Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemFrom developing child to competent learner: a genealogical study of the kindergarten child and progressive reform in Aotearoa New Zealand( 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.
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ItemMy Italian kindergarten: an investigation of preschool language teaching( 2016)While early natural second language acquisition often produces high levels of bilingual competence, second language learning in institutional settings is far less successful. One response has been to lower the starting age for second language instruction to preschool, but there has been limited research to date into pedagogy for language teaching tailored to early childhood education settings. This study takes an analytic autoethnographic approach to investigating teaching in a play-based bilingual program. Situated in an Italian-English kindergarten program in Melbourne, the study is an inquiry into microprocesses of second language teaching. The Bilingual Turn in education and second language research seeks to acknowledge multilingual realities, suggesting reconsideration of assumptions about language separation in education, recommending bilingual practices such as translanguaging and responsible code-switching, and proposing the adoption of Usage-Based Linguistics as a theory of second language development. This study examines records of enacted bilingual teaching using practitioner reflection, and theoretical resources drawn from the perspective of the Bilingual Turn. The project takes up two related facets of teacher language use, with one focus on English use and issues of language separation and alternation, and the other focus on Italian use and formulaic language in routines. The study finds teaching practices that maximise target language exposure may be a higher priority than language separation. On the other hand, while it may be valid to adopt intentionally bilingual teaching strategies in some settings, the learning context must be considered. Analysis of formulaic language use in routines identifies ‘scripted’ routines as a pedagogical strategy used to add frequency to opportunities for Italian language interaction in a manner compatible with a Usage-Based Linguistics approach to piecemeal repertoire building.
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ItemBeing, becoming and potential: thinking coexistence and coproduction in early childhood education( 2016)This thesis explores how disparate ideas of being, becoming and agency can be reframed to decolonise early childhood education and care contexts. It asks questions of multiple childhood perspectives to denaturalise accepted and dominating early childhood discourses. It does so by pursuing a variegated understanding nested within three questions. First, what ideas of childhood and development compel and inspire the framing of educational objectives in current policy contexts of Australian early childhood reform? Second, what can contemporary challenges to the nature of subjectivity offer for rethinking assumptions of being, agency and development in early childhood? The third asks, what non-dominating perspectives reframe ideas of becoming and potential within the context of early childhood education and care? In addressing these questions, the thesis draws on humanist, post-humanist and postcolonial theory, Indigenous and early childhood policy to examine intersections of childhood and being as colonised subject. Theoretically this thesis grounds itself in critical ontology, emerging through a range of theories on concepts of governmentality, power relations, self and subjectivity. Foundations of critical ontology are challenged by ideas of colonised-coloniser relationships, processes of subjectification and their relationship to the child. This positions the study's contribution to emerging postcolonial reframing of early childhood education. Methodologically, the thesis utilises an approach drawing from interpretive, deconstructive and critical methodologies of education. It draws on critical discourse analysis of philosophy, reform policy, and narratives of experience, overarched by a relatedness ethic, in which a space is held open to contradictions and disparity in theory and thinkers. The study comprises five streams of knowledge about the child. The first explores the idea of childhood as a European foundation of early education discourse. The second explores contemporary critical challenges to the nature of being and the subject. The third stream explores the shaping of docile bodies as refracted through Australian early childhood policy frameworks, and the fourth takes this further to present a genealogy of discourses intersecting child, potential, and education. The fifth stream explores Indigenous Australian perspectives and postcolonial challenges that highlight the ongoing processes constructing the colonial subject. The thesis contributes to understanding how early childhood education might enable difference as multiple manifestations of being. It suggests the ongoing colonial processes of control over childhood calls for the paradigm shift needed. It produces three main theoretical contributions. First, it produces a conceptual possibility of early education and care as a platform for coexistence. Second, it offers concrete and symbolic beginnings for decolonial coproduction. Third, in order to break with childhood as colonised subject, and children as deficit beings, the thesis develops an understanding of emergent being-becomings and becoming-relations, highlighting potentiality as existing in confluence with being. Overall, these can offer directions for unearthing colonial foundations of childhood in reviewing policy and rethinking directions for early childhood education and care.
