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- Lindgren, Therese, et al.
(författare)
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On the Educable Child : Orphans of Our Common Worlds
- 2018
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Traditionally, the school pupil has been regarded as an important actor, both in the preservation of society and in encountering predicted outcomes of the future. Today, even the youngest children are included in the educational project, fabricating 1-5-year-olds as universal pathfinders for the somewhat conflicting mission of creating both economic growth and sustainable development (European Commission, 2010). Considering this process, it is worth examining how the young child is articulated as an educable subject within the framework of dominating perspectives in the ECEC field. We do so by focusing on two contrasting discursive movements: the policy-driven social economic and the philosophically inclined posthumanist discourses. These discourses provide seemingly opposing basic assumptions about the subject within the same educational context, that is, early education. Yet, education is accentuated in both discourses as the single most important factor in handling contemporary and future global economic, social and ecological crisis. In what many scholars, as well as educational policy actors, call a precarious time long-term challenges such as globalisation and the pressure on resources are intensified (e.g. Malone, Truong & Gray, 2017; Taylor & Giugni, 2012; European Commission, 2010). In Early Childhood Education policy, the child figures as a social, economic and political project, mirroring both the existing society and current political endeavours in trying to control the outcome of the future. Recurring in the history of the young institutionalised child is the idea that the child can be emancipated and released from a future predestined by unfavourable background conditions (connected to culture and socioeconomic environment), through education. This assuming that children will participate in education early on, which is why the goal of providing preschool activities for all children (even when the economic or the social incentives are missing) is prominent in the international education policy for younger children (Nagazawa, Peters & Swadener, 2014). This idea of the educable child focuses on individual cognition and receptivity in relation to predefined subject knowledge, where education is the “intervention” that captures political intentions and expectations (Eurostat, 2017) through, what we call, a social economic discourse. The social economic discourse is not uniform but contains several different intentions within the governing field of education, which together produce a particular subject: the entrepreneur, ready to invest in her/himself and in the future (Bacchi, 2009). However, the social economic discourse, albeit historically dominant within the ECEC field, has not been unopposed. The emergence of critical pedagogies and the growing interest in the sociology of childhood in the 1980s and 90s, offered alternatives to the developmentalist and social economic view on the child. In the wake of these movements, posthumanist theory has gained an increasing influence in early education research at large, and in the ESD field in particular. According to the proponents of posthumanism, in order to thrive and survive we (as humans) need to re-evaluate our position in the world by realising the complex relational nature of existence. In this endeavour, early education becomes crucial and posthumanist theory is proposed as an invitation to reconsider the humanist notion of “human” through the child (Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Taylor, Pacini-Ketchabaw and Blaise, 2012). By studying the terms and conditions of the social economic and posthumanist discourses, we examine what is represented as being at stake (e.g. growth, competitiveness, the environment and not least human survival) and offer a critical reflection on the different, but surprisingly consistent, articulations of the educable young child.
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- Lindgren, Therese, et al.
(författare)
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Orphans of Our Common Worlds
- 2019
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Ingår i: Educational Theory. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 0013-2004 .- 1741-5446. ; 69:3, s. 283-303
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this article, Therese Lindgren and Magdalena Sjöstrand Öhrfelt compare two discourses that have been influential in the field of early education: the social‐economic and the posthumanist. Studying how the young educable child is articulated in these seemingly contradictory discourses, Lindgren and Sjöstrand Öhrfelt have found that the discourses not only overlap, but, to some extent, they also reinforce each other. Both discourses depict the future as precarious, and along with identifying deficiencies of our time, they seek to justify the need for early intervention in terms of education. The young child is portrayed, on the one hand, as not‐yet‐realized human capital and, on the other, as a site for change and new beginnings. That is, the child figures as the key to a better and more sustainable world. In both discourses, early childhood education and care (ECEC) is depicted as an emancipating project, detaching the child from the child's social and cultural contexts and historical past, making the young educable child an “orphan.”
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- Sjöstrand Öhrfelt, Magdalena, 1967-
(författare)
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Export och import av den svenska förskolemodellen via transnationell utbildningspolicy
- 2019
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Ingår i: Utbildning och Demokrati. - : Örebro universitet. - 1102-6472 .- 2001-7316. ; 28:1, s. 29-53
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The purpose of this article is to discuss how the Swedish preschool’s role has changed over the last twenty years, and how this change has been influenced by transnational education policy. Through text analysis and focus on key strategies and concepts that describe problems and solutions (Bacchi 2012), I have found a prominent intertextuality in transnational and national education policy, leading to significant discursive displacements. Sweden, by working with a cohesion model that combines care and learning, has now embraced a modified version of its own model, influenced by dominant transnational economics-oriented organizations. The concept of the vulnerable child works as a legitimizing mechanism.
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- Sjöstrand Öhrfelt, Magdalena, 1967-
(författare)
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Ord och inga visor : konstruktioner av förskolebarnet i kunskapsekonomin
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Historically, changes in preschool policy have been legitimized in relation to ideas about the preschool child and the various problems that the education of this child is supposed to be able to “solve”. From an early age, children have been considered the most effective tool for dealing with a variety of social, economic or environmental issues of central importance for maintaining and developing society.Against this background, the purpose of this thesis is to examine representations of the preschool child in different policy texts (textbooks, research- and educational policy) related to changing requirements and targets affecting contemporary Swedish preschools. Discursive constructions of the preschool child are considered as important central aspects, used to legitimize political reforms in accordance with pedagogical ideas and prevailing social contexts. The thesis focuses on the tensions within contemporary constructions of the preschool child in the so-called “knowledge economy”: i.e. the tensions between a competent child, who is both able and willing to take advantage of education, and a “newcomer” – the vulnerable child – in need of obtaining the benefits of education in order to be able to cope with the future.The simultaneously competent and vulnerable preschool child is thus an efficiently designed target for the interests of economic transnational organizations viewing education mainly in terms of human capital development, as well as an important factor for economic competitiveness.In the thesis’ final analysis, I study how the OECD, EU and IEA are developing methods for measuring and evaluating the results of preschool education, with the intention of being able to "streamline" it by finding universally successful concepts that are both cost-effective and of high quality. The construction of the preschool child as simultaneously competent and vulnerable is used to legitimize shifts in power over the definition of the Swedish preschool agenda, the fundamental ideas of what preschool is about, what its aims are, and for whom it is intended. As these ideas are disguised as being the result of supposedly "objective" forces far from the ideological contradictions of the political sphere, a critical discussion concerning the goals and aims of early childhood education becomes almost impossible to achieve.
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