Interiority and government of the child

Focaal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (77) ◽  
pp. 76-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Newberry

Early childhood education and care programs in Indonesia developed rapidly in the aftermath of the 2006 earthquake centered south of Yogyakarta. The newly empowered self-directed learner at the center of these programs seemed to follow from the emergence of another child in this devastated landscape: the traumatized child in need of healing. The appearance of these images of childhood along with Indonesia’s neoliberal democratization reiterates the long-standing relationship between childhood and rule. Grounded in long-term ethnographic work in the Yogyakarta area, this article traces a conceptual link between the shift to transparent and accountable good governance in post-Suharto Indonesia and the desire to produce a newly transparent childhood ready for intervention. The generative power of history, trauma, and the interior self is contrasted with risk management, nongovernmental governance, and the exteriorization of self and state to challenge the unquestioned good of empowerment and transparency.

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (7) ◽  
pp. 637-640 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merete Moe ◽  
Anne B. Reinertsen

A threshold situation is a kind of crisis of, for example, deteriorating health. Fall 2014, a project was conducted, focusing on writing for well-being with a former employee and leader at an Early Childhood Education and Care, now on long-term sick leave. Here is her story and poem; her writings/Sis. Our stories and theory/practice/data/interpretive poems; our writings/Merete and Anne: Our companionship, company, and compassion: Sis/Merete/Anne.Com . We aim at Deleuze and Guattarian safespace writing. In modern working life participation, empowerment, governance, and self-leadership is considered vital for creating good psychosociological work environments. Foucault’s concept governmentality aims to elucidate how we are created as subjects, looking at how we are governed by others and by ourselves according to norms and expectations in organizations, society, and from ourselves. We think with poetry to open up, explore, and fabulate. We call it poeticalization and storying and work and worlds and words or rather work/world/word/making/melding/mattering/Sis/Merete/Anne: www.mmm.com .


Author(s):  
Colin Tarr

In 2002 a long-term strategic plan for New Zealand early childhood education and care (ECEC) provision was announced with three goals, those of increased participation, improved quality and the promotion of collaboration. To realise these goals, New Zealand can learn much from Finland. Finland participated in the Thematic Review of Early Childhood Education and Care Policy project conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2000. The purpose of the project was to provide comparative information to help inform ECEC policy-making in OECD countries. This article reviews the OECD report on Finland. An outline of Finnish ECEC provision is briefly described and a brief critique of some Finnish ECEC issues is provided. The article concludes with some comparisons with New Zealand ECEC policy issues.


Author(s):  
Margarita León

The chapter first examines at a conceptual level the links between theories of social investment and childcare expansion. Although ‘the perfect match’ between the two is often taken for granted in the specialized literature as well as in policy papers, it is here argued that a more nuance approach that ‘unpacks’ this relationship is needed. The chapter will then look for elements of variation in early childhood education and care (ECEC) expansion. Despite an increase in spending over the last two decades in many European and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, wide variation still exists in the way in which ECEC develops. A trade-off is often observed between coverage and quality of provision. A crucial dividing line that determines, to a large extent, the quality of provision in ECEC is the increasing differentiation between preschool education for children aged 3 and above and childcare for younger children.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146394912110101
Author(s):  
Geraldine Mooney Simmie ◽  
Dawn Murphy

The last decade has revealed a global (re)configuring of the relationships between the state, society and educational settings in the direction of systems of performance management. In this article, the authors conduct a critical feminist inquiry into this changing relationship in relation to the professionalisation of early childhood education and care practitioners in Ireland, with a focus on dilemmatic contradictions between the policy reform ensemble and practitioners’ reported working conditions in a doctoral study. The critique draws from the politics of power and education, and gendered and classed subjectivities, and allows the authors to theorise early childhood education and care professionalisation in alternative emancipatory ways for democratic pedagogy rather than a limited performativity. The findings reveal the state (re)configured as a central command centre with an over-reliance on surveillance, alongside deficits of responsibility for public interest values in relation to the working conditions of early childhood education and care workers, who are mostly part-time ‘pink-collar’ women workers in precarious roles. The study has implications that go beyond Ireland for the professionalisation of early childhood education and care workers and meeting the early developmental needs of young children.


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