Zsuzsa Millei
Tampere University, Faculty of Education and Culture, Faculty Member
- Central and East European Studies, Comparative & International Education, Governmentality, Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education, Political Concepts and Education, Reconceptualizing Classroom Discipline, and 39 moreEarly Childhood Education, Socialisms, Contemporary Governance and Education Subjects Early Childhood Education Policy in Comparative Contexts, Politics Of Education, Childhood studies, Poststructuralism in Education, Poststructuralism, Political Subjectivities, Political Agency, Children's Rights, Sociology of Education, Classroom Management, Politics of Education and Social Policy, Neoliberalism, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Critical sociology and politics of education, Central and Eastern Europe, Space and Place, Post-Socialism, Michel Foucault, Early Childhood, Post-Socialist Societies, Post-Communist Studies, Education Policy, Early Childhood Policy, Postsocialism, Power, Children's Voices, Cosmopolitanism, New Social Studies of Childhood, COMPARATIVE PRESCHOOL EDUCATION, Politics and Children, Childhood Politics, Children’s Geographies, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, Childrens Geographies, Children's geographies, Nationalism, and National Identityedit
- I am a Professor at the Faculty of Education and Culture, University of Tampere, Finland. I am interested in the ways... moreI am a Professor at the Faculty of Education and Culture, University of Tampere, Finland. I am interested in the ways in which contemporary governance constitutes the subjects of education and shapes children as political subjects and childhood as the site of politics. Based in comparative frameworks and individual case studies, my published work examines government policies and initiatives; nation and childhood; the use of political concepts in education, such as participation, citizenship and community; curriculum and pedagogical discourses under different political ideological regimes; classroom discipline and practices of early childhood education. My recent projects explores everyday nationhood, children's place-making in a globalizing world and memories of childhood and schooling under socialism.edit
In NSW, Australia, universal access met with a fragmented system that has high fees, low participation rates and a three prong model of service delivery, which includes government, community and private services. This system has struggled... more
In NSW, Australia, universal access met with a fragmented system that has high fees, low participation rates and a three prong model of service delivery, which includes government, community and private services. This system has struggled to accommodate universal access, which is 15 hours per week of quality early childhood education for all 4 and 5 years old children, especially targeting those from disadvantaged backgrounds. This chapter provides a place-based analysis of the implementation of universal access in a New South Wales preschool in Australia. By successfully grappling with re-targeted funding to support the implementation of universal access, the example preschool's demographic composition has profoundly changed. It had disproportionately larger number of children requiring additional support bringing significant shifts in everyday pedagogical work. In order to continue providing a high quality education, the preschool relied on an already underappreciated and underpaid workforce's resilience, unrecognized work and emotional labor. While the aim was primarily to give access to affordable and quality early education for disadvantaged children, through our analysis we demonstrate that universal access has a cunning ability to produce uneven progress across places and to continue reproducing inequality.
Research Interests:
This book explores childhood and schooling in late socialist societies by bringing into dialogue public narratives and personal memories that move beyond imaginaries of Cold War divisions between the East and West. Written by cultural... more
This book explores childhood and schooling in late socialist societies by bringing into dialogue public narratives and personal memories that move beyond imaginaries of Cold War divisions between the East and West. Written by cultural insiders who were brought up and educated on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain - spanning from Central Europe to mainland Asia - the book offers insights into the diverse spaces of socialist childhoods interweaving with broader political, economic, and social life. These evocative memories explore the experiences of children in navigating state expectations to embody “model socialist citizens” and their mixed feelings of attachment, optimism, dullness, and alienation associated with participation in “building” socialist futures. Drawing on the research traditions of autobiography, autoethnography, and collective biography, the authors challenge what is often considered ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ in the historical accounts of socialist childhoods, and engage in (re)writing histories that open space for new knowledges and vast webs of interconnections to emerge. This book will be compelling reading for students and researchers working in education, sociology and history, particularly those within the interdisciplinary fields of childhood and area studies. ‘
The authors of this beautiful book are professional academics and intellectuals who grew up in different socialist countries. Exploring “socialist childhoods” in myriad ways, they draw on memories, and collective history, emotional insider knowledge and the measured perspective of an analyst. What emerges is life that was caught between real optimism and dullness, ethical commitments and ideological absurdities, selfless devotion to children and their treatment as a political resource. Such attention to detail and examination of the paradoxical nature of this time makes this collective effort not only timely but remarkably genuine.’ —Alexei Yurchak, University of California, USA
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The authors of this beautiful book are professional academics and intellectuals who grew up in different socialist countries. Exploring “socialist childhoods” in myriad ways, they draw on memories, and collective history, emotional insider knowledge and the measured perspective of an analyst. What emerges is life that was caught between real optimism and dullness, ethical commitments and ideological absurdities, selfless devotion to children and their treatment as a political resource. Such attention to detail and examination of the paradoxical nature of this time makes this collective effort not only timely but remarkably genuine.’ —Alexei Yurchak, University of California, USA
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Research Interests: Sociology of Education, Sociology of Children and Childhood, History of Education, Cold War and Culture, Cold War, and 16 moreAutoethnography, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, Autobiography, History of Childhood and Youth, Post-Socialist Societies, Politics Of Education, Soviet Union (History), Children and Youth, Memoir and Autobiography, Socialism, Culture in the Soviet Union, Critical sociology and politics of education, Decolonial Thought, Childhood studies, Decolonization, and Schooling Systems
This book offers critical explorations of how the psy-disciplines, Michel Foucault’s collective term for psychiatry, psychology and psycho-analysis, play out in contemporary educational spaces. With a strong focus on Foucault’s theories,... more
This book offers critical explorations of how the psy-disciplines, Michel Foucault’s collective term for psychiatry, psychology and psycho-analysis, play out in contemporary educational spaces. With a strong focus on Foucault’s theories, it critically investigates how the psy-disciplines continue to influence education, both regulating and shaping behaviour and morality. The book provides insight into different educational contexts and concerns across a child’s educational lifespan; early childhood education, inclusive education, special education, educational leadership, social media, university, and beyond to enable reflection and critique of the implications of psy-based knowledge and practice.
With chapters by a mixture of established and emerging international scholars in the field this is an interdisciplinary and authoritative study into the role of the psy-disciplines in the education system. Providing vivid illustrations from throughout the educational lifespan the book serves as an invaluable tool for reflection and critique of the implications of psy-based practice, and will be of particular interest to academics and scholars in the field of education policy and psychology.
With chapters by a mixture of established and emerging international scholars in the field this is an interdisciplinary and authoritative study into the role of the psy-disciplines in the education system. Providing vivid illustrations from throughout the educational lifespan the book serves as an invaluable tool for reflection and critique of the implications of psy-based practice, and will be of particular interest to academics and scholars in the field of education policy and psychology.
Research Interests: Sociology, Positive Psychology, Education, Sociology of Education, Educational Leadership, and 18 moreSociology of Children and Childhood, Teacher Education, Educational Psychology, Early Childhood Education, Doctoral Supervision, Child Development, Critical Discourse Analysis, Michel Foucault, Diversity & Inclusion, Foucault and education, Critical sociology and politics of education, Foucault power/knowledge - discourse, Childhood studies, Teacher professionalism, Early Childhood Development, Classroom behaviour management, Sociology of Childhood and Youth, and Governmentality Studies
Childhood and Nation explores the historical and manifold current relations between nation and childhood. Millei and Imre bring together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars from education, policy studies, political... more
Childhood and Nation explores the historical and manifold current relations between nation and childhood. Millei and Imre bring together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars from education, policy studies, political science, sociology, anthropology, literature, and psychology to address many pressing questions of today. The analytical incisions created by nation and childhood bring answers to the following questions: How do national agendas related to economic, social and political problems exploit children and tighten their regulation? How do representations of nations take advantage of ideals of childhood? Why do nations look to children and search for those characteristics of childhood that help them solve environmental and humanitarian issues? By linking two of the foremost categories of life in the modern world, childhood and nation, this book opens a new vista for thinking about the contemporary world.
Research Interests: Political Geography and Geopolitics, Education, Sociology of Education, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Children's Literature, and 20 moreChildren and Families, Children's Literature & Culture, Children's and Young Adult Literature, Comparative & International Education, Politics, Nationalism, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, History of Childhood and Youth, National Identity, Nationalism And State Building, History of Childhood, Children and Youth, Children's Rights, Comparative Education, Critical sociology and politics of education, Comparative and International Development Education, Political Subjectivity, Children, Childhood studies, and Politics and Children
For some, socialism is a potent way of achieving economic, political and social transformations in the twenty-first century, while others find the very term socialism outdated. This book engages readers in a discussion about the viability... more
For some, socialism is a potent way of achieving economic, political and social transformations in the twenty-first century, while others find the very term socialism outdated. This book engages readers in a discussion about the viability of socialist views on education and identifies the capacity of some socialist ideas to address a range of widely recognized social ills. It argues that these pervasive social problems, which plague so-called 'developed' societies as much as they contribute to the poverty, humiliation and lack of prospects in the rest of the world, fundamentally challenge us to act. In our contemporary world-system, distancing ourselves from the injustices of others is neither viable nor defensible. Rather than waiting for radically new solutions to emerge, this book sees the possibility of transformation in the reconfiguration of existing social logics that comprise our modern societies, including logics of socialism. The book presents case studies that offer a critical examination of education in contemporary socialist contexts, as well as reconsidering examples of education under historical socialism. In charting these alternatives, and retooling past solutions in a nuanced way, it sets out compelling evidence that it is possible to think and act in ways that depart from today's dominant educational paradigm. It offers contemporary policy makers, researchers, and practitioners a cogent demonstration of the contemporary utility of educational ideas and solutions associated with socialism.
Research Interests: Social Movements, Cuban Studies, Comparative & International Education, South African Politics and Society, Socialisms, and 6 moreCommunism, Venezuela, Post-Socialist Societies, Slovenian History, History of Socialism, Contemporary History of Eastern Europe, esp. Czechoslovakia, and MST Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra
For over a century, teachers, parents, and school leaders have lamented a loss of 'discipline' in classrooms. Caught between guidance approaches on the one hand and a call for zero tolerance on the other, current debates rarely venture... more
For over a century, teachers, parents, and school leaders have lamented a loss of 'discipline' in classrooms. Caught between guidance approaches on the one hand and a call for zero tolerance on the other, current debates rarely venture beyond the terrain of implementation strategies. This book aims to reinvigorate thinking on 'discipline' in education by challenging the notions, foundations, and paradigms that underpin its use in policy and practice. It confronts the understanding of 'discipline' as purely repressive, and raises the possibility of enabling forms and conceptualizations of 'discipline' that challenge tokenistic avenues for students' liberation and enhance students' capacity for agency. This book is an essential resource for university lecturers, pre-service and in-service teachers, policymakers, and educational administrators who want to re-think 'discipline' in education in ways that move beyond a concern with managing disorder, to generate alternative understandings that can make a difference in students' lives.
Contents:
Shirley R. Steinberg: Preface
Zsuzsa Millei/Tom G. Griffiths/Robert John Parkes: Opening the Field: Deliberating over 'Discipline'
Zsuzsa Millei: Is It (Still) Useful to Think About Classroom Discipline as Control? An Examination of the 'Problem of Discipline'
Zsuzsa Millei/Rebecca Raby: Embodied Logic: Understanding Discipline through Constituting the Subjects of Discipline
Rebecca Raby: The Intricacies of Power Relations in Discourses of Secondary School Disciplinary Strategies
Megan Watkins: Discipline, Diversity and Agency: Pedagogic Practice and Dispositions to Learning
Robert John Parkes: Discipline and the Dojo
Erica Southgate: Punishing Powerplays: Emotion, Discipline and Memories of School Life
Ken Cliff: Disciplinary Power and the Production of the Contemporary 'Healthy Citizen' in the Era of the 'Obesity Epidemic'
Affrica Taylor: Disciplining Desire: Young Children, Schools and the Media
Rob Imre/Zsuzsa Millei: Citizenship? What Citizenship? Using Political Science Terminology in New Discipline Approaches
Tom G. Griffiths/Rob Imre: Classroom Discipline: A Local Kantian?
