Waldorf education, an alternative pedagogy imported to the USA from Germany in 1921, is rarely researched yet popularly conceptualized as a space of unusual educational freedom and creativity. However, viewed systematically through the lens of critical ethnography and discourse analysis, the Waldorf approach is quite the opposite, governed by rigid routines and adult control of children's bodies, activities, and language. Drawing upon the critical sociology of childhood and combining observational and interview data from a nine-month ethnography, I argue that Waldorf (...) education's central tenet of ‘protecting childhood’ is fundamentally about adult control and a deficit notion of young children. Specifically, I use critical discourse analysis to illuminate how pronominal use in the teacher's discourse serves to justify her authority and deficit constructions of child development. The article concludes by considering the ways Waldorf education might be made more egalitarian by incorporating multiple conceptions of child development in its pedagogical practice. (shrink)

This article theorizes and exemplifies reconceptualized teaching practices, both in early childhood education 1 and in a couple of programs within the new Swedish Teacher Education . 2 These programs are tightly knit to the last 12 years of reconceptualized early childhood education practices in and around Stockholm, built on deconstructive, co‐constructive, and re‐constructive principles, inspired by poststructural and feminist poststructural theories. The aim is foremost to work towards a dissolution and/or transgression of the modernist theory‐practice binary that dominates ECE (...) and teacher education practices, where theory is meant to be applied to practice. Student teachers, as well as pre‐school teachers, use what I have conceptualized as deconstructive talks, as a possibility of making visible the dominant discourses of childhood, identity, learning, play, and gender in the performed and documented teaching practices. In teacher education, students’ narratives are also deconstructed. The aim is to transgress teaching‐as‐usual; i.e. dominant and normative ways of thinking and acting in teaching and learning situations. I will suggest an ethics of ‘resistance’, affirmation and becoming, inspired by Derridean deconstructionist thinking, as a professional attitude and reflexive mode for teachers, teacher students and teacher educators. (shrink)

This paper critically engages with the theme of ‘process over product’—a theme that is argued to be increasingly problematised as an influential narrative in the construction and transmission of a philosophy of early education. The importance of producing children of ‘competence’ through appropriate educational processes is associated with assumptions regarding what counts as an appropriate educational journey for children before they reach school age. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, and Jean‐François Lyotard, this paper considers the purpose and tensions (...) of articulating process as more important than product in early childhood. It is argued that the articulation of the child as a particular kind of process‐oriented player leads to an uncritical acceptance of technologies of governing the child. Furthermore, discourse asserting the importance of processes of play reveals a crisis in understanding what it means to be a player, and what the purpose of the process of play might be. Process contributes to a narrow understanding of a performative purpose of play as a processing of information. A role of the educator, this paper argues, is then to critically engage with the transmission of the theme of process. (shrink)

Despite the multiplicity of constructions of childhood in various disciplines, the prevalent view is that children are incompetent in the sense of lacking reason, maturity, or independence. In this paper, I first examine how this dominant view is constructed in the fields of philosophy and psychology, highlighting the perspectives of Plato, Aristotle, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and Jean Piaget. Then, following Jacques Derrida who conceives justice as a source of meaning for deconstruction, I deconstruct several of the dominant constructions (...) and argue that they do not do children justice. To return justice to childhood, I suggest that childhood should be regarded as a self-contained state with distinctive features that are worthy of consideration in their own right rather than as an incomplete state of incompetence relative to adulthood that is considered a complete state of humans, while adulthood should be regarded as a never-ending process of becoming mature that includes rather than excludes childhood. Moreover, I suggest that both the absolute denial of adult rights to children and the naturalization of childhood in developmental psychology as a biologically determined and culturally universal stage of irrationality should be challenged. (shrink)

Images of brains circulate today as rationales for decision-making and selectivity in policies, curriculum, preservice teacher education and inservice professional development. The excitement over brain-based research, its visual reach and authorizing role accompanies longstanding debates in which the status attributed to biology, physiology and allied psychological approaches has been considered prejudicial. This article traces a series of dislocations in the linkages forged between discourses of vision and epistemic authorization, and how they still inhere in contemporary debates over brain imaging. The (...) critical history that the article offers within the general framework of Visual science and technology studies requires questioning some of the core tenets of visual culture, including what gets to count as the visual, ‘its’ role in legitimation, and the primacy assigned to looking and observation as strategies of truth-production. (shrink)

This article seeks to contribute new perspectives to the ontology and epistemology of preschool science education by exploring the idea of using everyday verbs, rather than nouns, to discern possibilities for science learning in preschool. Herein, the author merges empirical examples from preschools with findings from research on children's noun and verb learning and posthumanist perspectives on matter and concepts. What comes out of the exploration is a radical way of viewing and knowing the world. The verbs trigger a shift (...) from an object-oriented view of the world to seeing action and non-tangible processes and phenomena in one's surroundings. Further, the verbs highlight the potential science learning that emerges in action and in child–matter relations, opening up to preschool science pedagogies that go beyond subjective/objective and concrete/abstract binaries. (shrink)