Faculty of Education - Theses

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Author: Buchanan, Emma × Start date: 2000 × Type: PhD thesis × Subject: early childhood education ×

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    From developing child to competent learner: a genealogical study of the kindergarten child and progressive reform in Aotearoa New Zealand
    Buchanan, Emma ( 2017)
    Historically through to the present day, early childhood education has been the focus of myriad and potent investments; a persistent, if variously inflected, feature is its reforming and progressive impulse. This thesis offers a history of the kindergarten child in Aotearoa New Zealand in which themes of subjectivity, knowledge, temporality, truth, and freedom are central. The history, a form of genealogy (Foucault 1984), examines two moments of significant early education reform in New Zealand. Analysis of these reforms is anchored by, and extends from, the landmark policy statements of Pre-School Education: Report of the Consultative Committee on Pre-School Educational Services (DOE 1947) and Education to be More: Report of the Early Childhood Care and Education Working Group (DOE 1988). Working with diverse historical sources – textual, visual, socio-spatial, expert, professional, and practice oriented – the thesis develops a historical account of these reforms and their respective elaboration as self-consciously new and leading-edge practices. It explores the kindergarten child as the subject of changing progressive discourses through analysis of epistemological and affective investments and close examination of practices within what I conceptualize as free-play, developmental pedagogies of freedom (late 1940s and 1950s), and sociocultural learning pedagogies of empowerment (late 1990s and 2000s). The identified pedagogies and their respective conditions of reform are situated in juxtaposed rather than linear temporal relations. That is, I conceptualize them as two differently liberating “timespaces” (Baker 2001, 24), each animated by fervently held understandings of the nature of young children, and what their good education should entail. Engaging a non-binary and practical understanding of processes of subject formation, I understand the pedagogies, spaces, concepts, materials, and practices under examination as technologies of government and subjectivity, and the forms of natural – free or empowered – conduct that they presumed and promoted are analysed. Motivated by critical genealogical aims, the thesis seeks to unsettle current certainties and commitments to the truth of the child in early education, a subject who is commonly understood and called forth as a competent, social and culturally diverse learner. Overall, the thesis argues that these reforms and their respective pedagogies have a “double gesture” (Popkewitz 2009, 397), entailing a valorization and promotion of particular forms of liberated conduct and work-upon the self, whilst simultaneously foreclosing alternative possibilities. Developing a somewhat anti-progressivist account, the history illuminates the surprising – and often neglected in present-day critique – forms of caring attention towards children as embodied, affective subjects within mid-century developmental pedagogies. It surfaces, too, the often overlooked essentializing effects of discourses of empowerment, diversity, and competence within recently ascendant learning-framed pedagogies. While illuminating the affordances of discourses of growth, along with the normative foundationalism of learning discourses, the thesis does not simply call for a restoration of developmental pedagogies or for the wholesale repudiation of empowerment and learning. Rather, this historical study seeks to produce an opening in which present-day investments, including those formulated as counter-discourses, may be appraised with an alertness to their subject-forming effects as well as the blindspots and ambivalence of progressive discourses. Further, while grounded in the cultural politics of Aotearoa New Zealand, the issues raised and arguments developed have relevance to wider shifts and flows in critique, policy, and practice in early education during the twentieth century through to the present day. Grappling with themes of knowledge, subjectivity and temporality, the thesis aims to contribute new and contextually rich insights into the history of the child in and through early education. In doing so, it seeks to reframe that history and open up fresh ways of rethinking the effects of progressive ideas in early education. Finally, this thesis attempts to contribute conceptually and methodologically to approaches for the exploration of educated subjectivities in the past. It does so through a reflexive engagement with Foucauldian concepts of government and ethics in critical interaction with space, materiality and the visual in the history of education.