Rob Imre/Zsuzsa Millei/Tom G. Griffiths: Utopia/Dystopia: Where Do We Go With 'Discipline'?
Zsuzsa Millei/Tom G. Griffiths/Robert John Parkes: Continuing the Conversation About Discipline as a Problem? A Conclusion.
Contents:
Shirley R. Steinberg: Preface
Zsuzsa Millei/Tom G. Griffiths/Robert John Parkes: Opening the Field: Deliberating over 'Discipline'
Zsuzsa Millei: Is It (Still) Useful to Think About Classroom Discipline as Control? An Examination of the 'Problem of Discipline'
Zsuzsa Millei/Rebecca Raby: Embodied Logic: Understanding Discipline through Constituting the Subjects of Discipline
Rebecca Raby: The Intricacies of Power Relations in Discourses of Secondary School Disciplinary Strategies
Megan Watkins: Discipline, Diversity and Agency: Pedagogic Practice and Dispositions to Learning
Robert John Parkes: Discipline and the Dojo
Erica Southgate: Punishing Powerplays: Emotion, Discipline and Memories of School Life
Ken Cliff: Disciplinary Power and the Production of the Contemporary 'Healthy Citizen' in the Era of the 'Obesity Epidemic'
Affrica Taylor: Disciplining Desire: Young Children, Schools and the Media
Rob Imre/Zsuzsa Millei: Citizenship? What Citizenship? Using Political Science Terminology in New Discipline Approaches
Tom G. Griffiths/Rob Imre: Classroom Discipline: A Local Kantian?
Rob Imre/Zsuzsa Millei/Tom G. Griffiths: Utopia/Dystopia: Where Do We Go With 'Discipline'?
Zsuzsa Millei/Tom G. Griffiths/Robert John Parkes: Continuing the Conversation About Discipline as a Problem? A Conclusion.
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Introduction to the special issue in European Education
Free download here: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KAmzwmAHXr8KY7EyymXi/full
Free download here: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KAmzwmAHXr8KY7EyymXi/full
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Research Interests: Ethics, 21st Century Literacies, Feminist Theory, Marxism, Feminist Philosophy, and 16 moreSexuality, Transformation, Socialisms, Postsocialism, East European studies, Gender, Sigmund Freud, Ecology, Michel Foucault, Socialism, Social and Political Philosophy, Solidarity Economy, Transition, Theories of Socialism, Antiglobalization Social Movements, and Latin American feminisms
Special issue in Global Studies of Childhood Volume 4 Number 3 2014
OPEN ACCESS
http://gsc.sagepub.com/content/4/3.toc
OPEN ACCESS
http://gsc.sagepub.com/content/4/3.toc
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This is a special issue please check the contents:
http://gsc.sagepub.com/content/current
http://gsc.sagepub.com/content/current
Research Interests: Education, Sociology of Education, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Spatial Analysis, Globalization, and 16 moreGlobalisation and cultural change, Mobility/Mobilities, Educational Research, Early Childhood Education, Children's Literature & Culture, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, Children's Voices, Social Justice in Education, Globalisation and "global cultural flows", Children and Media, Children's Rights, Early Childhood, International student mobility, Early Childhood Curriculum, Early Childhood Education, Hidden Curriculum, Social Justice, and Sociology of Childhood and Youth
Nationalism in many parts of the world takes new shapes merging with populist, far-right, nativist and green agendas illustrating how political evocations of the nation enjoy growing electoral success. One consequence among many is that... more
Nationalism in many parts of the world takes new shapes merging with populist, far-right, nativist and green agendas illustrating how political evocations of the nation enjoy growing electoral success. One consequence among many is that previously 'settled' matters around racism, fascism and migration, are once again up for debate with elected officials and media personalities able to
Research Interests: Sociology of Education, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Early Childhood Education, Politics, Nationalism, and 7 morePolitics Of Education, Childhood studies, Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education, Everyday Nationalism, Banal nationalism, Education and nationalism, and Ideology and Education
Nationalism as an ideology seeks to assert the primacy of national community in children's thinking, beings and feelings through curricula and official school rituals. Another form of nationalism permeating the daily routines and mundane... more
Nationalism as an ideology seeks to assert the primacy of national community in children's thinking, beings and feelings through curricula and official school rituals. Another form of nationalism permeating the daily routines and mundane spaces of everyday life, however, often remains imperceptible to our critical gaze. This paper brings these invisible practices into sight in young children's institutional lives and uniquely focuses on their affective and emotional dimensions. To understand how these affective practices operate, it zooms in on two situations, first, in which a teacher invites young children to engage with the nation's affective and emotional dimensions, and second, where affective practices of nation are performed by children. Situations are drawn from an ethnographic study in an Australian preschool. The paper calls for more recognition of and a critical engagement with everyday nationalism and its affective practices that often go unnoticed yet seamlessly reproduce exclusive ideals of nation.
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In the history of modernity, childhood represents societies' hopes and desires for the future. An offspring of modernity, the socialist project had a unique preoccupation with children and childhood for the social (re)making of societies.... more
In the history of modernity, childhood represents societies' hopes and desires for the future. An offspring of modernity, the socialist project had a unique preoccupation with children and childhood for the social (re)making of societies. However, research on both sides of the Iron Curtain has explored children's lives in socialist societies by focusing on the organised efforts of state socialisation, largely overlooking how childhoods were actually experienced. In this article, first, we delve into the utility of memory stories for exploring childhoods and children's everyday lives in a variety of socialist spaces. Second, we explicate how memory stories about everyday life can serve as data for cultural-political analysis. We aim to show how 'thinking through' memory stories enables us to learn about childhood and children's lives and to gain access to historical socio-political discourses and practices. We conclude with the relevance of our discussion for engagements with current global problems. ARTICLE HISTORY
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In our current context, researching how young children encounter and inhabit the nation among diverse people is ever-more important. In societies free of conflict, the nation operates beneath the surface, therefore, it is difficult to... more
In our current context, researching how young children encounter and inhabit the nation among diverse people is ever-more important. In societies free of conflict, the nation operates beneath the surface, therefore, it is difficult to study. By bringing together the perspectives of 'everyday nationalism' and 'cultural pedagogy', I develop the concept of 'pedagogy of nation' to focus on and account for various didactic means through which young children learn to inhabit the nation and to further explore everyday nationalism.
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Special issue on ECEC and spatial theories: https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/jped/9/1/jped.9.issue-1.xml
Research Interests: Education, Sociology of Education, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Space and Place, Early Childhood Education, and 9 moreSense of Place, Early Childhood, Early Childhood Care and Education, Children's Play, Children, Childhood studies, Childhood, Early Childhood Curriculum, and Early Childhood Teacher Education
Global flows and their geopolitical power relations powerfully shape the environments in which children lead their everyday lives. Children's images, imagi-nations and ideas of distant places are part of these global flows and the... more
Global flows and their geopolitical power relations powerfully shape the environments in which children lead their everyday lives. Children's images, imagi-nations and ideas of distant places are part of these global flows and the everyday activities children perform in preschool. Research explores how through curricula young children are moulded into global and cosmopolitan citizens and how children make sense of distant places through globally circulating ideas, images and imaginations. How these ideas, images and imaginations form an unproblematised part of young children's everyday preschool activities and identity formation has been much less explored, if at all. I use Massey's (2005) concept of a 'global sense of place' in my analysis of ethnographic data collected in an Australian preschool to explore how children produce global qualities of preschool places and form and perform identities by relating to distant places. I pay special attention to how place, objects and children become entangled, and to the sensory aspects of their emplaced experiences, as distant spatialities embed in and as children's bodies inhabit the preschool place. To conclude, I call for critical pedagogies to engage with children's use of these constructions to draw similarities or contrast aspects of distant places and self, potentially reproducing global power relations by fixing representations of places and through uncritically enacting stereotypes.
Research Interests: Sociology of Education, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Space and Place, Educational Research, Early Childhood Education, and 7 moreEarly Childhood, Early Childhood Care and Education, Children's Play, Children, Childhood studies, Early Childhood Curriculum, and Early Childhood Teacher Education
In 2009, the Australian states and territories signed an agreement to provide 15 hours per week of universal access to quality early education to all children in Australia in the year before they enter school. Taking on board the... more
In 2009, the Australian states and territories signed an agreement to provide 15 hours per week of universal access to quality early education to all children in Australia in the year before they enter school. Taking on board the international evidence about the importance of early education, the Commonwealth government made a considerable investment to make universal access possible by 2013. We explore the ongoing processes that seek to make universal access a reality in New South Wales by attending to the complex agential relationships between multiple actors. While we describe the state government and policy makers' actions in devising funding models to drive changes, we prioritise our gaze on the engagement of a preschool and its director with the state government's initiatives that saw them develop various funding and provision models in response. To offer accounts of their participation in policy making and doing at the preschool, we use the director's autobiographical notes. We argue that the state's commitment to ECEC remained a form of political manoeuvring where responsibility for policy making was pushed onto early childhood actors. This manoeuvring helped to silence and further fragment the sector, but these new processes also created spaces where the sector can further struggle for recognition through the very accountability measures that the government has introduced.
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This article explores the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education in and about (post)socialist spaces of Southeast/Central Europe and former Soviet Union after the Cold War. We engage in a particular form of... more
This article explores the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education in and about (post)socialist spaces of Southeast/Central Europe and former Soviet Union after the Cold War. We engage in a particular form of decoloniality, or what Walter Mignolo terms delinking. Delinking challenges the " emancipatory project " of modernity and colonial relations and sets out to decolonize knowledge, thus interrupting dominant understandings about the organization of the world, society, and education. We do not propose to replace this epistemology with another or others, but take it as the target of critique in a world where many different views could co-exist on a non-hierarchical basis. Our critique is threefold. First, we engage in rethinking and rewriting the socialist past(s) through new and multiple frames to reveal potential possibilities for imagining multiple post-socialist future(s). Second, we show the relations and the intertwined histories of " different worlds, " thus unsettling the established spatial partitions of the world. Third, we examine how coloniality has shaped our own identities as scholars and discuss ways to reclaim our positions as epistemic subjects who have both the legitimacy and capacity to look at and interpret the world from our own origins and lived realities. We believe that this kind of delinking fractures the hegemony of Western-centric knowledge, enabling comparative education to gain a global viewpoint that is more inclusive of different voices.
Research Interests: Sociology of Education, Postcolonial Studies, International Education, Comparative & International Education, Postsocialism, and 9 moreColonialism, Politics Of Education, Socialism, Critical sociology and politics of education, Comparative and International Development Education, Knowledge Production, Colonial Discourse, Politics of knowledge production, and Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality
Australian early childhood education still labours with the achievement of universal access and the production of comprehensive and consistent data to underpin a national evidence base. In this article, we attend to the processes led by... more
Australian early childhood education still labours with the achievement of universal access and the production of comprehensive and consistent data to underpin a national evidence base. In this article, we attend to the processes led by numbers whereby new practices of quantification, rationalization and reporting are introduced and mastered in a New South Wales preschool to reach universal access and effective data reporting following state initiatives. Provisional numbers, set by the state government, are instrumental in configuring and solidifying these processes through which preschools engage in creative strategizing, modelling and calculations to enact, inform and form policies. With the help of a preschool director’s biographical notes, we explore the complex entanglements of these new processes and the resulting ambivalent positions professionals find themselves in, the ethical dilemmas that emerge and the practical and material consequences and political possibilities that formalizing processes of universal access and data production bring forward.
