Contemporary Issues in
Early Childhood

ISSN 1463-9491

Volume 6 Number 2 2005

CONTENTS [click on author's name for abstract and full text]

Editorial, pages 110‑111
Christopher Brown. Creating Opportunities, pages 112‑127
Zsuzsanna J. Millei. The Discourse of Control: disruption and Foucault in an early childhood classroom, pages 128‑139
Jill Robbins. Contexts, Collaboration, and Cultural Tools: a sociocultural perspective on researching children’s thinking, pages 140‑149
Elizabeth Warren & Tom Cooper. Introducing Functional Thinking in Year 2: a case study of early algebra teaching, pages 150‑162
Affrica Taylor & Carmel Richardson. Queering Home Corner, pages 163‑173
Kerry Robinson. Doing Anti-homophobia and Anti-heterosexism in Early Childhood Education: moving beyond the immobilising impacts of ‘risks’, ‘fears’ and ‘silences’. Can We Afford Not To?, pages 175‑188
Jen Skattebol. Insider/Outsider Belongings: traversing the borders of whiteness in early childhood, pages 189‑203

COLLOQUIUM
Megan Gibson & Nadine McAllister. BIG ART small viewer: a collaborative community project, pages 204‑208

BOOK REVIEWS VIEW FULL TEXT
My Right to Play: a child with complex needs (debating play) (Robert J. Orr) reviewed by Yarrow Andrew, pages 209‑210
We Don’t Play with Guns Here: war, weapon and superhero play in the early years (Penny Holland), reviewed by Gloria Latham, pages 210‑211

Editorial

The regulation and control of young children has been the subject of an increasing amount of research and scholarship in early childhood education. There is a growing trend among all sectors of the field that recognises the limitations of some of the traditional theoretical and methodological perspectives and as a result many early childhood educators have been actively seeking alternative ways of understanding and being in the world. In this issue, all of the articles contest the boundedness of the field by challenging the ways in which we have been taught and subsequently learnt to think about young children, what they should be doing and who they should be within institutions such as schools and before school settings.

In the USA many children identified as not meeting required standards during the school year attend summer school in order to ‘catch up’. Christopher Brown (‘Creating Opportunities’) presents the case of Steven, a child diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, and analyses his experiences in summer school, looking specifically for opportunities for Steven to succeed. Using Bakhtin, Brown shows that adherence to the conventions of curriculum and expected school behaviour results in Steven’s carnivalistic actions and words being seen as deviance. Brown contends that Steven’s opportunities to learn on his terms are not considered and thus his chances to ‘catch up’ over the summer are compromised significantly. Relatedly, Zsuzsanna Millei (‘The Discourse of Control: disruption and Foucault in an early childhood classroom’) investigates disruption in a pre-primary classroom in Western Australia, arguing that notions of disruption are constructed by behaviourist discourses and thus construed as a problem of teacher control. When combined with maintenance of traditional power relationships in the classroom, the limitations imposed by a control discourse mean that there are few occasions for children to act agentically in their classroom experiences. Millei endorses ‘disciplined activity’, which is based on intrinsic motivations and values, and recommends a revision of teacher-child power relations so that young persons can experience very different classroom experiences than those based on a discourse of control.

Moving to children’s thinking brings further consideration of the confines of dominant research traditions and practices. In ‘Contexts, Collaboration, and Cultural Tools: a sociocultural perspective on researching children’s thinking’, Jill Robbins explains the merits of understanding children’s thinking within a contextual framework of how children participate in the sociocultural activities of their communities. This perspective repositions the traditional focus on the individual to one of relationships in communities that accounts for cultural histories and current circumstances, as well as the complexities that go with any community considered holistically. Robbins maintains that this approach provides an understanding of the richness and dynamism of children’s thinking. Algebra, too, has been subjected to challenges to traditional ways of how we think about and teach it, particularly in relation to young children. Warren & Cooper (‘Introducing Functional Thinking in Year 2: a case study of early algebra teaching’) suggest that the conventional approach to mathematics of concentrating on counting and operations with particular numbers does not assist children to ‘develop a consistent conceptual base that can deal with all numbers’. They contest the focus on the accuracy of answers at the expense of understanding the processes used for reaching answers, and contend that this restricted knowledge in the early years impedes later development of algebraic thinking. Using children in their second year of schooling from three different classes, Warren & Cooper taught a lesson and introduced functional thinking that concentrated on change, specifically about relations and transformations between things. Although there was mixed success, of importance is the idea that children were forced to think relationally rather than sequentially, which is a higher level of thinking and the type required to engage successfully with all numbers.

