Teacher accounts of parent involvement in children's education in China

Discursive insights into early childhood teacher views of parenting in a Chinese context is the focus of this paper. A critical discourse analysis was conducted on teachers' professional accounts captured on an online discussion forum uncovering how parenting and the role of parents in children's education were represented. Emphasized in the analysis is the importance of situating teacher discourse within the context of ‘glocalization’, acknowledging the influence of Confucian ideology on their professional stance, and recognizing the position of Western approaches in early childhood education. The findings reveal a tenuous place for teacher-parent partnerships in teachers' dialogic space and practice.     

If not quality,then what? The discursive risks in early childhood quality reform

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on the findings of a genealogical study and argues that the global discourse of quality in early childhood education and care (ECEC) is based on a number of problematic assumptions that converge to identify ‘quality’ as the site of government investment. Using the Australian policy context as an example, the assumption that only quality ECEC is beneficial for children is linked to the historical privileging of mother-care and the male breadwinner through family policy. Using Foucault’s notion of the ‘art of government’, the implications of the discursive logics of quality are outlined, including how ‘not quality’ childcare is positioned as potentially harmful, yet, the workforce can never be ‘quality enough’. It is recommended that early childhood sector academics, advocates and professionals work to introduce new discursive statements to the global policyscape, in order to create and foster diverse representations and understandings of the benefits and value of ECEC.     

The representation of the national quality framework in the australian print media: silences and slants in the mediatisation of early childhood education policy

ABSTRACT

While research investigating the mediatisation of education policy has primarily been undertaken in school contexts, this paper reports on a study conducted in the context of early childhood education. The paper examines how a major policy in early childhood education in Australia – the National Quality Framework – has been mediatised in selected newspapers. Drawing on Foucauldian, critical discourse analysis and mediatisation theorising, we utilised the corpus linguistic tools of WordSmith Tools 6.0 to inform content analyses of 121 articles from two major media corporations, News Corp and Fairfax. Our findings highlight the utility of treating our data as two distinct corpora, with each corporation found to have utilised discursive technologies to proffer competing positionings of the Framework. The contested nature of the Framework – generally purported in Fairfax to be a tool that supports quality early education, as opposed to News Corp’s framing of the policy as one that inhibits affordable childcare – poses implications for which advocacy groups are regarded by the media as having authority and thus likely to influence policy through the reporting of their voices. Implications for newspaper media as a discursive influence on parents’ childcare decision-making are also considered.     

Unpacking the narrative of non-positional leadership in academia: Hero and/or victim?

This article, based on narrative inquiry, explores how academics with/out formal leadership positions experience and understand themselves as leaders in their everyday working contexts. A single case of a fixed-term academic was chosen to illustrate how different analytical lenses – ‘plot analysis’ and ‘discourse analysis’ – can unpack the complexities of experience associated with non-positional leadership, a topic scarcely represented in studies of leadership in higher education. Two interdependent plots – the heroic plot and the victimised plot – were found to recur throughout the participant's narrative. These plots signified the conflictual dynamics and the unique subjectivity in which this person made sense of himself as a leader. The analytical lens was then shifted to pay greater attention to the ways in which broader networks of discourses were at play within this participant's narrative. Using discourse analysis, the discourses of autonomy and masculinity, among others, were present in constituting the unique subject positions the participant took up. The article concludes with a summary of methodological contributions this study offers to the field of leadership in higher education.     

{Le Théâtre de la Cruauté} or When Caring ‘Is’

In this article we offer an ontological theorization of care. The article interrogates the self-evident quality of everyday meanings for ‘care’ that might be generated from psychological or biological discourses; we aim to question the way that ‘care’ is applied in a technical or an emotional sense within the field of early childhood education. The article works towards offering a new theorization that does not treat the meaning of ‘care’ as self-evident. If ‘care’ is a way of addressing concern for ourselves as human beings, we think that deepening the theoretical parameters of this concept will add to how we understand the complexity of gender and race relations. By articulating Heidegger’s use of ‘care’ and comparing it to Irigaray’s critique of Heidegger’s work on this concept, we hope to enable professionals and families to view conceptions of ‘care’ outside the familiar definitions applied in everyday discourse. The article treats early childhood education professional practice as an instance of how both gender and race delimit the way in which human relationships can be understood.     

