Decentering Anglo-American curricular power in early childhood education: learning, culture, and "child development" in higher education coursework.

Publication: Journal of Curriculum Theorizing

Publication Date: 22-SEP-05

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The concerns of this paper regard the content of coursework for Masters degree students in Early Childhood Education in Norway. This has developed from a local site of otherness to Anglo-American practices and theories. By considering Norwegian curriculum, and relating this to translations from a Norwegian Masters thesis (Brandtzaeg, 2001b), the paper shows and discusses some effects of the local and the global on what counts as today's knowledge, practices and research about and with young children. Reconstructions of institutions engaged in education and care can only come about through discursive and generic shift. The paper works toward these by critiquing the pervading discourse of development psychology and its relations to pedagogy and the new social studies of childhood. The reconceptualizing of early childhood's higher education requires a knowledge of not only how to resist positivist research and positivist positionings, but to how to recognize and act upon the discourses and genres of various non-positivist approaches. The Masters degree (Hovedfag i barnehagepedagogikk, 2001) courses considered regard (1) 'Child development and learning in a relational perspective' and (2) 'Childhood and society.' All translations in this paper are the author's. Further, she takes responsibility for any misinterpretations and omissions she makes because of her positioning in Norway as an 'immigrant.'

One way to read a course outline (from its listed aims, contents and reference list) is to see what is not there that could be, and to imagine how the various discourses seemingly within the described course might play themselves out. To make this reading, the course outline (seen as text) requires a contextual background in the form of other courses also having to be taken by these students. A course is also contextualized by its relation or its non-relation to practice, to similar courses in other places, to the culture in which it is embedded, and to the professional and personal lives of the postgraduate students and lecturers engaged in it. From the course called 'Childhood and Society' it can thus be read that 'society,' which in 2001 was without aims, content or references about cultural and linguistic diversity, complexity and multiplicity, might be problematic. Further, from the course called 'Child Development and Learning in a Relational Perspective,' it appears that which children and whose relational perspectives are not what is central. Relations between gender, ethnicity and social class as they relate to poverty and power are thus left off the agenda. This paper shows what Masters degree students might do to avoid confronting such political and theoretical dilemmas between their given coursework, their own experience as teachers and carers with the very young, their need to pass, and their desires to produce today's cutting edge research as their thesis.

Rather than simply critiquing the two courses, this paper also produces positive (but not positivist) readings of them, in terms of what a particular cultural practice (in Norway) is currently constructing as valuable for Early Childhood Education and care. As ways of reading texts and discourses three approaches are thus demonstrated. The first, which theoretically draws from the poststructural, is constituted within the deconstructive and postmodern. The second draws mostly from a critical or Foucault approach, though it also works with a Derridean notion of traces and absences. The third ignores these to approach research as a meaning making or semantics informed by phenomenology and hermeneutics. All of these may be described as non-positivist, non-empiricist approaches to knowledge making and to educational caring practices.

Developmental psychology, however, has a positivist hard science history. Hence its assumptions regard prediction, control, explanation and technically exploitable knowledge. Here the researcher takes the role of expert, with children and their abilities objectified and categorized. A pedagogy informed mostly by developmental psychology is not likely to be critical or highly theorized. Moreover, the teacher-carers, the parents and the children themselves may be bypassed by the developmental psychologist in the rush to record results and findings (Leseman, 2002). I shall show how this approach is affecting what counts as coursework in Early Childhood Education, and where and why this is out of touch with today's newer directions. For Masters students, who may choose what to write about as their thesis, after a year of studying coursework, one solution is to just ignore the theorists they find not interesting. However, in taking up newer theorists they risk facing external examiners who know only the paradigms of positivism, or only the discourse of a psychology so normalized as to go unnamed. For Early Childhood Education then to be more affected by contemporary shifts to cultural studies (and methodologies relating to critical theory, literary theory and anthropology), requires a change in those in power.

Thus the 'new social studies of early childhood' (Christensen and James, 2000, p.1) and the new 'childhood and cultural studies' (Cannella and Viruru, 1999) are implicitly and overtly raising issues and controversies in 'child development' discourses and their relationships to pedagogy. Because the traditionally dissimilar disciplines of psychology and sociology have historically constructed what people in affluent nations call Early Childhood Education, there is still quite a lot of transforming to be done as reconstruction and transgression. In Oslo Norway, where I now teach, supervise and examine in Early Childhood Education, the psychologybased coursework and the sociology-based coursework are not seen in opposition to each other. Rather they are seen as complementary and mutually reconstructive (Brandtzaeg, 2001b). Further, although Norwegian coursework is cognizant of some of the latest in Anglo-American texts (international publications in English) Norway is building its own locally constructed institutionalised practices, documentations and research. As this all happens in Norwegian language, it is little known outside Norway, Sweden and Denmark, where the languages are mutually understood.