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ItemChildren's participation in theory and practice: (re)theorising the everyday enactment of children's participatory rights with early childhood educators( 2014)This participatory action research project sought to engage early childhood educators in the generation and promotion of critical and ethical early childhood theories and practices that support the enactment of children’s participation rights in the everyday in early childhood settings. Children’s participation is increasingly promoted in early childhood curriculum framework documents in Australia, and is subsequently tied to regulatory requirements and understandings of best practice. However, there are limited resources to support the enactment of young children’s participation in everyday early childhood practice. The basis of this study was to support educators on the ground to explore and generate ethical participatory practices for daily use in the classroom. In doing so, it recognised the need to address the divide between theory and practice that is perceived and experienced by early childhood educators, to account for existing critiques of participation rights, and to resist the maintenance of limiting neoliberal ideals. The methodology employed in this study was poststructural participatory action research. Participants were eight early childhood educators working with 3-5 year old children in different settings across metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. Data was generated by various means over the course of a year including semi-structured interviews, transcriptions from action research meetings, participant journals, artefacts, email correspondence, joint writing for conference presentations and shared analysis processes. This project was designed and undertaken using a poststructural conceptual framework. Two stages of analysis were undertaken the first with an emphasis on Derridean deconstruction and the second through the lens of Derrida’s ethic of hospitality. Findings from the deconstructive analysis demonstrated that children’s participation in early childhood is able to support established best practice, support the reconceptualisation of practice, and support resistance to structural and regulatory barriers. These were positive outcomes that support the sustainable practice of children’s rights in early childhood. However, the deconstructive analysis revealed that participatory practices in early childhood also enable maintenance of discourses, binaries and subject positions that limit the ethical possibilities of children’s participation and affect the wellbeing of children and educators. In response to these findings a concept was sought through which to (re)theorise participation for use in early childhood settings. Applying an ethic of hospitality (Derrida, 2000) as a framework demonstrated how educators can create opportunities to welcome and affirm children’s participation more ethically by cultivating passivity, providing provocation, responsiveness, and being open to surprise. This research concludes by exploring possibilities for an hospitality-informed ethics through which educators may encounter and interact with each child as other rather than normalising children and their participation, thus promoting critical and ethical participatory practices.
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ItemThinking, feeling and relating: young children learning through dance( 2014)Dance is considered to be central to the development of the young child (Sansom, 2011; Wright, 2003; Schiller & Meiners, 2003; Stinson, 1988), yet playful body-based learning, is often avoided as a learning area by early childhood educators. Framed within socio-constructivist and rights based theory this study investigated how dance enabled young children’s learning and the role of the teacher in enabling this learning. The research adopted a qualitative mixed methods case study methodology (Stake, 2005; Yin, 2003). The participants were twenty, four and five-year old children and their teacher, who was also the researcher. Data was collected over twenty-six weeks and was generated from video recordings, photographs, children’s drawing-tellings (Wright, 2003a, 2003b) and teacher program plans and journal notes. Video recordings and photographic images were transcribed using a number of original analytical tools that supported a systematic and in-depth investigation of young children’s responses to learning through dance and the role of the teacher in enabling this learning. The findings revealed that young children engaged in embodied thinking, playful imaginative problem-solving and aesthetic decision making, whilst developing, through multi-modal semiotic meaning making, a strong sense of self and collective agency. The findings also highlighted a particular pedagogical platform and a range of teaching strategies that supported the establishment of an interest-based socio-constructivist dance curriculum where the voices of children were given an opportunity to be expressed in multiple ways. The results of this study indicate that learning through dance provides young children with an authentic and unique learning modality that supports sophisticated levels of thinking, feeling and relating. This position infers that dance should be recognized for its potential to excite young children’s creative and artistic thinking and their social development, and as such, be represented more broadly in mainstream curriculum. In addition, this thesis recommends a teaching and learning model that recognizes the rights of children to have the opportunity to express their voices through artistic and creative endeavours, of which dance is considered paramount.