Revealing the research ‘hole’ of early childhood education for sustainability: a preliminary survey of the literature

In 2007, Environmental Education Research dedicated a special issue to childhood and environmental education. This paper makes a case for ‘early childhood’ to also be in the discussions. Here, I am referring to early childhood as the before‐school years, focusing on educational settings such as childcare centres and kindergartens. This sector is one of the research ‘holes’ that Reid and Scott ask the environmental education community to have the ‘courage to discuss’. This paper draws on a survey of Australian and international research journals in environmental education and early childhood education seeking studies at their intersection. Few were found. Some studies explored young children’s relationships with nature (education in the environment). A smaller number discussed young children’s understandings of environmental topics (education about the environment). Hardly any centred on young children as agents of change (education for the environment). At a time when there is a growing literature showing that early investments in human capital offer substantial returns to individuals and communities and have a far‐reaching effect – and when early childhood educators are beginning to engage with sustainability – it is vital that our field responds. This paper calls for urgent action – especially for research – to address the gap.     

World culture with Chinese characteristics: when global models go native

Just as the world has increasingly been compressed over recent decades through transnationally engaged actors or ‘carriers’ such as mobile experts, international organisations, and seemingly globalised bodies of knowledge, so have China's politicians and academics increasingly ‘gone global’ in various fields of social action, including education. China's Open Door policy since the late 1970s is, historically, not the country's first opening to the world but is preceded by earlier phases of opening and closing. Each of these ‘global’ phases is witness to two interrelated phenomena: the reconstruction of the local through the global; and the reconceptualisation of the global through the local.

The article seeks to illustrate this dialectic process both in theory and in practice. The first part unpacks dimensions and paradoxes of the global–local nexus in comparative education, discussing both fruitfulness and shortcomings of the ‘world culture theory’ and complementary approaches. Based on the insights from this discussion, the second part showcases the local embeddedness of seemingly global paths by revealing how the Chinese educational field dealt with – and appropriated – ‘world culture’. I will exemplify this by looking at two different time periods: firstly, I will show how, in the Republican China of the 1920s, the idea of ‘vocational education’ was taken up, transformed, and meshed with socio-culturally grounded, both traditional and contemporaneous notions of how the individual should be socialised into working life. Secondly, I will trace how the idea of ‘neo-liberalism’ has been taken up by Chinese educationists since the 1990s and how it has been sinicised to justify – or oppose – equality in education. The insights from these two historical snapshots are two-fold: firstly, the development of Chinese education is not as nationally determined as is suggested by various actors and researchers but emerges at the interface of globally migrating ideas and nationally designed strategies; secondly, ‘world culture’ – or an educational ideology spreading worldwide – is not as uniform as is suggested by its apparent global ubiquity but is remade by local, if transnationally active agents and networks.     

Toward a Wonderland of comparative education

ABSTRACT

The publication of Noah & Eckstein's Toward a Science of Comparative Education (1969, Macmillan, NY) marked the beginning of an increasingly narrow research trajectory in comparative education, claiming a universality for Western knowledge and privileging scientific rationality in research. Juxtaposing the ‘science’ to Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’, such comparative education relegated more-than-human worlds and spiritual domains of learning – and being – to our collective pasts, personal childhood memories, or imaginations. How can we reorient and attune ourselves toward a Wonder(land), rather than a Science of comparative education exclusively, opening spaces for multiple ways of making sense of the world, and multiple ways of being? How can we reanimate our capacity toengage with a more-than-human world? Based on the analysis of children’s literature and textbooks published during various historical periods in Latvia, this article follows the white rabbit to reexamine taken-for-granted dichotomies – nature and culture, time and space, self and other – by bringing the ‘pagan’ worldviews or nature-centred spiritualities more clearly into focus, while reimagining education and childhood beyond the Western horizon.     