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We take on the challenge posed by Horton & Kraftl (2006b, p. 71) that research be 'slowed down' through methodological and theoretical routes to acknowledge seemingly trivial details in children's lives. Based on an ethnographic study in... more
We take on the challenge posed by Horton & Kraftl (2006b, p. 71) that research be 'slowed down' through methodological and theoretical routes to acknowledge seemingly trivial details in children's lives. Based on an ethnographic study in an Australian preschool focusing on children's place-making in a globalizing world, this paper discusses one event in the home corner to exemplify what we understand as and how we enact methodological slowness. The event is revisited by recognising the role of the unexpected, the troubling and paying attention to data that overspills the research engagement in conducting 'ideally preset qualitative research'. Research engagements not only reflect but also produce children's lives. Researching 'the global' is 'doing the global' as the frames, practices and traditions of research itself are part and parcel of the so-called answers we produce. As result, a more nuanced and complex understanding of how 'the global' is made and circulated by children surfaces.
Research Interests: Childrens Geographies, Social Research Methods and Methodology, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Research Methodology, Research Design, and 14 moreQualitative methodology, Educational Research, Children and Families, Early Childhood Education, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, Qualitative Research, Children's Rights, Early Childhood, Early Childhood Care and Education, Research with Children, Children, Childhood studies, Research with children and young people, and Post-Qualitative Research
In his inspirational article titled Bringing politics into the nursery, Peter Moss (2007) argued for early childhood institutions to become places of 'democratic political practice'. In this article, we add to Moss's call and argue that... more
In his inspirational article titled Bringing politics into the nursery, Peter Moss (2007) argued for early childhood institutions to become places of 'democratic political practice'. In this article, we add to Moss's call and argue that these institutions are sites of 'mundane political practice', containing various attitudinal orientations and ideologies, and including many kinds of purposive activities. Recognizing different dimensions of political life in institutional spaces where children lead their lives requires a differentiation between two types of politics: first, official politics and policies that aim to institute certain ideals in early childhood education and care; second, everyday politics unfolding in communities that involve people as political subjects from birth till death. When the latter is discussed in early childhood research, if at all, it is rarely identified in political terms, which we consider problematic. The lacking recognition of mundane politics denies important aspects of children's agency, which is prejudicial in itself. Moreover, such ignorance may lead to unintended consequences in democratization processes, like the one suggested by Moss. Imposing political ideals without recognizing children's existing political agencies carries a risk of interfering with their political lives so that some children may feel misrecognized, or find their capacities to act hindered or activities misunderstood. To avoid such outcomes, our paper is an argument for research and pedagogies that acknowledge and scaffold children's political agencies at large.
Research Interests: Childrens Geographies, Sociology of Education, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Early Childhood Education, Child Development, and 15 moreAnthropology of Children and Childhood, Children's Voices, Politics Of Education, Children's Rights, Sociology of Childhood, Early Childhood, Early Childhood Care and Education, Children, Agency, Childhood studies, Early Childhood Curriculum, Early Childhood Development, Early Childhood Studies, Early Childhood Teacher Education, and Sociology of Childhood and Youth
A kora gyermekkori környezet jelentős szerepet játszik a gyermekek beilleszkedésében, kötődéseiben, jólétében és tanulásában. Azonban ez idáig a szakirodalomban az óvodai mosdók minimális figyelmet kaptak a gyermekek környezetével... more
A kora gyermekkori környezet jelentős szerepet játszik a gyermekek beilleszkedésében, kötődéseiben, jólétében és tanulásában. Azonban ez idáig a szakirodalomban az óvodai mosdók minimális figyelmet kaptak a gyermekek környezetével kapcsolatosan. A mosdóhasználat keretei gyakorta orvosi és fejlődésbeli szempontokból kerülnek vizsgálat alá, pl. a vizeléshez és székeléshez kapcsolódó megbetegedések, a WC-re szoktatás legjobb módszerei kapcsán, vagy a mosdó megfelelő használata és higiéniás szokások témaköreiben. Ez a cikk egy Ausztráliai (New South Wales-beli) óvoda résztvevőinek a beszámolóit mutatja be az óvodai mosdóról. Ezen beszámolók többségében kritikaként fogalmazódnak meg a jelenlegi mosdóval kapcsolatban és egy alternatív mosdóról adnak elképzelést. Az óvodapedagógiai kutatás lehetővé tette a párbeszéd kialakulását. A résztvevők perspektívái tágabb szempontokat fejeztek ki a mosdóval kapcsolatosan mint az az előző tudományos vizsgálatokban megjelent. Újszerű módon értették meg a mosdót, mint szociális és kulturális tér, és egy tér ami szintén fontos része a gyermeki környezet minőségének. Mindezen beszámolók arra mutatnak rá hogy a mosdók nagyobb figyelmet érdemelnek a kora gyermekkori környezet vizsgálatában, megtervezésében, és a mindennapi gyakorlatban.
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In this paper we study the effects of power in a bathroom, which is a rarely analysed space in preschools, by using empirical examples from a semi-ethnographic study conducted in New South Wales, Australia. We demonstrate that educators’... more
In this paper we study the effects of power in a bathroom, which is a rarely analysed space in preschools, by using empirical examples from a semi-ethnographic study conducted in New South Wales, Australia. We demonstrate that educators’ understanding and practices mostly consider their own positioning in discourses and
come short in accounting for children’s practices in and expressed views on the bathroom. Educators also remain distant from children’s bodily experiences. The interplay of the open architectural design of the bathroom space and dominant
discourses operating in the preschool constitute some children as ‘problem bodies’ apparently requiring (and justifying) direct intervention. Following this reasoning we argue that the surveillance, regularisation and normalisation in the bathroom is far from total, which leads us to question the adequacy of understanding the bathroom as forming a part of a modern (disciplinary) institution.
come short in accounting for children’s practices in and expressed views on the bathroom. Educators also remain distant from children’s bodily experiences. The interplay of the open architectural design of the bathroom space and dominant
discourses operating in the preschool constitute some children as ‘problem bodies’ apparently requiring (and justifying) direct intervention. Following this reasoning we argue that the surveillance, regularisation and normalisation in the bathroom is far from total, which leads us to question the adequacy of understanding the bathroom as forming a part of a modern (disciplinary) institution.
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In many fields and in education in particular, researchers, such as teachers, are inclined to believe that because they are enmeshed in the field or have good relationships with students, issues of politics, power and status will exert... more
In many fields and in education in particular, researchers, such as teachers, are inclined to believe that because they are enmeshed in the field or have good relationships with students, issues of politics, power and status will exert minimal influence and that access to the field will be smooth and unproblematic. In this paper, three doctoral students with varying degrees of insider status, working in the Australian context, reflect on the rocky journeys they experienced obtaining and maintaining access to field sites. The authors argue that despite a body of literature addressing this issue, many of the commonly used texts devoted to educational research do not adequately tackle the subject. The novice researcher often remains unsuspecting and under prepared for the range and depth of difficulties encountered in the process of gaining access. The question is posed, what might be the role of the academy in preparing researchers?
Rethinking transition through ideas of "community" in Hungarian kindergarten curriculum, In Iveta Silova, (ed.) Post-Socialism is not Dead: (Re)Reading the Global in Comparative Education (International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 14), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 125 - 154more
This chapter provides a Foucauldian genealogical analysis of the concept of “community” in three curriculum documents signposting major changes in the conceptualisation of kindergarten education in Hungary. Our approach is to closely... more
This chapter provides a Foucauldian genealogical analysis of the concept of “community” in three curriculum documents signposting major changes in the conceptualisation of kindergarten education in Hungary. Our approach is to closely examine the discourses of the core curriculum documents and their sociopolitical contexts in order to explore the shifts in the ideas of “community” and “communitarianism” contained within the texts, and to focus particularly on the period of “transition” in Hungary. This chapter interrogates the shifting ideas of “community” and finds that the meaning of “transition” in the context of post-WWII Hungary needs to be radically reassessed. Furthermore, the study suggests that the “transition” in Hungary has been in fact a drawn out process, one beginning well before the early 1990s and involving major reforms throughout the post-WWII period. By outlining the shifts in the conceptualisations of “community” embedded in kindergarten curriculum, the chapter explores what political problems were attempted to be solved through the changing conception of this early education. And examines whether these reconceptualisations can be considered to be directly linked to the transition of particular political ideologies–from socialism to neoliberal capitalism–or rather, do they represent much smoother transitions to a new era after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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ABSTRACT 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... more
ABSTRACT 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.
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Developments in neurosciences have moved into many spheres of early childhood education and policy. I am exploring the possible consequences for different populations and educational knowledge production of new narratives that are... more
Developments in neurosciences have moved into many spheres of early childhood education and policy. I am exploring the possible consequences for different populations and educational knowledge production of new narratives that are produced by the neurosciences latching onto the human capital model. How do developments in the neurosciences alter the ways in which the human capital model constructs problems, makes them intelligible and shapes interventions? On what kind of human being or child subjects these interventions are administered? My Foucauldian analysis offers a speculative examination of a series of possible narratives to critique (and destabilize) the possible effects of these policy directions.
Research Interests: Neuroscience, Political Sociology, Critical Discourse Studies, Social Policy, Sociology of Education, and 26 moreSociology of Children and Childhood, Children and Families, Early Childhood Education, History of Childhood and Youth, Education Policy, Critical Discourse Analysis, Children and Youth, Children's Rights, Foucault and education, Early Childhood, Early Years (Education), Early Childhood Care and Education, Early Childhood Education and Care, Childhood studies, Early childhood education policy, Biopower and Biopolitics, Early Childhood Policy, Early Years Education, Early Childhood Curriculum, Early Childhood Development, Early Childhood Studies, Childhood Politics, Childhood Studies, Early Childhood Education, and Children's Play Culture., ICT and children, early childhood ecucation, educational policy, Politics and Children, and Policy Implementation In Early Childhood Education
It is well established in research that early childhood classrooms are one of the most controlled environments during the human life course. When control is discussed the enactment of regulatory frameworks and various discourses are... more
It is well established in research that early childhood classrooms are one of the most controlled environments during the human life course. When control is discussed the enactment of regulatory frameworks and various discourses are analysed but less focus is paid on non-human actors. In this paper, we pay attention to ‘special’ non-human actors present in an ‘inclusive’ early childhood classroom. These ‘special’ non-human actors are so named as they operate in the classroom as objects specific for the child with a diagnosis. The ‘special’ non-human actors - the wrist band, the lock and the scooter board – take on meaning as they form assemblages with discourses in the ‘inclusive’ classroom. We illuminate how these non-human actors contribute to the constitution of the ‘normal’ and the regulation of educators and children. We ask the following questions to trouble the working of power and the control these objects effect on all who is present in the classroom: What do these non-human actors do in the ‘inclusive’ classroom? How do non-human actors re/produce the ‘normal’, possible ways to be and act, thus control educators and children? The data used in our analyses was produced as part of a 6 month long ethnographic engagement in three early childhood settings in the broader region of Newcastle, Australia. It includes observations and conversations with children.
