Care and education have deep historical divisions in the Canadian policy landscape: care is traditionally situated as a private, gendered, and a welfare problem, whereas education is seen as a universal public good. Since the early 2000s, the entrenched divide between private care and public education has been challenged by academic, applied and political settings mainly through human capital investment arguments. This perspective allocates scarce public funds to early childhood education and care through a lens narrowly focused on child development outcomes. From the investment perspective, care remains a prerequisite to education rather than a public good in its own right. This chapter seeks to disrupt this neoliberal, human capital discourse that has justified and continues to position care as subordinate to education. Drawing upon the feminist ethics of care scholarship of philosopher Virginia Held, political scientist Joan Tronto, and sociologist Marian Barnes, this chapter reconceptualizes the care in early childhood education and care rooted through four key ideas: (1) Care is a universal and fundamental aspect of all human life. In early childhood settings, young children's dependency on care is negatively regarded as
A critical discourse analysis (CDA) was used to analyze the representation of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in the 2006 federal election in Canada. Guided by Fairclough's approach to CDA, this study analyzed written documents including newspaper articles from The Globe and Mail and The National Post, the policy platforms of the Liberal and Conservative parties, and political speeches from party leaders. Four textual and discourse processes were found to legitimize the 'choice' discourse and contribute to its dominance: conversationalization, nominalization, use of irrealis statements and recontextualization. It is concluded that a fundamental shift in discourse related to political and media discussion of ECEC policy in Canada is needed if progressive policy changes are to take place.
This article explores observations of care practices in interactions between early childhood educators and children in two urban early childhood settings in Ontario. Analysis of these care practices is informed by a feminist ethics of care. Findings show that the care actions of educators were more often instrumental in nature, often incomplete, and/ or interrupted. Children’s experience with and perspectives on their care were not taken into consideration. Structural factors such as staffing levels appeared to interfere significantly with the possibility of care as conceptualized from a feminist ethics of care framework. Practice and policy implications for the absence and presence of an ethics of care in Canadian early childhood settings are discussed.
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