Contemporary Issues in
Early Childhood

ISSN 1463-9491

Volume 8 Number 2 2007

CONTENTS

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

SPECIAL ISSUE
Childcare Politics and Policy: analysis and advocacy. Part 1*
Guest Editors: JENNIFER SUMSION & FRANCES PRESS
* Part 2 of this special issue is contained
within Volume 8 Number 3 2007

Editorial, pages 96‑97
Elizabeth Rigby, Kate Tarrant & Michelle J. Neuman. Alternative Policy Designs and the Socio-political Construction of Childcare, pages 98‑108
Marianne Fenech & Jennifer Sumsion. Early Childhood Teachers and Regulation: complicating power relations using a Foucauldian lens, pages 109‑122
Andrew Gibbons. Playing the Ruins: the philosophy of care in early childhood education, pages 123‑132
Helen May. ‘Minding’, ‘Working’, ‘Teaching’: childcare in Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1940s–2000s, pages 133‑143
Sandie Wong. Looking Back and Moving Forward: historicising the social construction of early childhood education and care as national work, pages 144‑156
Jo Ailwood. Mothers, Teachers, Maternalism and Early Childhood Education and Care: some historical connections, pages 157‑165

COLLOQUIA
Linda J. Graham. Countering the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Epidemic: a question of ethics?, pages 166‑169
Ann Merete Otterstad. Doing and Unpacking De/Colonising Methodologies: who is at risk?, pages 170‑174

BOOK REVIEWS VIEW FULL TEXT doi: 10.2304/ciec.2007.8.2. 175
Theorising Early Childhood Practice: emerging dialogues (Linda Keesing-Styles & Helen Hedges), reviewed by Helen Logan, pages 175‑176
Transitions to School: perceptions, expectations, experiences (S. Dockett & B. Perry), reviewed by Anne Petriwskyj, page 177

Editorial

doi: 10.2304/ciec.2007.8.2.96

VIEW FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST

This is the first of two issues of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood focusing on childcare politics and policy. In these special issues we hope to open up to analysis and debate the role of politics and policy in framing community perceptions of childcare. How do policy discourses position children, families, teachers and childcare staff? How do early childhood activists and advocates interact with and influence policy? What is there to be learned from critical analyses of policy trends? And how do we both deconstruct and reconstruct the policy landscape?

This first issue contains a rich and diverse collection of articles collectively examining historical and contemporary trends in early childhood policy primarily, but not exclusively, in Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand contexts. Commencing with a cross-national examination of policy designs from researchers based in the USA, the articles are ordered and interlinked thematically. The collection begins with the contemporary policy context, with the first two articles examining specific tools of government policy (funding and regulation). Then we are offered two different perspectives on the Aotearoa/New Zealand policy landscape: the first concerned with the deconstruction and reconstitution of ‘care’ in contemporary early childhood policy; the second drawing heavily upon the history of early childhood policy trends and advocacy in Aotearoa/New Zealand to highlight, in particular, trends in the provision and staffing of childcare. In the final two articles, the historical lens transfers to the Australian context, each contribution offering different perspectives on past influences on the contemporary childcare landscape.

In the first article, Elizabeth Rigby, Kate Tarrant & Michelle Neuman propose a framework for comparing childcare funding policy design that uncovers hidden assumptions and discourses about the role and purpose of childcare, and helps make explicit the social constructions of childcare which are privileged by these approaches. They draw our attention to the implications of the individual design choices of policy makers; the need to be cognisant of the cumulative impact of incremental policy changes; and the way in which policy can become institutionalised, ‘sticky’ and difficult to reshape. Their critical examination of common funding tools helps explicate the intent and impact of such policy design. Continuing the focus upon policy mechanisms, Marianne Fenech & Jennifer Sumsion draw upon an Australian study of early childhood teachers’ perceptions of regulations to complicate analyses which frame regulation primarily as constraint. Their exploration and analysis of teacher interactions with regulatory processes and the politics of regulation provide an insight into the multiple ways in which teachers both experience and position regulation. The authors’ analysis underscores the agentic potential of critical engagement with the enactment and formulation of policy.

The linguistic intertwining of care and education, within the framework of early childhood educational policy, has gained widespread acceptance. Andrew Gibbons places this rhetorical and institutional conflation under the microscope with a particular focus on how this plays out in the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Drawing upon the work of Readings and Arendt he urges a ‘working of the ruins’ of care to open up spaces for care, paying particular attention to the knowledge and propensities of the carer. Whilst providing a thoughtful critique of the normalising and constraining potential of the contemporary discourse of education and care, Gibbons also brings our attention to the possibilities of ‘positively reconstituting’ care and education.