Research Interests: Discourse Analysis, Childrens Geographies, Special Education, Actor Network Theory, Social and Cultural Anthropology, and 27 moreEarly Childhood Education, Inclusion, Inclusive education (Learning And Teaching), Diversity & Inclusion, Inclusive Education, Special education (Psychology), Classroom Discourse Analysis, Critical Special Education, Special Educational Needs, Special Education Teacher Education, Early Childhood, New Social Studies of Childhood, Early Childhood Care and Education, Early Childhood Education and Care, Actor-Network Theory, Early Childhood Special Education, Childhood studies, Materialities, Special Education Needs and Inclusive Practice, Special Education Policy, International Perspectives in Early Childhood, Special and inclusive education, Early Childhood Curriculum, Early Childhood Development, Early Childhood Studies, Special needs education, and Exceptional Childrens Education
‘Community’ is a pervasive concept and a ‘best practice’ in early childhood education and care (Wisneski & Goldstein, 2004) that remains mostly unchallenged. ‘Community’ is widely utilized to discuss theories and practices around the... more
‘Community’ is a pervasive concept and a ‘best practice’ in early childhood education and care (Wisneski & Goldstein, 2004) that remains mostly unchallenged. ‘Community’ is widely utilized to discuss theories and practices around the globe to discuss the context and describe the social world of young children and their carers and educators. It is also a familiar term used in relation to curriculum and pedagogical frameworks and practices. Another concept that appears increasingly in the literature and in practical considerations is the possibility for early childhood settings to be places of ‘democratic political practice’ (Dahlgberg & Moss, 2005). Democratic practice is hoped to prevent autocracy, to ensure pluralism and cater for diversity, and to enable collaborative knowledge production. However, community and ‘democratic practice’ is not without contentions. This article considers the nexus and the contentions between concepts of ‘community’ and ‘democratic practice’. With Roberto Esposito’s notion of communitas, it offers a possible theorization of community that enables community to serve as a backdrop to ‘democratic political practice’ in ECEC.
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In this paper we argue that the socialist kindergarten in Hungary (1948-1989) was set up to aid the modernizing of a nation in a particular way and in a historical and political context in which leaving behind aspects of the past and... more
In this paper we argue that the socialist kindergarten in Hungary (1948-1989) was set up to aid the modernizing of a nation in a particular way and in a historical and political context in which leaving behind aspects of the past and starting a new chapter in Hungarian history was the only way forward. We claim that this project was not dissimilar to the ‘cosmopolitan’ project discussed by Popkewitz (2004, 2008) and therefore we argue that kindergarten education was more similar to education in the fictionalized ‘West’ than it is previously thought. By reading socialist kindergarten education, curriculum and pedagogy as part of the broader ‘cosmopolitan project’, we make evident the ways in which particular civic/civil habits, behaviour and morals were formed to produce modern citizens often in contradistinction to stated socialist ideology. We also explore versions of cosmopolitanism particular to the region that is attached to the developing nation-state and the creation and violent negotiations of what it means to be Hungarian against the background of rich cultural and ethnic diversity in the region.
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This paper critiques guidance approaches to discipline, that are employed in early childhood environments with an aim to create democratic environments for children, and as part of ‘good’ practices. Advocates of guidance claim that this... more
This paper critiques guidance approaches to discipline, that are employed in early childhood environments with an aim to create democratic environments for children, and as part of ‘good’ practices. Advocates of guidance claim that this is a more humane or democratic approach to discipline that empowers children, and therefore, power in the classroom appears as more equalized or distributed. The author adopts a particular perspective in the field of educational psychology by using Foucault’s conceptualization of power and confession (1981). This analytical context opens up avenues to problematize guidance’s claims about the nature of teacher-child power relations, and children’s autonomy. Guidance is then re-read as a subtle, often invisible way of regulation, that sheds new light on a particular kind of autonomy children are allowed. The paper concludes with an emphasis on the necessity to be vigilant with guidance. Vigilance is needed to keep in sight that guidance is a discourse that positions subjects in power relations and its quest for democracy is a part of its discourse with power implications rather than its ultimate goal.
The concepts of ‘citizenship’ and ‘participation’ are used increasingly in the early childhood field. Political rhetoric, policy frameworks, educational theory, pedagogy and practices all draw on these ideas in different ways.... more
The concepts of ‘citizenship’ and ‘participation’ are used increasingly in the early childhood field. Political rhetoric, policy frameworks, educational theory, pedagogy and practices all draw on these ideas in different ways. Professionals also use these concepts because of their democratic tone, with the best of intentions to create more inclusive, equitable and liberating relationships with children. However, ‘citizenship’ and ‘participation’ are rarely problematized in early years settings. This paper destabilizes these taken-for-granted notions. The author examines what the political notions of ‘citizenship’ and ‘participation’ entail; then uses the concept of governmentality to reconsider these discourses as technologies of government. The article poses some questions that might be asked before creating policies,and enacting pedagogies and practices in early years settings with and for children’s citizenship and participation.
Cosmopolitanism, like democracy, is an ontologically troubled term: how can one be against cosmopolitanism? Those critiques that seek to examine cosmopolitanism as a concept suffer from a severe popularity problem from the outset. Rather... more
Cosmopolitanism, like democracy, is an ontologically troubled term: how can one be against cosmopolitanism? Those critiques that seek to examine cosmopolitanism as a concept suffer from a severe popularity problem from the outset. Rather than engage in this pro/con debate, we are interested in demonstrating that cosmopolitanism can wax and wane, ebb and flow, and has appeared as a grounding ideology for educational programs before, and has been torn asunder by those seeking to consolidate regime change. We do not suggest that cosmopolitanism is a good and righteous politics, normatively opposed to or supporting patriotism, is ideologically left, right or centre; although these are all important arguments. Our problem here is that we see a burgeoning cosmopolitan outlook in a particular time and place, that was smashed by political and social forces both unforeseen and powerful, changing foundational concepts of education in East-Central Europe in general and Hungary in particular.
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Early years policy increasingly uses the concept of ‘citizenship’ in relation to children in Australia and worldwide. This concept is used as a taken-for-granted idea; however, there is no singularly agreed-upon answer to the question of... more
Early years policy increasingly uses the concept of ‘citizenship’ in relation to children in Australia and worldwide. This concept is used as a taken-for-granted idea; however, there is no singularly agreed-upon answer to the question of what ‘citizenship’ means when used in relation to children, and what practical considerations it carries both for policymaking and for implementation. This article introduces theoretical ideas of ‘citizenship’ from the field of political theory in order to begin a discussion on how we imagine and might imagine children as citizens in policy discourses. Some conceptualisations of children as citizens are also discussed and questioned as starting points to consider in regard to the use of the notion of children as citizens in policy and practice.
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More than 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, scholars and educators continue to engage with histories under socialism and re-evaluate the consequences of those education systems for everyday lives then and in the present. This... more
More than 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, scholars and educators continue to engage with histories under socialism and re-evaluate the consequences of those education systems for everyday lives then and in the present. This article develops an understanding of how kindergarten teachers understand their historical work in the socialist system. It does so by using the memories of five teachers who taught before 1989 in socialist Hungary. I consider memory as discourse that teachers produced during their interviews to reason about their practices. My research question is: In what ways did the interviewed teachers see themselves as ideologues representing the state? To answer this question I use Foucauldian discourse analysis informed by the concept of governmentality to examine the organized practices and rationalities through which political subjects are governed. I discuss three rationalities: (1) constructing children’s needs and generating their interests through play; (2) collective engagements; (3) teachers as experts; and then move on to analyse the ways in which explicit socialist ideology is understood by the interviewed teachers. From the interviews it emerges that the teachers understand their own historical position as not being ‘in the service of the state’ but as experts looking after the interests of children to learn so they can become useful members of society. The analysis also offers some insights into the interconnectivities of politics, history, and culture across localities.
Keywords: memory, socialism, early childhood education, ideology, governmentality, Hungary
Keywords: memory, socialism, early childhood education, ideology, governmentality, Hungary
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This article critiques the Smart Population Foundation Initiative (SPFI), which was established to ‘bring parenting information and the science of child development to Australian parents and carers’ (Smart Population Foundation, 2006)... more
This article critiques the Smart Population Foundation Initiative (SPFI), which was established to ‘bring parenting information and the science of child development to Australian parents
and carers’ (Smart Population Foundation, 2006) and to satisfy the need for a credible and easily accessible source of information for parents. The article draws on the notion of modern governance
developed by Rose and analyses the Initiative as a deeply political project. It looks at the Initiative from a critical distance created by the context of governmentality. The authors argue that the discourses produced by the Initiative constitute a particular notion of parent as ‘smart’ (lifelong learner, responsible and informed). These discourses govern parents through ‘ethopolitics’ to take up a certain art of parenting as their supposed free choice. Through standardising and sanctioning a particular way of acting as a parent, the SPFI translates governmental objectives into parents’ own values and practices. As a result, the discourse the SPFI constitutes about parenting effectively ‘shuts down’ multiple understandings of being a ‘good’ parent. Hence, parents’ conscious formation of their parenting practices are inhibited and with that, the ethical debates around this contentious issue are
silenced.
and carers’ (Smart Population Foundation, 2006) and to satisfy the need for a credible and easily accessible source of information for parents. The article draws on the notion of modern governance
developed by Rose and analyses the Initiative as a deeply political project. It looks at the Initiative from a critical distance created by the context of governmentality. The authors argue that the discourses produced by the Initiative constitute a particular notion of parent as ‘smart’ (lifelong learner, responsible and informed). These discourses govern parents through ‘ethopolitics’ to take up a certain art of parenting as their supposed free choice. Through standardising and sanctioning a particular way of acting as a parent, the SPFI translates governmental objectives into parents’ own values and practices. As a result, the discourse the SPFI constitutes about parenting effectively ‘shuts down’ multiple understandings of being a ‘good’ parent. Hence, parents’ conscious formation of their parenting practices are inhibited and with that, the ethical debates around this contentious issue are
silenced.
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This article articulates the appeal of different conceptualisations of community to the curriculum writers of Belonging, Being and Becoming: the Early Years Learning Framework for Australia and to the Council of Australian Governments... more
This article articulates the appeal of different conceptualisations of community to the curriculum writers of Belonging, Being and Becoming: the Early Years Learning Framework for Australia and to the Council of Australian Governments that commissioned the Framework, and the tensions within and between those respective conceptualisations. It then traces shifts in conceptualisations of community and the work done by community across the first publicly released draft and the final version of the Framework. Attributing these shifts, at least in part, to the Rudd government’s risk averseness, it concludes that despite the severely contained nature of community in the final version of the Framework, there remains space for what Rose terms ‘radical ethico-politics’ and for working towards a more socially just society.
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Early years environments play a significant role in children’s sense of belonging, wellbeing and learning. Yet, bathroom spaces have received minimal considerations as part of early years environments. Bathroom practices in early... more
Early years environments play a significant role in children’s sense of belonging, wellbeing and learning. Yet, bathroom spaces have received minimal considerations as part of early years environments. Bathroom practices in early childhood settings are usually examined from medical and developmental perspectives, such as pathologies related to urinating and defecating, best practices of toilet training or the acquisition of appropriate toilet and hygiene habits. This paper explores participants’ accounts of the bathroom in one preschool setting in New South Wales (NSW) Australia. These accounts are articulated as critiques about the existing bathroom or as visions about an alternative bathroom space. The practitioner research with children project opened up spaces for dialogue and the perspectives offered by participants exceeded the literature and brought new ways to understand the bathroom as a social and cultural space and a space that is a part of a quality environment for children. Therefore, we not only argue that bathrooms deserve greater attention in early years settings, but also offer a brief agenda for research to potentially improve understandings and practices related to the bathroom.
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Within the bathrooms of early childhood education settings, children perform more or less fundamental biological processes while concurrently learning about how to conduct themselves socially in relation to these. While the governance of... more
Within the bathrooms of early childhood education settings, children perform more or less fundamental biological processes while concurrently learning about how to conduct themselves socially in relation to these. While the governance of children’s bodies falls very much within the scope of ‘biopower’ as proposed by Foucault (1978), we suggest that within the bathroom children’s bodies are only partly regulated by ‘biopolitical’ strategies. Rather, this setting provides us with illustrative examples of disciplinary, sovereign and biopower working together through processes of governmentality. Foucault (2007) argues that alternative mechanisms overtaking biopolitics emerged from the critiques posed by the democratisation of the subject of rights, and critiques of sovereignty. In the bathroom, answers to these critiques are exemplified by the panoptic nature of the bathroom, child-centred practices and the appearance of the burgeoning discourses around child protection and children’s rights to privacy. The empirical examples in this Australian case study present a complex picture of the workings of power within the bathroom.
