that we have so far resisted.

Looking, listening and working for moments of multiplicity and difference

Writing this paper has created time and space to theorise, reflect and talk together. It is provided moments for important ruptures or wonderings, and as it does so it returns us to the question not only of what we are still angry about, but to ask what does or can anger do? Being angry about a lack of change or limited change, about a sense of stasis, can be a great release for the frustration that tends to set in, creating opportunities to ‘rage against the machine’. But it can also be destructive and restrictive. If we always or only defer to the position or (e)motion of anger then there is a risk of becoming stagnant, where we defend (our position, theories and paradigms), dilute and potentially destroy (relationships, dynamic ways forward), and dismiss (other ways of knowing and being). When this happens, we run the risk of (re)tracing singular truths, which is the very thing that we have raged against for years. Defending, diluting, destroying, dismissing and postulating sucks energy, imagination and thought, out of ourselves and others. It limits possibilities and opportunities, as St.Pierre (2024:8) says:

All that leads me to wonder about all the orders of things that have come and gone and will come, how much thought we have lost, how much thought we might never be able to think, and how constrained thought is now.

Us and them dichotomies, then, are neither helpful nor constructive. Rather they are divisive and, dare we say, arrogant. We ask ourselves what it even means to be an ethical feminist poststructuralist, when the foundations of feminist poststructuralist thinking involve engaging with multiple, complex, shifting and contingent discourses (Weedon, 1996) and making visible multiple truths. Butler (2021) reminds us of how we perform multiple identities where we take up, speak, move and breathe diverse and complex subject positions in political and strategic ways. Similarly to St. Pierre, Kristeva (1977/1986: 299) suggests adopting a thoughtful response, of dissidence, not as a major overthrow or total disruption, but rather, as she puts it, as a creative examination of life, as ‘simply what it always has been: thought’. Rather than the violence of a ‘takeover’ or becoming a ‘dictatorship’ where there is one way to think about and enact theory in early childhood education and policy, which we have been pushing back on, maybe we should be more open to uncertainty, undoing, or unknowing, that might be described as mini revolts, or, as Todd (2004) suggests, as accepting our own ignorance. Perhaps in this way we can open up different ways of being: listening defending , enriching diluting , growing destroying , and collaborating dismissing , as ethical, relational and contextual encounters. And perhaps we need to start small, within each of our own ‘mini’ spaces?

Conclusion

St. Pierre’s (2024) writing nudges us to remember to engage with multiplicity, disorder, and dialogue (not only with like-minded people) and an always ongoing ontological and epistemological wondering. She reminds us that

. . . an intractable obsession with epistemology and proper methods that guarantee true knowledge of a real world that already exists, an obsession that pervades much educational and social science research, is pointless and perilous (p. 2).

What are the questions then, that we can leave this conversation with, that are not pointless or perilous? In what ways might we inspire thought, and the desire to weave non-linear, unknown, theories, pedagogies and point-ful research into the early childhood field? If we want to honour those that have inspired us, that have driven us to despair in the uncertain terrains in which they have positioned us, only to push us beyond the edge to new insights, perhaps we must risk rediscovering spaces of uncertainty? Perhaps we must crack open the ‘real world that already exists’ to argue for a new obsession, one that promotes creativity and thought? And perhaps, most importantly, we must never assume that we have the answer, but rather, never stop questioning . . .?