From myths to models: the (re)production of world culture in comparative education

This article traces the emergence of the world culture theory in comparative education using critical discourse analysis. By chronicling the emergence and expansion of world culture theory over the past four decades, we highlight the (unintended) limitations and exclusive regimes of thought that have resulted. We argue that the theory's telos of a ‘world culture’ neglects the notions of power and agency, and continues to use discourses of modernism and ‘scientific’ methodology to justify conformity as the reigning global ‘norm’. The world culture theory ultimately results in an unwitting legitimisation of neoliberal policies and its varied educational projects. Drawing on the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of discourse analysis, we examine how the semantics and content of the world culture theory have evolved as it embraced an increasingly large and diverse community of scholars aligned with it. By highlighting some significant semantic shifts during the last four decades, we explore how the world culture theorists forged a relatively new (privileged) space in comparative education – a space that has increasingly turned deterministic and normative. Through a careful deconstruction of some of the basic assumptions of world culture theory, we call for reopening of an intellectual space for new ways of thinking about educational phenomena in the context of globalisation.     

Teaching through an ethics of belonging,care and obligation as a critical approach to transforming education

This paper considers the experiences of a New Zealand family and their ‘disabled’ daughter Clare’s ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ in her early childhood centre and the implications of these experiences for shifting from a discourse of ‘inclusion’ to ‘belonging’ based on ‘an ethics of care and obligation to others’. I argue that the meanings and understandings of ‘inclusion’ for disabled children in education are variable and that they often default to dominant deficit discourses whilst believing themselves to be ‘inclusive’. I also argue that we must consciously develop a critical awareness of how exclusionary power operates in society and in our own settings. In this paper, I present ideas drawn from a ‘pedagogy of listening’ and Te Whaariki – The New Zealand Early Childhood Curriculum to critically reflect on some of the early childhood education experiences of Clare and her family. I suggest that teachers’ use of critical reflective ‘child’s questions’ can be used as tools for educational transformation towards the full and meaningful participation of disabled children in education.     

Morality in parents’ stories of preschool choice: narrating identity positions of good parenting

This article aims to contribute to our understanding of how moral aspects of parents’ choices of preschool play a part in the processes of marketisation and privatisation of childcare in Sweden. The paper explores parents’ narratives of preschool choice as moral claims of parental identities. The analysed data are based on a study of how parents make sense of their preschool choice during life-story interviews. Our results point out good parenting as having to do with making distinctions between what is ‘good and bad’ and ‘right and wrong’ regardless of whether the choices concern preschools or the behaviour of preschool teachers and parents. Culturally available discourses become visible through the making of these distinctions in ways that ultimately point to the subject position of parents as particular choosers as related to a prevailing discourse of parental responsibility.     

Remove ‘care’ and stir: modernizing early childhood teacher education in Norway

ABSTRACT

There is growing concern within the field of education regarding how the implementation of national frameworks based on the European Qualifications Framework displaces tacit and less traditionally formalized knowledge from policy. This issue is particularly salient concerning national frameworks that regulate early childhood teacher education, in which knowledge and competencies about caring are crucial, though under-articulated. The proportion of under three-year olds who participate in government subsidized early childhood education and care programs in Norway has risen from 37% in 2000 to over 82% in 2016. Amidst this historic rise, the word ‘care’ was removed from Norway’s most recent National Framework for Early Childhood Teacher Education. Whilst policy analyses generally focus on the content of policy texts, in this article, I examine the circumstances surrounding the curious disappearance of text, namely the key concept of care. Combining a Foucauldian concern with discourse with Malabou’s concept of plasticity, this article reports on a plastic discourse analysis of the removal of care from the newest framework for early childhood teacher education in Norway.     