Keywords: biopower, governing bodies, bathroom, early childhood curriculum and pedagogy, health.
Keywords: biopower, governing bodies, bathroom, early childhood curriculum and pedagogy, health.
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In our interconnected and interdependent world, national early childhood education and care (ECEC) policies can no longer be made or read independently from their global contexts. Policy statements often display a global awareness that... more
In our interconnected and interdependent world, national early childhood education and care (ECEC) policies can no longer be made or read independently from their global contexts. Policy statements often display a global awareness that construct notions about ‘the child’ as a ‘global citizen’, particular relations to others and certain prospects about the world. In this paper, we analyse the Australian Early Years Learning Framework: Belonging, Being and Becoming (EYLF) and associated documents to make explicit the particular child subjects, forms of belonging and prospects they produce. The multivocality and multiperspectivity of the EYLF enable parallel interpretations, which we utilise here and focus on two possible readings: first, an educational prospect that furthers neoliberal globalisation and modernist notions by fashioning ECEC as part of national and mostly economic projects. The second reading identifies aspects of the EYLF that prefigure a new mode of learning that engages alternatively with our interdependent world through a ‘cosmopolitan ethics’ and ‘cosmopolitan solidarity’. Based upon our second reading we utilize our ‘radical imagination’ to extend the cosmopolitan imaginary of the EYLF for pedagogical use.
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LINK TO FREE ARTCLE: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/xNrfp6jvxjWZpEeFfVS9/full When educators consider ‘student behaviour’ they usually think about ‘problem behaviour’ such as disruption or defiance. This limited and limiting view... more
LINK TO FREE ARTCLE: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/xNrfp6jvxjWZpEeFfVS9/full
When educators consider ‘student behaviour’ they usually think about ‘problem behaviour’ such as disruption or defiance. This limited and limiting view of ‘student behaviour’ not only fails to acknowledge children as educational actors in a wider sense, but also narrowly positions educators as either in control or out-of-control of their classroom. Mainstream educational psychology’s responses to ‘challenging behaviour’ point educators to numerous ways to prevent its occurrence, through, for example, changing their disciplining approaches and techniques. However, much of the advice directed at improving student behaviour fails to interrogate the core notion of ‘student behaviour’ itself, as well as the conceptual baggage that it carries. The focus is squarely on eliminating ‘problem behaviour’ and often resorts to a pathologisation of students. Meanwhile, when considering ‘student behaviour’ through a Foucauldian poststructuralist optic, behaviour emerges as something highly complex; as spatialised, embodied action within/against governing discourses. In this opening up, it becomes both possible and critical to defamiliarise oneself with the categorisation of ‘challenging behaviour’ and to interrogate the discourses and subject positionings at play. In this paper we pursue this task by asking: what happens with the notion of ‘behaviour’ if we change focus from ‘fixing problems’ to looking at the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’? What does it become possible to see, think, feel and do? In this exploration we theorise ‘behaviour’ as learning and illustrate the constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’. Drawing on two case scenarios, we explore how children accomplish themselves as learners and how this accomplishment links the production of subjectivity and embodied action, and illustrate how ‘student/child behaviour’ appears significantly different to what mainstream educational psychology would have us see.
Look up link to access to article: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/xNrfp6jvxjWZpEeFfVS9/full
When educators consider ‘student behaviour’ they usually think about ‘problem behaviour’ such as disruption or defiance. This limited and limiting view of ‘student behaviour’ not only fails to acknowledge children as educational actors in a wider sense, but also narrowly positions educators as either in control or out-of-control of their classroom. Mainstream educational psychology’s responses to ‘challenging behaviour’ point educators to numerous ways to prevent its occurrence, through, for example, changing their disciplining approaches and techniques. However, much of the advice directed at improving student behaviour fails to interrogate the core notion of ‘student behaviour’ itself, as well as the conceptual baggage that it carries. The focus is squarely on eliminating ‘problem behaviour’ and often resorts to a pathologisation of students. Meanwhile, when considering ‘student behaviour’ through a Foucauldian poststructuralist optic, behaviour emerges as something highly complex; as spatialised, embodied action within/against governing discourses. In this opening up, it becomes both possible and critical to defamiliarise oneself with the categorisation of ‘challenging behaviour’ and to interrogate the discourses and subject positionings at play. In this paper we pursue this task by asking: what happens with the notion of ‘behaviour’ if we change focus from ‘fixing problems’ to looking at the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’? What does it become possible to see, think, feel and do? In this exploration we theorise ‘behaviour’ as learning and illustrate the constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’. Drawing on two case scenarios, we explore how children accomplish themselves as learners and how this accomplishment links the production of subjectivity and embodied action, and illustrate how ‘student/child behaviour’ appears significantly different to what mainstream educational psychology would have us see.
Look up link to access to article: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/xNrfp6jvxjWZpEeFfVS9/full
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Editorial for special issue in Global Studies of Childhood journal
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Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Education, Cultural Sociology, Sociology of Education, Sociology of Children and Childhood, and 20 moreChildren's Literature, Educational Research, Children and Families, Early Childhood Education, Children's Literature & Culture, Social Justice, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, History of Childhood and Youth, Children's Voices, Education Policy, Children's Media, Social Justice in Education, Social Justice Issues, Children and Youth, Children's Rights, Early Childhood Care and Education, Children, Childhood studies, International student mobility, and Early Childhood Curriculum
This article merges the fields of tourism studies with the social studies of children and childhood in a discourse analysis of the voluntourism company United Planet’s website. In the past decade, United Planet has emerged as a popular... more
This article merges the fields of tourism studies with the social studies of children and childhood in a discourse analysis of the voluntourism company United Planet’s website. In the past decade, United Planet has emerged as a popular voluntourist company with a mission to “unite the world in a community beyond borders.” United Planet’s volunteer projects, as described on their website, combine international volunteering with cultural excursions to children living in the Global South. Through our analysis of the United Planet website and focusing on notions of childhood, we demonstrate that it constructs a seemingly harmonious transnational world that is without cultural and geographic boundaries and histories. However, the erasure of borders and historical power relations to construct a global community with a form of global citizenship attached to it hinges upon the maintenance of different trajectories and inequalities of Global North and South. In this way, this form of global citizenship contradicts United Planet, and voluntourism’s promise about the creation of a more equitable world and limits its membership to the North.
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There is increasing recognition of the importance of space in the study of education, resulting in a greatly diversified literature on the geographies of education. This article builds on this growing body of scholarly work to examine a... more
There is increasing recognition of the importance of space in the study of education, resulting in a greatly diversified literature on the geographies of education. This article builds on this growing body of scholarly work to examine a number of critical spatial assumptions underpinning school-based HIV- and AIDS-related education in Maputo, Mozambique. It does so through an analysis of key governmental and ministerial documents and policy-makers’ and educators’ conceptions of the aims of such education. This article highlights how school-based HIV- and AIDS-related education in Mozambique was conceptualized in gendered and distinctly place-based terms. In addition, we elucidate how, despite the various discursive shifts since the struggle for independence from Portugal, young women continue to be construed as the symbolic anchor of the nation, their natural place defined in relation to the domestic, the intimate, and local ‘in-here.’
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In his book Discipline and Punish Foucault (1977) offered the notion of the ‘psy- disciplines’, as a collective term for psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapies, and described how they became entangled in new forms of... more
In his book Discipline and Punish Foucault (1977) offered the notion of the ‘psy- disciplines’, as a collective term for psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapies, and described how they became entangled in new forms of ‘governing at a distance’ during the 19th century. Here we set out to explore how the psy- disciplines currently manifest and operate as significant cogs in the teacher education machine. Responding to Law and Urry’s (2004) call for a more ‘messy’ social science, we offer an impressionistic assemblage ethnography, where we pick up and consider the psy -disciplinary cogs that we happen upon in our everyday lives as lecturers in Australian initial teacher education. We offer an incomplete list of some of these cogs, and indicate the ways in which they uphold psy-disciplinary knowledges, and the psy- gaze, as relevant and significant. We conclude by reflecting on the implications for possible interventions into the machine.
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At the present, human capital theory and neuroscience reasoning are dominant frameworks in early childhood education and care (ECEC) worldwide. Popular since the 1960s, human capital theory has provided an economic understanding of human... more
At the present, human capital theory and neuroscience reasoning are dominant frameworks in early childhood education and care (ECEC) worldwide. Popular since the 1960s, human capital theory has provided an economic understanding of human beings and offered strategies to manage the population with the promise of bringing improvements to nations. Neuroscience arguments added new ways to regulate human beings, and thus another 'hopeful ethos' and investment in to the future. In this paper we examine different positive, life-improving, and hopeful takes on early childhood as forms of biopolitical government, which are closely related to the enhancement of individual capacities and the shifting problems of the neoliberal state. Curiously, this process, grounded on biological fatalism and naturalizing arguments, has led to new class categorizations and ways of social discrimination. We hence argue that even though a 'hopeful ethos' is offered through the (bio)politicization of neurosciences, it has led to eugenic arguments by re-inscribing social and economic differences into differences in brain architecture. Finally, we aim to demonstrate that ECEC policy offers an example of how current policies govern through scientific evidence and softer forms of 'government by example', at the same time moving the government of population into the home, and with that privatizing and personalizing self-investment.
Research Interests: Social Policy, Sociology of Education, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Governmentality, Early Childhood Education, and 19 moreEducation (Social Policy), Australia, Education Policy, Michel Foucault, Neoliberalism, Human Capital, Biopolitics, Politics Of Education, Political Geography, Critical sociology and politics of education, Early Childhood, Early Childhood Care and Education, Childhood studies, Children’s Geographies, Early Childhood Development, Politics of Education and Social Policy, Neoliberalism and Education, Governmentality Studies, and Neoliberalism & Governmentality
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Materialities of everyday nationalism is more frequently explored today in nationalism studies. Similar attention, however, is missing if we consider young children's institutional lives. This chapter uses an object centric approach to... more
Materialities of everyday nationalism is more frequently explored today in nationalism studies. Similar attention, however, is missing if we consider young children's institutional lives. This chapter uses an object centric approach to everyday nationalism to explore how objects gain national significance and weave nationalism into young children's everyday institutional lives and contribute to their identity formation as national subjects. By analysing two scenarios as cases to learn from, I identify three processes: production, occupation and performance through which objects tie the nation into everyday practices. While everyday nationalism often operates beneath the surface, paying attention to objects and mundane practices in preschools help us understand where and when everyday nationalism is present in children's preschool lives, when it matters, and how it works. To conclude, I call attention to the need to take objects more seriously in the study of banal nationalism and childhood.