Helen May provides a review of the major policy shifts which have shaped the Aotearoa/New Zealand early childhood sector, particularly in relation to childcare, over the past 60 years. May characterises each period of significant policy shift as being shaped by a specific government gaze which has, in turn, positioned childcare, and the staff who work within it, in particular ways. Her historical overview is mindful of not only the ways in which childcare and childcare staff have been positioned, but also of the ways in which childcare advocates have opened up windows for change. Her potted history of the Aotearoa/New Zealand experience is a reminder of the ways in which political ideology and national concerns can shape policy, and also that the shape of policy is influenced by strategically coordinated activism.

May’s ‘minding’, ‘working’ and ‘teaching’ is illustrative of the ways in which advocates can consciously make use of the dominant paradigms to work toward the reform of the system. In a similar vein, Sandie Wong argues that early childhood activism can involve strategic use of nationalist and economic discourses in order to broaden the base of public support for the universal provision of early childhood education and care. Ranging over trends in contemporary social constructions of early childhood education and care in Australia, Wong then examines historical constructions of early childhood education in Australia as national work. Wong argues that by utilising these constructions, early childhood advocates successfully legitimated their claims for public support, and suggests that this holds lessons for contemporary advocacy.

The final contribution also provides a historical perspective, with Jo Ailwood considering the historical points at which discourses of maternalism have been embedded in Australian early childhood policy. Her article examines the construction and influence of maternalism in the ideas and teacher training expounded by Froebel, and the subsequent spread of the kindergarten movement. Like Wong, Ailwood recognises connections between the rhetoric of nation building and the spread of early childhood education, and draws our attention to the ways in which these were intertwined with constructions of idealised womanhood and maternalist discourses. Ailwood uses her historical analysis to make us mindful of maternalist discourses in contemporary debates concerning childcare.

Helen Logan’s book review discusses the recently released Theorising Early Childhood Practice: emerging dialogues (2007) edited by Linda Keesing–Styles & Helen Hedges. This edited collection brings together the writings of a range of researchers and practitioners from Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa, creating a trans-Tasman dialogue about critical issues in early childhood.

In their abstract, Elizabeth Rigby, Kate Tarrant & Michelle Neuman make the point that ‘[p]olicy design choices ... are in fact social, political, moral, and value-laden choices that shape the nature of young children’s experiences’. This understanding permeates the themes and analyses of this issue’s collection. Policy is expressed not only in the formal language of political parties and the official statements of government departments, but it is also played out in the use and interpretation of language, the formal mechanisms of funding and standard setting, the conditions in which childcare staff work, the design and ostensible purposes of childcare, and the action of advocates and activists.

The wide-ranging perspectives offered by these contributions are illustrative of the multiple influences to which childcare policy is subject and the multifaceted nature of policy itself. Each article adds to our capacity to scrutinise, analyse and to engage actively with childcare policy. Together, they contribute to an enriched understanding of the policy and the role of early childhood activists as advocates in that landscape.

Alternative Policy Designs and the Socio-political Construction of Childcare

ELIZABETH RIGBY University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
KATE TARRANT & MICHELLE J. NEUMAN Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, USA

doi: 10.2304/ciec.2007.8.2.98

Policy makers and advocates have a variety of tools from which to choose when designing childcare policy. Policy design choices, such as whether to provide childcare assistance through a new government program or via a voucher for use in the private market, are in fact social, political, moral, and value-laden choices that shape the nature of young children’s experiences in care settings. Although rarely discussed, these choices also privilege particular social constructions of childcare by defining our understanding of the policy problem and the characteristics of the target populations. In addition, policy designs institutionalize and legitimize particular forms of governmental involvement in children’s lives – as well as give power and voice to some interests over others – resulting in a new political context for future policy debates. To better illustrate these socio-political effects, this article documents and compares these consequences of five common childcare policy designs.

Early Childhood Teachers and Regulation: complicating power relations using a Foucauldian lens

MARIANNE FENECH Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
JENNIFER SUMSION Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, Australia

doi: 10.2304/ciec.2007.8.2.109

This article both supports and complicates the positioning of reconceptualists who frame the regulation of early childhood services as repressive. Drawing on Foucault’s construction of power and, in particular, his notion of an ‘analytics of power’, the authors analyse findings from an Australian study investigating university-qualified early childhood teachers’ perceptions of regulation. The authors contend that whilst most participants in this study experienced regulation as constraining, they resisted perceived threats to themselves and quality practices in ways that problematize a reconceptualist repressive construction of regulation. The authors show, firstly, that teachers strategically positioned regulation as an ally so as to resist perceived threats to themselves and to children; and secondly, that they strategically positioned themselves to resist perceived adversarial aspects of regulation. Exercising agency in these ways meant that regulation was experienced as enabling and its constraining potential somewhat mitigated. After highlighting the role critical thinking plays in early childhood teachers’ exercising of agency through resistance, the authors conclude by urging early childhood teachers to contest not only the elements of regulation they perceive to be constraining, but also the contextual factors that can influence how early childhood teachers view regulation.