The next three articles confront directly matters of power that occur regularly in early childhood settings. Taylor & Richardson (‘Queering Home Corner’) and Robinson (‘Doing Anti-homophobia and Anti-heterosexism in Early Childhood Education: moving beyond the immobilising impacts of ‘risks’, ‘fears’ and ‘silences’. Can We Afford Not To?’) tackle social justice issues of gender and sexuality. In responding to a recent public outcry that came as a result of the children’s television program Play School showing a girl called Brenna enjoying a visit to a fun park, along with her friend Meryn and her two mothers, Taylor & Richardson claim that early childhood education remains a bastion of heteronormative family privilege. Using three episodes of home corner play, the authors discuss the restrictions of the powerful discourses of childhood innocence and hegemonic heterosexuality, but also the ways in which children transgress gender norms that fortify heteronormative social relations. Taylor & Richardson suggest that home corner is a potentially transformative space and alert us to the possibilities that lie there for everyday social justice work.

Robinson asks whether early childhood educators can afford to remain inactive and risk continuing to approve tacitly the harmful impact of homophobia and heterosexism on individuals in the broader society. Making the point that most hate crime based on sexual identities is perpetrated by ‘adolescent boys and young men whose homophobic and heterosexist attitudes are well entrenched during their schooling years’, Robinson reasons that this necessitates the incorporation of anti-homophobic education in early childhood settings. She draws on recent research with early childhood educators to show the gamut of responses to surveys and interviews that include fear, ignorance as well as informed decisions not to engage in anti-homophobic education because of the personal risks involved.

The final article, by Jen Skattebol (‘Insider/Outsider Belongings: traversing the borders of whiteness in early childhood’), analyses transcripts of episodes of play where the negotiation of identities is about subtleties of the power of gendered whiteness. Notions of childhood innocence are again challenged by sophisticated and complex interactions amongst children, and when read against a social justice agenda provide insight into the myriad of ways that children attempt to disturb the established social order. Skattebol’s revealing teacher self-analysis points to the nuances to which teachers need to be attuned if they are to resist condoning and therefore perpetuating the inequitable patterns of the established social order.

A colloquium by Megan Gibson (‘BIG ART small viewer: a collaborative community project’) tells how one community-based kindergarten (Campus Kindergarten) with a strong visual arts program became involved in a project where children visited the University of Queensland Art Museum several times to view and respond to selected artworks. The project culminated in an exhibition of children’s works in the University of Queensland Art Museum.

Book reviews in this issue include My Right to Play: a child with complex needs (debating play), written by Robert J. Orr (2003) and reviewed by Yarrow Andrew and We Don’t Play with Guns Here: war, weapon and superhero play in the early years, by Penny Holland, which is reviewed by Gloria Latham.

Sue Grieshaber & Katrina Weier
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

Creating Opportunities

CHRISTOPHER BROWN University of Texas at Austin, USA

In this age of greater accountability, local school districts within the USA increasingly use summer school programs as an intervention service to provide students who have failed to meet classroom, district, or state performance requirements with the opportunity to ‘catch up’. Although such programs attempt to provide varying types of educational experiences to improve the student’s academic performance, teachers continue to inscribe the expectations and language of schooling. Through examining the actions of Steven, a student diagnosed with attention deficit disorder in a summer intervention program, the author contends that his teachers’ adherence to the norms of schooling prevent Steven from engaging in the school classroom in a meaningful way. Steven’s teachers read his carnivalistic actions as part of his deviant behavior rather than as a critique of how even the summer curriculum fails to meet his learning needs.

The Discourse of Control: disruption and Foucault in an early childhood classroom

ZSUZSANNA J. MILLEI Murdoch University, Perth, Australia

Disruption can be a result of a wide array of circumstances, but is commonly identified as a ‘control problem’ in early childhood classrooms. In this article, the author argues that the recognition of disruption as a ‘control problem’ is embedded in and governed by the social power and values entrenched in teaching discourses. Classroom practices draw strongly on the discourse of educational psychology and utilise its power and immanent knowledge to ‘discipline’ early childhood agents through classroom practices. These early childhood practitioners then become both an object and a subject of this knowledge. This article problematises particular discourses used in a metropolitan West Australian pre-primary classroom and aims to find alternative avenues to view disruption. To aid this search, the multiple meanings of ‘discipline’ in connection to behaviour management, learning and pedagogy are explored.

Contexts, Collaboration, and Cultural Tools: a sociocultural perspective on researching children’s thinking[1]

JILL ROBBINS Monash University, Frankston, Australia

Sociocultural theorists recognise that cognition is not an individual construction, but is distributed across people as they participate in culturally relevant activities. Thus, rather than being a universal skill, thinking is very much contextually specific, guided by others, and mediated by particular cultural tools and artefacts. Yet there is a tendency in research focusing on cognition in young children to examine thinking and understanding as though they occur in a vacuum, separate from the kinds of activities, experiences, artefacts, and people in and with which they participate. This article, drawing on the work of Vygotsky, Rogoff, Wertsch, Göncü, John-Steiner, and others, will discuss how consideration of the important factors of contexts, collaboration, and cultural tools can present a far more dynamic and rich view of young children’s thinking than some more traditional methods of research.