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The Sage Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood
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The Sage Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood
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The Sage Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood
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The Sage Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood
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The Sage Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood
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The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood St... (Pg 997 999)
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Childre, Childhood and Human Capital
Entry in The Sage Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood
Entry in The Sage Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood
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EGY EGYENRANGÚ NEVELŐ-SZÜLŐI KAPCSOLAT FELÉ: EGYÜTT ÍROTT KIS TÖRTÉNETEK VAGY NAGY SZAKMAI IGAZSÁGOK "A bizalom egymás megbecsülésén alapul, amit nem lehet imitálni, a bizalmat meg kell testesíteni. A bizalom a tisztelet gyakorlata"... more
EGY EGYENRANGÚ NEVELŐ-SZÜLŐI KAPCSOLAT FELÉ: EGYÜTT ÍROTT KIS TÖRTÉNETEK VAGY NAGY SZAKMAI IGAZSÁGOK "A bizalom egymás megbecsülésén alapul, amit nem lehet imitálni, a bizalmat meg kell testesíteni. A bizalom a tisztelet gyakorlata" (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 1999, p. 57). A kapcsolattartás a szülőkkel gyakran okoz gondot a nevelőknek. Vajon ez a megállapítás és a vele kapcsolatos érzés miből is fakad? Ezt a kérdést járjuk körül egy ausztrál tanulmány segítségével, amit a magyar óvodai nevelésből választott példákkal és véleményekkel hasonlítunk össze. Különösképpen éleslátónak és inspirálónak találtuk Patrick Hughes és Glenda MacNaughton (2000) munkáját, amit direkt fordításban használunk itt arra, hogy bemutassunk néhány alapelvet, amit a magyar gyakorlatban is megszívlelendőnek tartunk. A fejezetet a fordítással kezdjük, majd azzal kapcsolatba hozva gondolkozunk el a szülő-óvoda kapcsolatáról a magyar óvodai nevelésben. Abból az alapelvből indulunk ki, hogy az intézményes ellátás a 3-6 éves korosztály nevelésében nem jelentheti a szülői szuverenitás csökkenését, amit a jelenlegi magyar óvodai gyakorlat sajnos gyakran figyelmen kívül hagy. Az Óvodai Nevelés Országos Alapprogramja megfogalmazza, hogy a gyermek nevelése elsősorban a család joga és kötelessége, és ebben az óvodák kiegészítő szerepet játszanak. Nemzetközi összehasonlításban a gyermekek intézményes nevelése eltérően kezdődik, és ehhez a folyamathoz országonként különböző megközelítések és gyakorlatok léteznek. Cikkünkben ezeket az eltérő megközelítéseket elemezzük a szülő-nevelői kapcsolatra vonatkoztatva. Az intézményes nevelés megkezdéséről szóló megközelítések természetes módon 1 Docens, Társadalomkutató Intézet, Tampere Egyetem, Finnország 2 Egyetemi adjunktus, felsőoktatáskutató, Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem, Tanító-és Óvóképző Kar, Budapest
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Children inhabiting Finland inevitably live through cold and snowy winters. Accordingly, winter sports, like skating and skiing, are a standard or national component of curriculum in Finnish schools as well as an expected part of... more
Children inhabiting Finland inevitably live through cold and snowy winters. Accordingly, winter sports, like skating and skiing, are a standard or national component of curriculum in Finnish schools as well as an expected part of children’s leisure time. Skis and skates form a taken for granted part of the ‘nation-ed environment’ of Finland with which people feel at home. All this is often new to children who arrive to live in Finland from warm countries. In this chapter, we dive into the worlds of skis and skates and newly arrived children. Our reading is about skis and skates encountering children who negotiate the socio-material and cultural world of Finland. To foreground how objects matter to children, we apply the idea of ethnopoetry. By constructing poems from our data produced in two research projects with recently arrived children in Finland, and placing those in dialogue with quotes from a Finnish storybook and our own memories, we show how skis and skates fit in with children, mobilize difference or challenge the taken for granted view of a nation. Through stories of skis and skates, the nation, Finnishness, and the Arctic become perceivable as part of ongoing everyday processes that newly arrived as well as Finnish-born children and adults coordinate, sustain, tolerate, reject, and naturalize in encountering the world.
Research Interests: Sociology of Children and Childhood, Youth Studies, Migration, Nationalism, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, and 8 moreInternational Migration, Migration Studies, Transnational migration, Qualitative Research Methods, Nations and nationalism, Children, Childhood studies, and Everyday Nationalism
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Official politics in children’s lives during socialism took various forms, ranging from school curriculum, youth organizations, and celebrations in everyday life. Drawing on current scholarship about children’s politics and our collective... more
Official politics in children’s lives during socialism took various forms, ranging from school curriculum, youth organizations, and celebrations in everyday life. Drawing on current scholarship about children’s politics and our collective biography research, we explore the everydays of childhood—from mundane to ideological—to make visible the multiple ways in which our political agency emerged in particular spaces and times. Our memory stories are about hair bows as part of school uniform and the multiple roles they played in our being and becoming schoolgirls and political subjects. The emphasis is on how wearing (or not) a hair bow helped us work with/in or against the norms, as well as feeling the pain and desire to be or act otherwise.
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Absztrakt A kora gyermekkori környezet jelentős szerepet játszik a gyermekek beilleszkedésében, kötődéseiben, jólétében és tanulásában. Azonban ez idáig a szakirodalomban az óvodai mosdók minimális figyelmet kaptak a gyermekek... more
Absztrakt A kora gyermekkori környezet jelentős szerepet játszik a gyermekek beilleszkedésében, kötődéseiben, jólétében és tanulásában. Azonban ez idáig a szakirodalomban az óvodai mosdók minimális figyelmet kaptak a gyermekek környezetével kapcsolatosan. A mosdóhasználat keretei gyakorta orvosi és fejlődésbeli szempontokból kerülnek vizsgálat alá, pl. a vizeléshez és székeléshez kapcsolódó megbetegedések, a WC-re szoktatás legjobb módszerei kapcsán, vagy a mosdó megfelelő használata és higiéniás szokások témaköreiben. Ez a cikk egy Ausztráliai (New South Wales-beli) óvoda résztvevőinek a beszámolóit mutatja be az óvodai mosdóról. Ezen beszámolók többségében kritikaként fogalmazódnak meg a jelenlegi mosdóval kapcsolatban és egy alternatív mosdóról adnak elképzelést. Az óvodapedagógiai kutatás lehetővé tette a párbeszéd kialakulását. A résztvevők perspektívái tágabb szempontokat fejeztek ki a mosdóval kapcsolatosan mint az az előző tudományos vizsgálatokban megjelent. Újszerű módon értették meg a mosdót, mint szociális és kulturális tér, és egy tér ami szintén fontos része a gyermeki környezet minőségének. Mindezen beszámolók arra mutatnak rá hogy a mosdók nagyobb figyelmet érdemelnek a kora gyermekkori környezet vizsgálatában, megtervezésében, és a mindennapi gyakorlatban. Kulcsszavak: óvodai mosdó, minőségi környezete, óvodapedagógiai kutatás, kutatás gyermekekkel, Korai gyermekkor tananyag és pedagógia
Research Interests: Sociology of Education, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Early Childhood Education, Children's Rights, Participatory Action Research with Youth, and 11 moreEarly Childhood Care and Education, Research with Children, Children, Practitioner Research, Early Childhood Curriculum, Early Childhood Development, Szociológia, Early Childhood Teacher Education, Kvalitatív Kutatások, Ovodai neveles, and Gyermeknevelési értékek
Ez a fejezet egy átfogó bevezetést és néhány gyakorlati tanácsot ad ahhoz hogy a gyerekek jogait hogyan lehet a mindennapi óvodai gyakorlatba beleültetni.
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This book offers critical explorations of how the psy-disciplines, Michel Foucault’s collective term for psychiatry, psychology and psycho-analysis, play out in contemporary educational spaces. With a strong focus on Foucault’s... more
This book offers critical explorations of how the psy-disciplines, Michel Foucault’s collective term for psychiatry, psychology and psycho-analysis, play out in contemporary educational spaces. With a strong focus on Foucault’s theories, it critically investigates how the psy-disciplines continue to influence education, both regulating and shaping behaviour and morality. The book provides insight into different educational contexts and concerns across a child’s educational lifespan; early childhood education, inclusive education, special education, educational leadership, social media, university, and beyond to enable reflection and critique of the implications of psy-based knowledge and practice.
With chapters by a mixture of established and emerging international scholars in the field this is an interdisciplinary and authoritative study into the role of the psy-disciplines in the education system. Providing vivid illustrations from throughout the educational lifespan the book serves as an invaluable tool for reflection and critique of the implications of psy-based practice, and will be of particular interest to academics and scholars in the field of education policy and psychology.
With chapters by a mixture of established and emerging international scholars in the field this is an interdisciplinary and authoritative study into the role of the psy-disciplines in the education system. Providing vivid illustrations from throughout the educational lifespan the book serves as an invaluable tool for reflection and critique of the implications of psy-based practice, and will be of particular interest to academics and scholars in the field of education policy and psychology.
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This article examines the role of state ideology in the formation of kindergarten curriculum documents in socialist Hungary during the 1970s and in contemporary neoliberal Australia. The examination compares the ways in which ‘the child’... more
This article examines the role of state ideology in the formation of kindergarten curriculum documents in socialist Hungary during the 1970s and in contemporary neoliberal Australia. The examination compares the ways in which ‘the child’ to be educated are conceptualized in relation to particular ideas of community in two landmark curriculum documents. Departing from earlier studies that examine images of the child as they move through history, this study uses Foucauldian genealogy for analysis and constructs a vertical case study to compare ideas of ‘the child’ and ‘community’ embedded in curriculum documents and shaped by their respective ideological discursive context of socialist and neoliberal political ideologies. By delivering these case studies this paper also illustrates some of the ways curriculum documents written for the early years regulate children sometimes in explicit and ideologically prescribed ways, such as in socialist curriculum, and other times more covert and arguably ‘apolitical’ but non the less powerful ways, such as in the neoliberal curriculum.
Introduction to the special issue.
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Educational settings for children have a role in (re)producing their societies’ political cultures and to dynamically shape children’s subjectivities, including their political understandings, feelings, and orientations. In this chapter,... more
Educational settings for children have a role in (re)producing their societies’ political cultures and to dynamically shape children’s subjectivities, including their political understandings, feelings, and orientations. In this chapter, a particular preschool in rural Australia is understood as a political space that (re)produces those relations that are part of the democratic society in which it is situated. Through the multiple “stories” told on the renovation of the preschool bathroom, the authors trace the political culture of the preschool by paying special attention to the politics of space. “Stories” were generated through interviews with various stakeholders after the refurbished bathroom was opened. The analysis illustrates the interview participants’ struggle over authority and the agendas and power relations they invest through the discursive constitution of the bathroom space. These struggles are indicative of the preschool’s and the broader political culture in which it is located. The preschool’s political culture ultimately led to the exclusion of many ideas young children put forward and considered important in regard to their bathroom. To conclude considerations are made about the ways in which these power relations condition the possibility of including children’s views and their participation and the importance of spatial politics for young children’s political learning.
Research Interests: Political Sociology, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Youth Studies, Early Childhood Education, Political Culture, and 23 moreAnthropology of Children and Childhood, Intergenerational Relationships, Political Socialization, Spatial Politics, Children and Youth, Early Childhood, Early Childhood Care and Education, Children, Childhood studies, Childhood, Toilets, Children’s Geographies, Bathroom Remodeling, Political Socialisation, Bathroom, Toilet Practices, Intergenerational Relations, Intergenerational Learning and Education, Bathroom Design, Political Socialization, Knowledge Gaps, Youth Political Development, Political Socialization, Conflict Avoidance, Political Identity, Political Learning, and Political Socialialisation
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Attachment theory is often referenced in psychology, social work and early childhood care and education, and is ubiquitous in popular publications directed to parents, carers and educators of young children. It is considered as a ‘grand... more
Attachment theory is often referenced in psychology, social work and early childhood care and education, and is ubiquitous in popular publications directed to parents, carers and educators of young children. It is considered as a ‘grand theory’ that explains “the growth of social relationships from infants’ experiences with their caregivers and the consequent social preference called attachment” (Mercer, 2011, p. 26). In this chapter, we understand attachment theory as a discourse and as part of the ‘psy-complex’, “the sprawling speculative and regulative network of theories and practices that constitute psychology” (Parker, 2002, p. 199). We focus on the operation of ‘attachment discourses’ in early childhood policy and practice prescriptions in two contexts: Finland and Australia. We show how attachment theory is being translated (or undergoes change) as it travels across boundaries and fits within policies, existing practices and economic and ideological agendas of governments in its different contexts. As it is being translated to fit the particular policy problem, attachment produces various understandings of ‘the child’, ‘the caregiver’ and their relations. We outline in a comparative manner ‘the child’, ‘the caregiver’ and the relations, feelings, duties and responsibilities these discourses produce and with what effects. Our conclusions meet with others who discussed the economic and ideological biases of psychological theories and how they enter into the material structure of major institutions – including the preschool and the family - and govern actors’ everyday experiences and actions, including what is included in professionals’ work.