Norwegian Interpretations of Social Studies of Childhood

At the time of the writing of this paper the Masters degree coursework was named in Norwegian Hovedfag i barnehagepedagogikk 2001. Since that time the coursework has been changed. We now have a 'Masters' degree, as Norwegian university colleges have all now adopted this English word. Here linguistic colonialism is seen to be alive and well, although the content of the course is no more 'English' than before, and the students continue to write and speak Norwegian.

In some ways the 'new' social studies of childhood are apparent in the Norwegian work of Bae and Waastad (1992), Bae (1992; 1995) and Schibbye (1996; 1997; 1998). What also happens here is a construction in practice and in theory of a Scandinavian ethics of pedagogy and care (Fog, 1992). This works especially well for Norway and its dominant discourses. Here the current trend for the psychologically based study of 'child development' opens for the study of the social, and treats children as actors in their own right. The critique of this is that relationships are not only social but cultural. So taking this notion a step further would involve deconstructing essentialism. But if you are located at the centre of a culture and not at its periphery, this is impossible: without some radicalizing experience.

Further, the Norwegian 'relationship perspective' in 'child development' (Bae; Schibbye) stops short of critical theory and the postmodern (Connole, 1998). It does so epistemologically by explaining, analysing and interpreting its research data and drawing its conclusions from there; but not going further, into critique and deconstruction. Thus a phenomenological and hermeneutic approach to research (Bae; Schibbye) avoids Foucault (Cannella, 1997) and postmodernity's undoing of meaning (Burman, 2000). I shall develop this idea later in the paper by demonstrating, deconstructing, rationalising and discussing. In Norway as a non-English-speaking country, there is some confusion over the differences in the terms 'modern' and 'postmodern' (Kolle, 2001; Winger, 1994), and the term 'poststructural' may be published without referees stopping its inappropriate use. But whose language here is doing the colonizing?

While earlier studies of 'child development' focused on behaviourism and the manipulation of 'prosocial behaviour,' more recent work has been constructionist (Jenks, 2000, p. 66). This allows for possibilities of practical political change as receptualizations of what happens when children and adults are together. In other words, childhood is seen as 'not simply the context for socialisation but as the frame within which children become constituted as children' (Christensen and James, 2000, p. 3). For each of the Norwegian courses considered here, this is happening. The first of these, as 'child development' coursework and hence deriving from psychology, differs from the traditional. The second, coming from the discipline of a sociology that is newer than psychology but not as new as cultural studies, perhaps finds it easier to be critical, (its reference texts include Dahlberg, Moss and Pence, 1999; James, Jenks and Prout, 1998), though it stops short of taking on diversity and difference. Thus although 'social research is always about social relationships' (Christensen and James, 2000, p. 5), who defines the social becomes a moot point. So whilst the Norwegian theories and practices regarding relationship, acknowledgement and respect (Bae; Schibbye) are putting the social back into the social science of Early Childhood Education, this requires the support of critical studies of childhood. Why is this necessary when sociology, anthropology, sociolinguistics and cultural studies have always regarded the social? Because psychology developed by the isolated study of the individual, and (special) education has built up its curriculum of intervention and adult expertise as a result. It is thus only within a pedagogical/psychological culture that lacks the social that relationships have to be named. Reading between the lines then, Norway's early childhood pedagogy appears as needing this naming.

Beyond pedagogy, a research practice of relationship with children and adults challenges traditional notions of what a researcher does in 'getting data,' and in writing subjectively and objectively about it afterwards. Representing children's lives in research then becomes a challenge, as understanding childhood (unless it is your own in retrospect) may be presumptive. At this point a relationship perspective to 'child development' becomes critical. The dilemma for researchers and beginning researchers (such as postgraduate students who have completed their coursework and must now produce a thesis) is what to do with this knowledge and how to construct a theoretically and ethically compatible research methodology.

Added to this is a further feature of the new social science of childhood: 'intergenerational perspectives'. These account for commonality and diversity by locating childhood within a life-course perspective (Mayall, 2000). Researchers following this will probably want to take up aspects of ethnography, as a research methodology for 'hearing' what children say: not just 'listening' to them. Here Norwegian postgraduates highly able in English and disposed towards cutting edge theory are accessing these discourses for themselves (Brandtzaeg, 2001a; 2001b; 2002) to challenge normalised research...

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