A more-than-social movement: The post-human condition of quality in the early years

Abstract

This article explores quality in early childhood education by de-elevating the importance of the human subject and experience, and heightening instead a focus on and tensions with the posthuman. The argument traces the intricate web of 'qualities' woven throughout entanglements of subjects, objects and things that constitute what is referred to as 'the early years sector'. The strike through the social in this post-human condition exposes critical concerns about the 'problem' of quality, and foregrounds the urgency of rupturing the status quo. Dislodged from the perceived comfort and safety of human control and determination, quality in the speculative state of the more-than-social movement can expect no conclusion. Instead, the (re)configuration of the early years sector as a more-than-social movement compels a rethinking of the dominance of human-centric philosophies. By repositioning Kristeva's semiotic subject-in-process and Havel's subject positionings within automatisms, this analysis inserts 'non-human-being' and 'multiple beings-times' into the 'problem with quality'. In the early childhood sector, these ruptures create generative possibilities of quality entanglements with and beyond the human.

Teachers’ voice, power and agency: (un)professionalisation of the early years workforce

“…A comprehensive examination of international views on professionalism exceeds the scope of this article, and has been well documented elsewhere in relation to european, other Western and non-Western countries (Arndt and Tesar 2016b;Miller, Dalli, and Urban 2012;Moss 2013;Osgood 2006). As one example, the New Zealand context is indicative of the possibilities, diversity and uncertainty arising in contemporary early years policy perspectives, and demonstrates that the tensions of professionalism and the professional identity of the early years workforce are not unique to Slovakia.…”

Seeking space for entanglements with young children in immanent material relationality

“…She cannot, however, readily escape the requirement to ensure success in terms of what matters to neoliberalism.Whilst finalising this paper, Ian presented a version of it to colleagues at his own institution.One colleague suggested practitioners should refuse to negotiate with the requirements of regulatory frameworks and agencies where they believe it is not in the best interests of children and where it is the requirements that need to change. In a similar vein,Arndt and Tesar (2016, Early Years : an international research journal in the late afternoon light, a breeze, the sound of laughter'(Davies, 2014,10), is an accountability culture whose agential cuts 'account' primarily for cognitive and scientific ways of understanding and, in the measuring, makes these what matter. AsHaraway (2016, 12) says 'it matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties'.…”

Editorial

“…At the same time, inter- and intra-related contingencies construct conceptions of learners, of human–nature interplays and interspecies relationships (Haraway, 2007; Taylor, 2013). These entangled affective, inter-corporeal and moving relationships and modes of existence within specific milieus, what Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) might express as assemblages, or networks of people, materials and matters, offer possibilities for reconceptualising policy in the contemporary globalised, anthropocentric era, where learning spaces and places are crucially enmeshed with the geographies and politics of worldly ecological crises, survival and constructions of ‘quality’ education (Arndt and Tesar, 2016; Latour, 2014). Spaces and places represent the structures and securities as well as the anxieties and symbolic stasis of national and international quality and achievement benchmarks (OECD, 2013; Siraj, 2008), professional ethics (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005) and teacher education standards.…”