Research Interests: Sociology, Sociology of Education, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Governmentality, Educational Psychology, and 10 moreEarly Childhood Education, Parenting, Child Development, Education Policy, Michel Foucault, Politics Of Education, Attachment Theory, Foucault and education, Foucault power/knowledge - discourse, and Childhood studies
Millei, Z. (2016) ‘Generationing’ of educational and caring spaces for young children: Case of preschool bathroom. In R. Vanderbeck & S. Punch (2016) Families, Intergenerationality and Peer Group Relations, Vol. 5 of Skelton, T. (ed) Geographies of Children and Young People. Singapore: Springer.more
This chapter demonstrates how Foucauldian thinking can be used to understand the ways in which educational and care spaces are constituted by ‘putting into action’ various historically contingent knowledges and discourses about... more
This chapter demonstrates how Foucauldian thinking can be used to understand the ways in which educational and care spaces are constituted by ‘putting into action’ various historically contingent knowledges and discourses about ‘childhood’ and children. These knowledges, discourses and practices constitute a ‘generational view’ by mobilizing and re/configuring assumed differences between ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’. Mechanisms of ‘generationing’ operate in children’s places but the differences they produce between children and adults are often taken for granted as truth. This chapter aims to trouble the taken for granted ‘generational view’ of children’s places. To do this, the chapter provides a brief review of ‘relational space’ and the inseparability of knowledge/power/space in Foucault’s theorizing. It then retools Alanen’s concept of ‘generationing’ as a set of mechanisms of power. The case of an Australian preschool bathroom provides an illustration of the various mechanisms through which ‘generationing’ of places and spaces takes place and its power effects.
Research Interests: Childrens Geographies, Sociology of Education, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Early Childhood Education, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, and 11 morePolitics Of Education, Spatial Politics, Political Geography, Children's Rights, Critical sociology and politics of education, Children's Participation, Childhood studies, Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education, Intergenerationality, Critcal Pedagogy, Reconceptualization of Early Childhood Education, and Architecture and Public Spaces
Introduction to Millei, Z. & Imre, R. (Eds) (2015) Childhood and Nation: Interdisciplinary Engagements. (Critical Cultural Studies of Childhood series edited by Mimi Bloch and Elizabeth Blue Swadener) New York: Palgrave MacMillan... more
Introduction to Millei, Z. & Imre, R. (Eds) (2015) Childhood and Nation: Interdisciplinary Engagements. (Critical Cultural Studies of Childhood series edited by Mimi Bloch and Elizabeth Blue Swadener) New York: Palgrave MacMillan
http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/childhood-and-nation-zsuzsa-millei/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137477842
http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/childhood-and-nation-zsuzsa-millei/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137477842
Research Interests: Education, Social Policy, Sociology of Education, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Children's Literature, and 16 moreNationalism, Israel/Palestine, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, Education Policy, National Identity, Political Geography, Children and Youth, Critical sociology and politics of education, New Social Studies of Childhood, Political Subjectivity, Children, Childhood studies, Children’s Geographies, Childhood and Youth Studies, Childrens Literature, and Childhood Politics
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Early childhood/educational environmental imaginations transmit national, global and planetary views of the world through texts, visual representations and material objects. These representations produce politics, including nationalism... more
Early childhood/educational environmental imaginations transmit national, global and planetary views of the world through texts, visual representations and material objects. These representations produce politics, including nationalism and globalism, and play a part in policy making as well as in how children learn to view and relate to the world. Education, however, needs a new political attractor during anthropogenic climate change that differently orients political engagement with the world for education. In this article, we think with the four political attractors Latour describes: the national, global, planetary and Earth, and Cobb’s notion of the child’s primary relatedness to the world. We explore children’s environmental imagination in their drawings and associated stories to highlight the kinds of politics present in their views promoted by current imaginations. Then, we spin these stories further with speculative experiences our own relation with the world with Latour’s ideas and point to a new political object the Earth and Earthly politics for education.
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Research Interests: Socialization and Dualism
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Children inhabiting Finland inevitably live through cold and snowy winters. Accordingly, winter sports, like skating and skiing, are a standard or national component of curriculum in Finnish schools as well as an expected part of... more
Children inhabiting Finland inevitably live through cold and snowy winters. Accordingly, winter sports, like skating and skiing, are a standard or national component of curriculum in Finnish schools as well as an expected part of children's leisure time. Skis and skates form a taken for granted part of the 'nation-ed environment' of Finland with which people feel at home. All this is often new to children who arrive to live in Finland from warm countries. In this chapter, we dive into the worlds of skis and skates and newly arrived children. Our reading is about skis and skates encountering children who negotiate the socio-material and cultural world of Finland. To foreground how objects matter to children, we apply the idea of ethnopoetry. By constructing poems from our data produced in two research projects with recently arrived children in Finland, and placing those in dialogue with quotes from a Finnish storybook and our own memories, we show how skis and skates fit in with children, mobilize difference or challenge the taken for granted view of a nation. Through stories of skis and skates, the nation, Finnishness, and the Arctic become perceivable as part of ongoing everyday processes that newly arrived as well as Finnish-born children and adults coordinate, sustain, tolerate, reject, and naturalize in encountering the world.
Research Interests: Arctic and The Arctic
This paper considers the intersections of migration research in early childhood/education with issues of nationalism. Based on four articles which address migration and inclusion in four Nordic states, first, we demonstrate how migration... more
This paper considers the intersections of migration research in early childhood/education with issues of nationalism. Based on four articles which address migration and inclusion in four Nordic states, first, we demonstrate how migration research can serve as a fertile source for studying everyday nationalism and exploring its operation in teaching and learning settings. Second, applying a critical lens to this type of migration research opens up a reflective space for evaluating the inherent methodological nationalism of some migration research approaches. Our explorations in the article establish the need to rethink the categorizations of migration research in early childhood / education. The set of questioning we develop aid in identifying on the one hand, everyday nationalism and its operation in early childhood / education and on the other hand, methodological nationalism. Without reflexivity on methodological nationalism, migration researchers will keep falling into the trap of reifying everyday nationalism through the analytical and practical categories they draw on for their research.
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This article engages continuing discussions in childhood studies on (re)inserting the study of childhood into wider socio‐political matrices of power and practices. We present as a potent analytical strategy to do this work ‘child as... more
This article engages continuing discussions in childhood studies on (re)inserting the study of childhood into wider socio‐political matrices of power and practices. We present as a potent analytical strategy to do this work ‘child as method’, developed by one of the authors. After describing ‘child as method’, we draw on the Recollect/Reconnect project, in which scholars and artists who grew up during the last decades of the Cold War recalled their childhood memories. We focus on ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’ as a position of geopolitical address, formulated by narrators to the reader as revealing emergent post‐socialist subjectivities and conditions.
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This article is written as and ethnodrama. Approaching memory work as decolonial practice, we aimed to multiply stories of Cold War childhoods while simultaneously making the politics of collective biography processes explicit. The script... more
This article is written as and ethnodrama. Approaching memory work as decolonial practice, we aimed to multiply stories of Cold War childhoods while simultaneously making the politics of collective biography processes explicit. The script is based on nonfictional reality and is expanded by both researched and speculative elements to compose an evocative text and the characters of the drama. Ethnodrama offers a sense of how it was to “be there,” attending to unspoken and embodied knowledges, questioning habits and assumptions, and making visible the hierarchies and power, and the intricacies and coloniality of knowledge production that emerge in research practices.
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In this paper, an artist-researcher and scholars from the fields of cultural studies, theology, and educational and social sciences reflect on their artistic experiences to think about what kinds of affects, meanings, and responses emerge... more
In this paper, an artist-researcher and scholars from the fields of cultural studies, theology, and educational and social sciences reflect on their artistic experiences to think about what kinds of affects, meanings, and responses emerge when engaging with the sound artwork 63 windows. The experiences are discussed particularly in relation to the metaphor of the window and weaved together with the perspectives of collective biography and memory work, the ethics of care, and the narrative and interpretation theories. On this basis, the paper suggests that relational ethics of care emerges in the continuous and puzzling process of attentive engagement with art: first (1) with imagination, then (2) experiencing belonging and distance, and finally (3) arriving at the understanding of mutual connectedness of life.
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Western modernity has shaped people's thought patterns and value hierarchies, relegating humans to the position of supremacy. This anthropocentric worldview has disconnected humans from the rest of nature and eventually led to the... more
Western modernity has shaped people's thought patterns and value hierarchies, relegating humans to the position of supremacy. This anthropocentric worldview has disconnected humans from the rest of nature and eventually led to the social and ecological catastrophe. This paper shows that collective memory work can help us recognize how we are always socialized within and by human communities and also already ecosocialized within and by the rest of nature. The motivation to use the ecosocialization framework to analyze childhood memories comes from our wish to problematize the anthropocentric view of life further and resituate childhood and growing up beyond exclusively social and human contexts. We draw on the memories collected in the ReConnect / ReCollect: Crossing the Divides through Memories of Cold War Childhoods project (2019-2021). We "think with theory" to reveal traces of ecosocialization present in childhood memories. On this basis, we suggest that including multisensory awareness practices in memory workshops to recognize our bodily belonging-as participants create their memory stories bringing into focus relations with more-than-humans-could potentialize collective biography as a form of transformative ecosocial education.
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Aiming to move away from singular history writing toward multiple histories, this book brought together a group of scholars to (re)narrate histories in ways that would lead to more complex understandings of the (post)socialist pasts,... more
Aiming to move away from singular history writing toward multiple histories, this book brought together a group of scholars to (re)narrate histories in ways that would lead to more complex understandings of the (post)socialist pasts, presents, and futures. Committed to this outlook, we invited colleagues from different disciplines to engage with our volume in a series of afterwords rather than having one last word or single voice close the book. These authors speak from multiple perspectives, including different disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, as well as various levels of personal connections to (post)socialist histories and contexts. They discuss contributions and implications of our work for different fields, including international relations, comparative education, childhood studies, collective biography research, and decolonial studies. This ensemble of comments, reflections, and critiques offers different ways for readers to connect with our work and also points out new perspectives, complexities, and directions for future research. Together they inspire ample thoughts for what could follow afterward.
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This paper is a summary of the keynote panel conversation that took place as part of the “Childhood in Time”conference, May 10–12, 2021. The speakers respond to the question of how they place childhood in time relations,giving examples... more
This paper is a summary of the keynote panel conversation that took place as part of the “Childhood in Time”conference, May 10–12, 2021. The speakers respond to the question of how they place childhood in time relations,giving examples from their own research and outlining an agenda for considering time in childhood studies.
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The Sage Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood
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The Sage Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood
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Materialities of everyday nationalism is more frequently explored today in nationalism studies. Similar attention, however, is missing if we consider young children's institutional lives. This chapter uses an object centric... more
Materialities of everyday nationalism is more frequently explored today in nationalism studies. Similar attention, however, is missing if we consider young children's institutional lives. This chapter uses an object centric approach to everyday nationalism to explore how objects gain national significance and weave nationalism into young children's everyday institutional lives and contribute to their identity formation as national subjects. By analysing two scenarios as cases to learn from, I identify three processes: production, occupation and performance through which objects tie the nation into everyday practices. While everyday nationalism often operates beneath the surface, paying attention to objects and mundane practices in preschools help us understand where and when everyday nationalism is present in children's preschool lives, when it matters, and how it works. To conclude, I call attention to the need to take objects more seriously in the study of banal nationalism and childhood.