Governance and knowledge transformations in educational administration: Greek responses to global policies

This article explores the localisation of the global and European discourse of educational governance in the Greek education system through the changes that have been introduced in the field of education administration since 2009 by the then socialist government. Our research aims to contribute to the critical policy literature on the spreading marketisation and privatisation in the governing of education around the world and in Europe – through the adoption of New Public Management and Educational Leadership models. In developing our theoretical perspective, we use the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and discourse, and in order to conceptualise power and control relations in the organisation, transmission, acquisition, and evaluation of pedagogical knowledge, we draw on Bernstein's theory of symbolic control. Our study has examined how the field of education administration is governed through power and knowledge transformations. We trace these transformations by analysing systematically the pedagogic discourse through which the global governance discourse is relayed and becomes a ‘regime of truth’ within public policy and practice in Greece. We argue that such changes have significant implications for everyday educational practice and for the kinds of knowledge that are considered legitimate, and they may affect educational professionals' subjectivities in fundamental ways.     

Children's participation in school grounds developments: creating a place for education that promotes children's social inclusion

This paper advances the idea that ‘education for the social inclusion of children’ is similar but different to ‘inclusive education’ as it has come to be understood and used by some authors and UK government documents. ‘Inclusive education’ tends to carry an inward emphasis on the participation of children in the education system (with discussions on school culture, transitions, truancy, exclusion rates, underachievement, and school leaving age). In contrast, education for the promotion of children's social inclusion requires an outward emphasis on children's participation in ‘mainstream’ society while they are still children. The latter emphasis is seen to be lacking in educational policy discourse in Scotland though a recent shift in policy towards education for active citizenship is noted. Examples are provided to show how many policy statements enact a limitation on the scope for education to promote children's social inclusion by emphasizing children's deficits as social actors and focussing on the ‘condition’ of social exclusion. The paper draws on an empirical study of children's participation in changing school grounds in Scotland. The analysis shows how the enclosure of learning in books, classrooms and normative curricula was challenged. Learning from school grounds developments was constructed relationally and spatially, but the scope of what was to be learned was often delineated by adults. The paper closes with a discussion of how education that promotes the social inclusion of children will benefit from seeing both children and adults as current though partial citizens and using socio-spatial opportunities for the generation of uncertain curricula through their shared and/or differentiated participation.     

A Jamesonian analysis of “flat world” imagery in education discourse

This article presents a discourse analysis of Kylene Beers’ presidential address to the 2009 conference of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE-USA). The address, titled “Sailing over the Edge: Navigating the Uncharted Waters of a World Gone Flat,” calls teachers to reject the standardized education of the industrial order and to harness the creativity at the heart of the “flat world” (i.e. global, knowledge-based capitalism). The discourse analysis focuses on the figure of the “flat world” – an increasingly common image in education research – and asks how the speech uses the figure of the “flat world” to reimagine the role of education under global capitalism. Mobilizing the ideas of Fredric Jameson, the Marxist literary critic, the article asks how the speech's story of education in the “flat world” offers “an imaginary resolution of a real contradiction” between industrial and knowledge-based capitalisms.     