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ItemInvestigating the implementation of drama in a Taiwanese preschool( 2014)This thesis is an investigation of processes and possibilities for using drama as a medium for integrated thematic learning. It reports on a qualitative case study incorporating aspects of action research, focusing on developing and adapting a drama-based learning approach in a particular preschool setting in Taiwan. The study explored the growth in understanding and acceptance for teachers and their students of the approach to learning through drama. Two preschool teachers and their twenty-six students in Chiayi City, Taiwan, are involved in this thesis. In the study the researcher was a reflective practitioner, taking on the multiple roles of teacher, co-researcher and participant. Over twelve weeks, the researcher collected data through observation of drama sessions in a preschool classroom, interviews with the classroom teachers, students, parents and school director, and collection of journals, documents, photos and students’ work. This thesis illustrates details of the nature of implementing a new educational drama approach and the importance of discussion in drama activities. Several techniques and the teachers’ involvement in the drama sessions were categorised and considered as key factors which had effects on drama practice in the classroom. The study found that a drama-based learning approach was applicable in a Taiwanese preschool classroom. This approach was successfully applied once participants found their confidence with the newly introduced drama activities. The teachers and students used their prior drama experience to adopt a new approach and develop an individual drama-based learning style within the thematic curriculum. Based on this study, a new drama-based learning approach was formed and four-phase drama implementation practice was identified to describe the process of a fully developed educational drama approach in a Taiwanese pre-school. Several challenges that arose from the drama implementation and the factors that might influence or cause these challenges are revealed in this thesis. The local context was found to be an important consideration for teachers when implementing drama in their curriculum. The culture, education system and policy of the Taiwanese society influenced schools and drama practitioners. A key finding is that balancing traditional, social and educational values and Western drama education theories is important for the development of drama pedagogy in early childhood education in Taiwan.
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ItemBigger, better brains: neuroscience, music education and the pre-service early childhood and primary (elementary) generalist teacher( 2012)Since the early 1990s, there has been an enormous amount of research into the ways in which music listening and music training can improve our understanding of the structural and functional aspects of the human brain. As research in this interdisciplinary field, known as neuromusical research, advanced, it was also discovered that formal music training may have significant effects on brain development. As this is a relatively new field of research, the findings from these studies have remained predominantly in the area of neuroscience and have not been widely disseminated to educators or applied to educational practice. This thesis initially aimed to explore the possible applications of these findings in music education practice. It was then modified, due to the outcomes of the literature review, to examine the effects of these findings on the values that pre-service generalist primary (elementary) teachers hold towards music education. This thesis consisted of two interrelated studies. Study A mapped the current neuromusical research literature related to the effects of formal music training and summarised the significant findings to date. The mapping methodology included a four-stage process to determine the breadth of the field and identify categories, connections, correlations and contradictions across the findings. Study A revealed that neuromusical research findings are not advanced enough to be confidently applied to music education practices, which indicated the need to modify the initial focus of the thesis. This resulted in Study B, which consisted of a quasi- experimental quantitative study to measure the possible impact of neuromusical research findings on the perceptions of music education held by pre-service generalist primary (elementary) teachers. This study took the form of a ten-week teaching intervention with a pre- and post-test survey, and the resultant data was analysed for changes in values towards music education. Study B revealed that the values held by the participant group towards music education improved significantly after the teaching intervention. Furthermore, the experiment group, who were exposed to the neuromusical research findings, had more positive values than the control group in the majority of measures. Exposure to the neuromusical research findings was shown to affect the experiment group participants’ values in a number of ways: they indicated a higher level of confidence in the delivery of music education, rated music education at a higher level of importance in the curriculum, used higher levels of critical thinking and educational philosophy to justify the value of music education and performed better in their assessment items. This study has shown that exposure to the neuroscientific and aesthetic benefits of music education can positively influence the values pre-service generalist teachers hold towards the discipline. This is worthy of further research, as it could help improve the rate and quality of the delivery of music education by generalist teachers when they enter the profession.