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Research Interests: Sociology, Human Geography, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Ethnography, Early Childhood Education, and 11 moreIdeology, Nationalism, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, Nations and nationalism, Early Childhood, Everyday Life, Childhood studies, Everyday Nationalism, Feeling, Preschool, and affective practice
In our current context, researching how young children encounter and inhabit the nation among diverse people is ever-more important. In societies free of conflict, the nation operates beneath the surface, therefore, it is difficult to... more
In our current context, researching how young children encounter and inhabit the nation among diverse people is ever-more important. In societies free of conflict, the nation operates beneath the surface, therefore, it is difficult to study. By bringing together the perspectives of ‘everyday nationalism’ and ‘cultural pedagogy’, I develop the concept of ‘pedagogy of nation’ to focus on and account for various didactic means through which young children learn to inhabit the nation and to further explore everyday nationalism.
Research Interests: Sociology, Gender Studies, Education, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Diversity, and 15 moreDidactics, Critical Pedagogy, Early Childhood Education, Nationalism, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, Equality and Diversity, Cultural Diversity, Early Childhood, Childhood studies, Institutions, Childhood, Philosophy and Religious Studies, Everyday Nationalism, Children`s Rights, and Cultural Pedagogy
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ABSTRACT The study produces a genealogy of ‘the child’ as the shifting subject constituted by the confluence of discourses that are utilized by, and surround, Western Australian pre-compulsory education. The analysis is approached as a... more
ABSTRACT
The study produces a genealogy of ‘the child’ as the shifting subject constituted by the confluence of discourses that are utilized by, and surround, Western Australian pre-compulsory education. The analysis is approached as a genealogy of governmentality building on the work of Foucault and Rose, which enables the consideration of the research question that guides this study: How has ‘the child’ come to be constituted as a subject of regimes of practices of pre-compulsory education in Western Australia?
This study does not explore how the historical discourses changed in relation to ‘the child’ as a universal subject of early education, but it examines the multiple ways ‘the child’ was constituted by these discourses as the subject at which government is to be aimed, and whose characteristics government must harness and instrumentalize. Besides addressing the research question, the study also develops a set of intertwining arguments. In these the author contends that ‘the child’ is invented through historically contingent ideas about the individual and that the way in which ‘the child’ is constituted in pre-compulsory education shifts in concert with the changing problematizations about the government of the population and individuals. Further, the study demonstrates the necessity to understand the provision of pre-compulsory education as a political practice.
Looking at pre-compulsory education as a political practice de-stabilizes the taken-for-granted constitutions of ‘the child’ embedded in present theories, practices and research with children in the field of early childhood education. It also enables the de- and reconstruction of the notions of children’s ‘participation’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘citizenship’. The continuous de- and reconstruction of these notions and the de-stabilization of the constitutions of ‘the child’ creates a framework in which improvement is possible, rather than “a utopian, wholesale and, thus revolutionary, transformation” in early education (Branson & Miller, 1991, p. 187). This study also contributes to the critiques of classroom discipline approaches by reconceptualizing them as technologies of government in order to reveal the power relations they silently wield.
The study produces a genealogy of ‘the child’ as the shifting subject constituted by the confluence of discourses that are utilized by, and surround, Western Australian pre-compulsory education. The analysis is approached as a genealogy of governmentality building on the work of Foucault and Rose, which enables the consideration of the research question that guides this study: How has ‘the child’ come to be constituted as a subject of regimes of practices of pre-compulsory education in Western Australia?
This study does not explore how the historical discourses changed in relation to ‘the child’ as a universal subject of early education, but it examines the multiple ways ‘the child’ was constituted by these discourses as the subject at which government is to be aimed, and whose characteristics government must harness and instrumentalize. Besides addressing the research question, the study also develops a set of intertwining arguments. In these the author contends that ‘the child’ is invented through historically contingent ideas about the individual and that the way in which ‘the child’ is constituted in pre-compulsory education shifts in concert with the changing problematizations about the government of the population and individuals. Further, the study demonstrates the necessity to understand the provision of pre-compulsory education as a political practice.
Looking at pre-compulsory education as a political practice de-stabilizes the taken-for-granted constitutions of ‘the child’ embedded in present theories, practices and research with children in the field of early childhood education. It also enables the de- and reconstruction of the notions of children’s ‘participation’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘citizenship’. The continuous de- and reconstruction of these notions and the de-stabilization of the constitutions of ‘the child’ creates a framework in which improvement is possible, rather than “a utopian, wholesale and, thus revolutionary, transformation” in early education (Branson & Miller, 1991, p. 187). This study also contributes to the critiques of classroom discipline approaches by reconceptualizing them as technologies of government in order to reveal the power relations they silently wield.
Research Interests: Sociology of Children and Childhood, Early Childhood Education, Education Policy, Education Policy Studies, Classroom Management, and 5 moreEarly Childhood, Early Childhood Care and Education, Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education, Reconceptualizing Classroom Discipline, and Classroom Discipline
Did you grow up during the Cold War, on either side of the Berlin Wall? Would you be willing to share your childhood memories? If so, we would like to invite you to participate in a memory workshop to share and analyze memory stories... more
Did you grow up during the Cold War, on either side of the Berlin Wall? Would you be willing to share your childhood memories? If so, we would like to invite you to participate in a memory workshop to share and analyze memory stories about your own childhood experiences around the theme ‘crossing divides’. Download the document to read the details!!!!
Research Interests: Sociology of Children and Childhood, Cold War, Autoethnography, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, Autobiography, and 10 moreHistory of Childhood and Youth, Memory Studies, Cultural Memory, History of Childhood, Post-Socialist Societies, Socialism, Post-Socialism, Childhood studies, Childhood, and Collective Biography
Contents EDITORIAL Sabine Bollig, Zsuzsa Millei: Spaces of Early Childhood: Spatial Approaches in Research on Early Childhood Education and Care ARTICLES Aisling Gallagher: E-portfolios and Relational Space in the Early Education... more
Contents
EDITORIAL
Sabine Bollig, Zsuzsa Millei: Spaces of Early Childhood: Spatial Approaches in Research on Early Childhood Education and Care
ARTICLES
Aisling Gallagher: E-portfolios and Relational Space in the Early Education Environment
Mari Vuorisalo, Raija Raittila, Niina Rutanen: Kindergarten Space and Autonomy in Construction – Explorations during a Team Ethnography in one Finnish Kindergarten
Carie J. Green: Young children’s Spatial Autonomy in Their Home Environment and a Forest Setting
Danielle Ekman Ladru, Katarina Gustafson: ‘Yay, a Downhill!’ Mobile Preschool Children’s Collective Mobility Practices and ‘Doing’ of Space in Walks in Line
Jennifer Sumsion, Linda J. Harrison, Matthew Stapleton: Spatial Perspectives on Babies’ Ways of Belonging in Infant Early Childhood Education and Care
Zsuzsa Millei: Distant Places in Children’s Everyday Activities: Multiple Worlds in an Australian Preschool
Sabine Bollig: Approaching the Spatialities of Early Education and Care Systems from the Position of the Child
EDITORIAL
Sabine Bollig, Zsuzsa Millei: Spaces of Early Childhood: Spatial Approaches in Research on Early Childhood Education and Care
ARTICLES
Aisling Gallagher: E-portfolios and Relational Space in the Early Education Environment
Mari Vuorisalo, Raija Raittila, Niina Rutanen: Kindergarten Space and Autonomy in Construction – Explorations during a Team Ethnography in one Finnish Kindergarten
Carie J. Green: Young children’s Spatial Autonomy in Their Home Environment and a Forest Setting
Danielle Ekman Ladru, Katarina Gustafson: ‘Yay, a Downhill!’ Mobile Preschool Children’s Collective Mobility Practices and ‘Doing’ of Space in Walks in Line
Jennifer Sumsion, Linda J. Harrison, Matthew Stapleton: Spatial Perspectives on Babies’ Ways of Belonging in Infant Early Childhood Education and Care
Zsuzsa Millei: Distant Places in Children’s Everyday Activities: Multiple Worlds in an Australian Preschool
Sabine Bollig: Approaching the Spatialities of Early Education and Care Systems from the Position of the Child
Research Interests: Sociology of Children and Childhood, Space and Place, Early Childhood Education, Anthropology of space, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, and 10 morePhenomenology of Space and Place, Space, Early Childhood, Early Childhood Care and Education, Children's Play, Children, Early Childhood Studies, Home Environment, Educational Virtual Environments, and School Environment
EDITORIAL Ondrej Kaščák, Branislav Pupala: ECEC at the Crossroads – From Domination to Resistance ARTICLES Peter Moss: Power and Resistance in Early Childhood Education: From Dominant Discourse to Democratic Experimentalism Zsuzsa... more
EDITORIAL
Ondrej Kaščák, Branislav Pupala:
ECEC at the Crossroads – From Domination to Resistance
ARTICLES
Peter Moss:
Power and Resistance in Early Childhood Education: From Dominant Discourse to Democratic Experimentalism
Zsuzsa Millei, Brad Gobby, Jannelle Gallagher:
Doing State Policy at Preschool: An Autoethnographic Tale of Universal Access to ECEC in Australia
Ondrej Kaščák, Branislav Pupala:
Topography of Power Relations in Slovak Preschool Sector Based on Bourdieu’s Field Theory
Norma Rudolph:
Hierarchies of Knowledge, Incommensurabilities and Silences in South African ECD Policy: Whose Knowledge Counts?
Annegret Frindte, Johanna Mierendorff:
Bildung, Erziehung [education] and Care in German Early Childhood Settings – Spotlights on Current Discourses
Felipe Aravena Castillo, Marta Quiroga Lobos:
Early Child Care Education: Evidence from the New Law in Chile
Ondrej Kaščák, Branislav Pupala:
ECEC at the Crossroads – From Domination to Resistance
ARTICLES
Peter Moss:
Power and Resistance in Early Childhood Education: From Dominant Discourse to Democratic Experimentalism
Zsuzsa Millei, Brad Gobby, Jannelle Gallagher:
Doing State Policy at Preschool: An Autoethnographic Tale of Universal Access to ECEC in Australia
Ondrej Kaščák, Branislav Pupala:
Topography of Power Relations in Slovak Preschool Sector Based on Bourdieu’s Field Theory
Norma Rudolph:
Hierarchies of Knowledge, Incommensurabilities and Silences in South African ECD Policy: Whose Knowledge Counts?
Annegret Frindte, Johanna Mierendorff:
Bildung, Erziehung [education] and Care in German Early Childhood Settings – Spotlights on Current Discourses
Felipe Aravena Castillo, Marta Quiroga Lobos:
Early Child Care Education: Evidence from the New Law in Chile
Research Interests: Discourse Analysis, Field Theory, Critical Discourse Studies, Critical Pedagogy, Early Childhood Education, and 29 moreAutoethnography, Indigenous Knowledge, Education Policy, Critical Discourse Analysis, Political Discourse Analysis, Ideology and Discourse Analysis, Foucault and education, Early Childhood, Policy Analysis, Educational Governance, Early Childhood Care and Education, Foucault power/knowledge - discourse, Colonial Discourse, Preschool Education, Bildung, Critical discourse analysis and education, Political Discourse, Educational Policy Studies, Ethnographic & autoethnographic research, Neoliberal Reforms in Education, Quality of Education, Early Childhood Curriculum, Early Childhood Development, Preschool, Neoliberalism and Education, Education Governance, Theory of Social Fields, Neoliberalism & Governmentality, and Pierre Bourdieu Y La Educacion
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