Toward a Postmodern Notion of Human Rights

Abstract

A central element of Richard Peters’ philosophy of education has been his analysis of ‘education as initiation’. Understanding initiation is internally related to concepts of community and what it may mean to be a member. The concept of initiation assumes a mutually interdependent, dynamic relationship between the individual and community that claims to be justified on cognitive, moral and practical grounds. Although Peters’ analysis is embedded in a different discourse, his insights are relevant to current discourse on the individual in community. A fruitful conversation can be developed between Peters’ account of the learner’s ‘initiation’ into ‘bodies of knowledge and awareness’ and Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of ‘practices’; and how both assume a notion of ‘tradition’ within partly overlapping accounts of ‘community’. Secondly, I will consider how ‘initiation’ touches the concept of ‘social justice as membership’ developed by current philosophers, Michael Sandel and Michael Walzer, and what import Peters’ analysis has for different degrees of active and passive membership and participation. Thirdly, I will consider Charles Taylor’s ‘social imaginary’ as a contextual framework for processes surrounding ‘education as initiation’. This article does not argue that Peters’ concept of initiation cannot be contested at some points but rather that it can inform, and be informed by, the conversation with those who contend that community is itself a good essential for human flourishing.     

Neuroscience and Education: Blind Spots in a Strange Relationship

This article—mainly referring to the situation in Germany—consists of three parts. In a first section the current presence of neurosciences in the public discourse will be described in order to illuminate the background which is relevant for contemporary educational thinking. The prefix ‘neuro‐’ is ubiquitous today and therefore concepts like ‘neuropedagogy’ or ‘neurodidactics’ seem to be in the mainstream of modern thinking. In the second part of the article the perspective changes from the public discourse to the disciplinary discourse; a brief excursus into developmental psychiatry, neuropsychology and modern psychoanalysis will be made in order to demonstrate how the results of neuroscientific research are integrated in their theoretical frameworks. These three disciplines have no difficulty in integrating neuroscientific findings because each of them possesses a systematic core composed of ‘native concepts’. In contrast to them, educational theory has much more difficulty with such integration, as will be shown in the third part of the essay. On the one hand, neuroscientific thinking seems to be able to dominate education rather easily and without great resistance, especially in the fields of early childhood education, instruction and learning—mainly by simplifying educational processes and by reducing the complexity of the educational task to a mere ‘relationship problem’. On the other hand, this attraction of neuroscience in education might be understood as the reflection of a theoretical deficit in educational theory itself, with the significance of affect and emotion not receiving proper attention.     

‘Before I realised they were all women… I expected it to be more about materials’: Art,Gender and Tacit Subjectivity

This article discusses a critical discourse analysis research activity undertaken with a group of undergraduate primary trainees with an art specialism. The research activity involved the use of two contrasting texts discussing the work of Karla Black, Becky Beasley and Claire Barclay. The article explores how the positioning of the two texts affected the student teachers’ ability to engage effectively with ‘women's art’ on a personal and critical level, revealing some highly subjective views and raising questions around intertextuality; particularly how an individual's understanding of contexts, meanings and histories can inform collective interpretation and highlight existing subjectivity. The article subsequently identifies that although students were keen to talk about careful selection of texts, the benefits of using multiple sources and the risks of intertextual and ‘subliminal’ contamination, they were unable to reflect critically upon their own gendered reading of the texts. It concludes that this may well be a signifier of the problem – that the student teachers did not really see a problem at all.     

Fixing contradictions of education commercialisation: Pearson plc and the construction of its efficacy brand

ABSTRACT

This paper explores some of the fundamental contradictions related to the commercialisation of education and how Pearson plc – ‘the world’s leading multinational education company’ – is trying to overcome these challenges through discourse and semiotics. Pearson’s Efficacy Framework is a semiotic-calculative device created to measure the impact of educational products and services sold by the company. This paper examines the ways in which the efficacy programme and tools developed by Pearson represent a type of ‘social fix’ intended to resolve contradictions linked to education commercialisation by demonstrating the ‘measurable impact’ and ‘outcomes’ resulting from its educational products and services and communicating that to customers, shareholders, policymakers, state managers and partners. Efficacy will be analysed as it relates to a hegemonic ‘knowledge brand’ in the making in education that is being actively promoted and appropriated by Pearson. Pearson, therefore, aims to construct a corporate brand and reputation around efficacy based on legible measures of performance, which this paper argues is in response to risks and contradictions associated with the commercialisation of education.