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ItemPolicy, theory and practice in early childhood curriculum design and implementation: a study of one Australian state: Victoria( 2003)This thesis seeks to identify how and who informs the state-funded preschool curriculum program for four-year-old children in Victoria, Australia. The study took place over a one year period, and involved interviewing nine officials, eight academics and twenty seven preschool teachers regarding their beliefs and espoused theories about the preschool curriculum in relation to policy, theory and practice. Twelve of the teachers interviewed were invited to participate further in the study, so that the relationship between their espoused theories and practices could be determined. This part of the study involved field visits and this provided a means of collecting data through direct observation using the Framework of Perspectives and Descriptions of Practice (Raban et aI., 2003a, 2003b), a tool designed by the Early Childhood Consortium at The University of Melbourne. Other means of data collection included informal discussions with teachers, and collecting and analysing different documents. The paradigm for this research study was predominantly qualitative but combined some quantitative data. This approach was incorporated into the design of the study because the nature of the investigation demanded a holistic and naturalistic approach. Multiple sources of data collection also helped to improve the reliability and validity of the findings, by converging lines of enquiry. This comprehensive approach meant that appropriate comparisons and contrasts could be made using numerical data, and this required the inclusion of some quantitative techniques. The findings of this study reveal a strong need for curriculum guidelines to be reconceptualised to reflect current understandings about young children's learning and development. The need for greater depth in a curriculum framework was evident, not only in relation to how children learn but regarding content and guidelines for appropriate goals for children. These views were also consistent with beliefs and understandings about the two existing curriculum documents for four-year-old children in funded preschool programs, in the year before compulsory schooling. These two documents are the Early Childhood Curriculum Guidelines 3 - 5 Year Olds (Department of Health and Community Services, 1991), and the Preschool Quality Assessment Checklist (Department of Human Services, 1996b). The overwhelming consensus was that both documents had little or no influence on preschool practices in Victoria. This study also found that stakeholders held similar views and understandings about the importance for preschool teachers to know about curriculum theories and pedagogical practices. However, the findings revealed that 83% of preschool teachers' practices were not congruent with their espoused theories. This study concludes by addressing further research issues and recommendations for policy-makers, academics and preschool teachers, in order to foster high quality preschool programs for children in Victoria.
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ItemExpeditions, travels and journeys: reconceptualising teaching and learning about indigenous Australians in the early childhood curriculum( 2004)This thesis aimed to explore the terrain of early childhood educator's inclusion of Indigenous Australian peoples and cultures within their curriculum practice. Within this it was anticipated that these explorations would draw from early childhood reconceptualist literature to explore and trouble understandings of curriculum theory and practice. It was also anticipated that my research companions and I would use our beginning understandings of postcolonial theory to theorise, explore and disrupt our constructions and understandings of Indigenous Australian peoples and cultures that were based on the colonial understandings and discourse circulating within Australia and our local communities and that influenced our curriculum practices. In order to explore and disrupt this curriculum practice, my research companions and I set off on an action research journey. We travelled and journeyed within monthly meetings over one year as we located and explored curriculum practice. Action research provided the maps for this journey as we attempted to explore the curricula practices of my companions and locate and explore the issues and challenges that arose as they attempted to disrupt this practice and find reconceptualised ways towards inclusion of Indigenous peoples and cultures. Throughout this journey however, while curriculum practice was located and explored and changes to this practice occurred at superficial levels, discussions around how the reconceptualising of this practice was limited and constrained by the influences of colonial discourse upon our personal understandings of Indigenous peoples and cultures was avoided. As I travelled back into the research meetings after a prolonged absence from the research journey, I became more aware of the silences that existed within our travels that enabled us to resist change in our practices around inclusion of Indigenous peoples and cultures in ways that opened spaces for this inclusion in equitable and respectful ways. I journeyed again through postcolonial theory and while this provided me with important and useful waymarks in which to locate and understand the research travels and moments within it, this theory did not provide me with pathways to explore the resistances. Early childhood reconceptualist literature also provided and guided my reflections on curricula practice in important ways, however, similar to my struggles with postcolonial theory, did not provide for waymarks to understand and locate the silences within the research travelling group. Silences that ensured discussion of personal understandings of Indigenous people and how these understandings were constructed was avoided. Within my searching of alternate theories and ways of exploring the terrain of this research journey, I stumbled across whiteness theories and found that the silences in the research could be located, positioned and explored through and within these theories and understandings. The thesis journey then followed white pathways that led into explorations of whiteness within the research and made it possible to see how both the research companions and myself had constructed ourselves, Indigenous Australian peoples and curricula theory and practice through and within these white understandings. As I located and explored my experiences through narrative and mapped and traced whiteness within the research travels and journeys, it became possible to view how strategies of whiteness operated to discourage the explorations and locating of our personal within our professional understandings. Given this, the possibilities for shifts in personal understandings, and as a consequence, professional and curricula practice, were limited and constrained within this journey into reconceptualising Indigenous inclusion in early childhood curriculum. The journeying within this thesis into reconceptualising early childhood curriculum around Indigenous inclusion and the drawing from both postcolonial and whiteness theories, however, has resulted in more complex understandings of how this work could take place. Mapping postcolonial viewpoints and waymarks and tracing white viewpoints and waymarks within these can allow early childhood researchers and educators to view how these discourses intersect and overlap to silence Indigenous Australian peoples and cultures as well as work to avoid and limit discussion and awareness within white communities about the existence of prejudice and discrimination. Further, the effects of these colonial and white discourses on both personal understandings and the influence of these on curriculum practices aimed at including Indigenous peoples and cultures can be uncovered, located, explored and disrupted in order to create spaces and places for Indigenous voices within early childhood curricula practice.