Playing the Ruins: the philosophy of care in early childhood education

ANDREW GIBBONS New Zealand Tertiary College, Auckland, New Zealand

doi: 10.2304/ciec.2007.8.2.123

A recent ‘strategic initiative’ literature review developed for the Aotearoa/New Zealand Ministry of Education advised that care and education are no longer distinct. This article explores this suggestion in terms of the politics and the philosophy of early childhood education. It argues that the synthesis of care and education reflects an economy of ‘expert’ knowledge in which care is increasingly subject to an educational regulatory gaze. While the influence of a sociocultural perspective in early childhood education research and practice engenders a sense of acknowledging the margins, this article argues that the margins have very little say with regards to what constitutes caring and educating practices. The synthesis of care and education legitimates increased state regulation of early education, and reflects a contemporary will to iron out social seams (engendering the seamless society). This article argues that the conflation of education and care troubles truth regimes that have, in Aotearoa/New Zealand and elsewhere, governed practices of caring for the child during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hence, care is a concept in ruins.

‘Minding’, ‘Working’, ‘Teaching’: childcare in Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1940s–2000s

HELEN MAY University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

doi: 10.2304/ciec.2007.8.2.133

Over a sixty-year period, staff working in childcare have been transformed from childminders into teachers on a path towards pay parity with teachers in the kindergarten, primary and secondary school sectors. Similarly, childcare provision has shifted from being deemed potentially harmful for children, and unnecessary except in exceptional situations, to become the major provider of early childhood education in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Sixty years ago, childcare centres were excluded from government interest in terms of policy and funding. In the 2000s, childcare is a major plank of government policy interest. This article documents the political ‘gazes’ that have framed three ‘windows’ or points in time when significant government reports became blueprints for policy shifts. Advocacy was a key driver in shifting government opinion and policy.

Looking Back and Moving Forward: historicising the social construction of early childhood education and care as national work

SANDIE WONG SDN Children’s Services, Sydney, Australia

doi: 10.2304/ciec.2007.8.2.144

Whilst it is possible to construct early childhood education and care (ECEC) in multiple ways, this article focuses on constructions of ECEC that have emerged within nationalist discourses privileged in advanced Western countries today, that is, ECEC as ‘national work’. Although these constructs are problematic and thus subject to criticism, the author shows that, historically, positioning ECEC as being of national benefit proved a powerful strategy for the early advocates of ECEC in New South Wales, Australia. The author argues that, despite their problematic nature, contemporary advocates of universal ECEC should strategically use nationalist and economic discourses.

Mothers, Teachers, Maternalism and Early Childhood Education and Care: some historical connections

JO AILWOOD Queensland University of Technology, Kelvin Grove, Australia

doi: 10.2304/ciec.2007.8.2.157

Many current debates in Australia regarding the policy, politics and practicalities of childcare provision are embedded in dominant discourses of maternalism. This article places these debates within some historical contexts, emphasising the long history of these debates and the enduring centrality of maternalism – where the most revered of roles and relationships a woman can have is that of mother and one-on-one carer for her young child. In this article, the author discusses some of the historical points at which maternalism came to dominate early childhood education and care. The author considers Froebel, and the women who spread his word, nation building and the rise of psychology, making links between these and current debates in Australia.

Countering the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Epidemic: a question of ethics?

LINDA J. GRAHAM University of Sydney, Australia

doi: 10.2304/ciec.2007.8.2.166

Recently in Australia, another media skirmish erupted over the problem currently called ‘Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’. This particular event was precipitated by the comments of a respected District Court judge. His claim that doctors are creating a generation of violent juvenile offenders by prescribing Ritalin to young children created a great deal of excitement, attracting the attention of election-conscious politicians who appear blissfully unaware of the role played by educational policy in creating and maintaining the problem. Given the short (election-driven) attention span of government policy makers, the author bypasses government to question what those at the front line can do to circumvent the questionable practice of diagnosing and medicating young children for difficulties they experience in schools and with learning.

Doing and Unpacking De/Colonising Methodologies: who is at risk?

ANN MERETE OTTERSTAD Oslo University College, Norway

doi: 10.2304/ciec.2007.8.2.170

Contemporary research processes might be identified as having neither a beginning nor an end. This article is written as an interruption in the ending of the author’s doctoral processes. The project is to critically reflect and examine complexities involving who is at risk when methodology and theory argue for displacements that unpack taken-for-granted norms. These are unequal sociological binaries such as white/black, privileged/non-privileged, the researcher/the researched. By working within the epistemology of differences the author has been inspired by multiple methodologies involving stories, voices and metaphors. From theories of the critical social sciences, feminisms and post-structuralisms, knowledge is reconfigured from static, fixed disciplines towards dynamic fluidity and complexity.

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