Introducing Functional Thinking in Year 2: a case study of early algebra teaching

ELIZABETH WARREN Australian Catholic University, Brisbane, Australia
TOM COOPER Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

Sixty-five Year 2 children with ages ranging from six to seven years participated in a teaching experiment to introduce functional thinking. The results show that young children are capable of generalising, can provide examples of relations and functions, can describe the inverse of such relationships and give valid reasons for how they found the inverse relationships. They also indicate that specific features of instruction assist this process, particularly abstracting underlying mathematical relationships, notably the materials used by the teacher and the children, the types of activities and the questions asked by the teacher. This leads to specific implications for the teaching of arithmetic in the early years.

Queering Home Corner

AFFRICA TAYLOR & CARMEL RICHARDSON University of Canberra, Australia

A recent Australian controversy over the representation of a same-sex family on national children’s television highlighted the fact that early childhood remains a domain of strongly defended heteronormative family privilege. The authors use this controversial event as a springboard into an analysis of the interplay between the hegemonic discourses of childhood innocence and ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and as an opportunity to offer a queerer perspective on early childhood. Applying Foucault’s ‘heterotopia’ analytic to a set of narrative observations of children’s dramatic play in home corner, the authors trace some of the ways in which children both regulate and transgress the gender norms that underpin heteronormative social relations.

Doing Anti-homophobia and Anti-heterosexism in Early Childhood Education: moving beyond the immobilising impacts of ‘risks’, ‘fears’ and ‘silences’. Can We Afford Not To?

KERRY ROBINSON University of Western Sydney, Australia

This article explores the notion of ‘risk’ and the consequences of both ‘taking risks’ or ‘not taking risks’ in doing anti-homophobia (or anti-heterosexist) education within broader anti-bias and social justice agendas in early childhood education. Informed primarily by the author’s collaborative research and experience as a teacher educator in cultural diversity and social justice issues over the past decade, this discussion focuses on the discursive and material barriers that reinforce negative readings of taking risks, within personal, institutional and societal contexts, in relation to doing anti-homophobia education with children as part of early childhood education curricula. The article explores ‘risk’ as a social construction, operating as a powerful means of societal control in order to maintain the status quo and dominant power relations that underpin societal inequalities, especially those related to the rigid binary heterosexual us/homosexual them. The question of whether early childhood educators can afford to ‘risk’ not doing anti-homophobia education as part of their anti-bias or social justice agendas becomes the pertinent issue explored in this article.

Insider/Outsider Belongings: traversing the borders of whiteness in early childhood

JEN SKATTEBOL University of Western Sydney, Australia

The power associated with identities is frequently negotiated within children’s narratives and play scripts. When children engage in text production, they dispute and mediate their interpersonal and ideological relations. In this article, the author outlines an understanding of ‘whiteness’ as a form of power or capital that is accumulated through certain social practices and a feature of children’s social worlds. In this framework, the practices of whiteness that maintain hegemonic power rely on subtle expressions of an established sense of entitlement and governmental power. These expressions operate in collusion with the occasional use of racist epithets. Data collected in teacher research are read through this theoretical lens to reveal how the practice of ‘whiteness’ may be seen to operate in children’s shared narratives and in pedagogical interventions. Under scrutiny are a number of interactions including a jointly constructed ‘autobiography’ that contains all the typical elements of a young child’s heroic fantasies: home alone, able to recognise danger, the child outwits, outmanoeuvres and overpowers the baddie. The narratives function as a technology of race and of whiteness in particular. The children are intensely engaged with each other’s social imaginaries, and one of the remarkable features of these interactions is a propensity for resistance shown by the children as they dispute their identity positioning within the storylines.

BIG ART small viewer: a collaborative community project

MEGAN GIBSON & NADINE MCALLISTER Campus Kindy, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

Campus Kindergarten is a community-based centre for early childhood education and care located on campus at the University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane, Australia. Being located within this diverse community has presented many opportunities for Campus Kindergarten. It is creating and embracing possibilities that has formed the basis for ongoing projects for children and teachers involving research and investigation. In 2002 Campus Kindergarten embarked on a collaborative project with the Art Museum bringing together these two departments within the university community.

© SYMPOSIUM JOURNALS
Symposium Journals is the trading name of wwwords Ltd
PO Box 204, Didcot, Oxford OX11 9ZQ, United Kingdom
info@symposium-journals.co.uk
www.symposium-journals.co.uk