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ItemRe-imagining professional learning in early education( 2007)This project grew out of my desire to realise an emancipatory vision in my practice of teacher professional learning in early education. Most of the professional learning for early education teachers in New Zealand is designed to assist the implementation of policy, and with broad trends such as standardisation and evidence-based practice dominating political agendas, the space for alternatives is limited. There is growing concern by some with the continuing positivist influence on professional learning which prioritizes technical training over critical inquiry and dialectical debate. Despite this, there is very little research questioning these trends; or seeking ways to work differently with teachers towards social justice. The main aim of this project was therefore to examine professional learning and the inter-related themes of knowledge, the learner, and change from a critical pedagogical perspective, using poststructuralist feminist theory and the work of Foucault to do so. Action research was chosen as the methodology because this is most consistent with the critical pedagogical principles underpinning this project. In keeping with poststructuralist feminist theory and the work of Foucault, action research was reconceptualised within postmodernism and many of the normally accepted conventions of modernist research were therefore challenged and re-defined. There were no attempts made to produce certain and universal answers, or to prove the findings valid through methods such as triangulation. Instead, the aim was to present multiple perspectives, including the contradictory and uncertain. The researcher was not positioned as objective but as wholly present, and the subjectivities, contradictions and challenges experienced because of this were illuminated, not hidden. Moreover, a postmodern stance meant that findings were presented as partial, provisional, and local. To achieve the research aims I worked with seven early education teachers in New Zealand over a period of 2 ½ years, meeting with them both individually and as a group. In group sessions we discussed and debated many educational issues; some raised by teachers and some introduced by me. These sessions were an opportunity to engage on a dialectical level with the discourses shaping beliefs and practices. Most of the data came from these fragmented and discontinuous conversations, and this data was used to examine how power, knowledge and discourse worked together to shape what was counted as normal and worthwhile for these teachers to know and learn. Because the goal of reconceptualised action research is to understand more about the social order so that this can be transformed, data was used to inform social change during and not just after the project. Poststructuralist feminist theory focused the analysis more specifically on how the women teachers in this project negotiated and manoeuvred in and through the competing discourses to which they had access. Foucault's work on sexuality was used to consider how the problematization of teaching affected what teachers believed to be best practice, and how this shaped their becoming. Additionally, Foucault's work on power and the practices of the self became useful for examining how discourse was regulated, preserved and reproduced throughout this project, and how this sanctioned and silenced what could be spoken and by whom. Together, the work of Foucault and poststructuralist feminist theory offered a different lens with which to question and challenge teacher professional learning in early education. The main argument of this thesis is that professional learning for progressive social change involves much more than technical training. If teachers are to engage in the kind of critical inquiry and dialectical debate necessary for the work of social justice, then current professional learning opportunities need to be challenged. In this project, it was employing a Foucauldian analysis of power to the way I organised and managed time and space that brought the biggest shifts. For me, this involved redefining what I valued in terms of knowledge, the learner and change; and shifting what I prioritised in the time and space given to learning. As a result I more actively and intentionally sought to disrupt privileged truths and to create experimental learning spaces where learners could cross borders into the unfamiliar and unsafe. In these spaces both beliefs and practices were unsettled and learners were invited to become otherwise; and when they did, the change was transformational. The following pages share with the reader how this happened. Applying a poststructuralist feminist and Foucauldian analysis to teacher professional learning provided a way for me to re-imagine how teacher professional learning in early education might be a force for progressive social change. This thesis highlights the possibilities presented by such an analysis and challenges others to consider professional learning in early education differently.