Beyond a logic of quality: Opening space for material-discursive practices of ‘readiness’ in early years education

Abstract

This article is an exploration of the possibilities encountered through shifting from a 'logic of quality' to a 'space of meaning-making' within early years education. Focusing on ideas of 'readiness', this discussion aims to challenge normative understandings that relate this concept to the predictable achievement of fixed goals and outcomes. This article approaches 'quality' as a particular form of logic and seeks to explore new directions in thought and practice opened by shifting into a space of 'meaning-making'. Aspects of new materialist thought are entangled in this space of meaning-making, creating opportunities for renewed understandings and practices of 'readiness'. Binaries of human/material and discourse/matter are problematized with the intention of unsettling dominant constructions of 'readiness' as an independently representable and individualized identity. The article concludes by exploring an alternative understanding of 'readiness' as a material-affective relation between bodies (both material and human). Situated through a self-reflexive example from an early years setting in England, it is argued that entangling an attention to materiality within a space of meaning-making creates space to challenge the status quo, creating the potential for new ways of understanding experiences and happenings in early years contexts.

Conducting Case Study Research to Address the Continued Crises: A Process of Learning to Employ Decolonial Perspectives to Produce a Flourishing Academic Lifeworld

“…Moreover, I reiterate St. Pierre (2016) point that “the empiricism we practice assumes a founding, sensing, meaning-making individual separate from what it senses, and that assumption enables troubling binary oppositions” that allow the dynamics of crises to remain unchanged (p. 43). To move forward, be it in framing our work, collecting data to investigate our research questions, and/or analyzing what we found (e.g., C. P. Brown, 2021), I make clear to the students that we, as researchers, must “maintain a stance of constant critical questioning, never allowing ourselves to be too comfortable with the landscape we create, or for our practices and understandings to become taken for granted as part of the status quo” within the research process (Evans, 2016, p. 75). To remain critical while being uncomfortable with our research requires us to question constantly how our work, be it in the process of conducting case study or in sharing our findings, might privilege one group and disenfranchise another at any step in this process (Derrida, 2001; Foucault, 1977, 2006; Guba & Lincoln, 1981).…”

Integrating an Electronic Textbook on a Foreign Language into the M.E.S.-System

“…-prevalence of illustrative intermedia material over text, in contrast to the traditional printed textbook format (Ahlrichs and Macgilchrist, 2017); -the use of multimedia capabilities integrated into the content aspect of the content of individual modules: podcasts, audio fragments, video clips, animation, etc. (Kordes, 2014;Krasovitskaya and Bazhanov, 2019); -the presence of hyperlinks providing a nonlinear branched structure of the content of the modular organization of the program material (Gerasimenko, 2020); -quick "feedback" thanks to built-in test and control tasks, exercises with the possibility of self-monitoring and assessment (Gerasimenko, 2020); -simplicity and convenience of the teacher's creative use of interactive audiovisual and textual information of the basic and additional sections of each module (Evans, 2016); -maximum differentiation and individualization of the process of mastering a foreign language in the digital environment of an interactive software and methodological complex (DeRosa and Robinson, 2017).…”

The Map as Object: Working Beyond Bounded Realities and Mapping for Social Change

“…Students provide essential information in the way schools impact them both directly and indirectly. YPAR offers a framework for research that values that knowledge (Burke et al, 2016;Cammarota, Romero, & Stovall, 2014;Evans, 2016). Partnering with youth, whose voices are traditionally marginalised, not only values their understanding and experiences but provides opportunity to create a counter narrative.…”