Children’s development, capability approaches and postdevelopmental child: The birth to four curriculum in South Africa

Abstract

This article explores how three well-known conceptual frameworks view child development and how they assume particular figurations of the child in the context of the South African National Curriculum Framework for Children from Birth to Four. This new curriculum is based on a children's rights framework. The capability approaches offer important insights for children's rights advocates, but, like psychosocial theories of child development, assumes a 'becoming-adult view of child', which poses a serious threat to children's right to genuine participation. They also share the exclusive focus on understanding development as located ontologically in the individualised human. In contrast, critical posthumanism queers humanist understandings of child development and reconfigures subjectivity through a radical philosophical decentring of the human. The relevance of this shift for postdevelopmental child in the context of the new South African early years curriculum is threaded throughout the article. A posthuman reconfiguration of child subjectivity moves theory and practice from a focus on assessing the capabilities of individual children in sociocultural contexts to the tracing of material and discursive entanglements that render children capable. This ontoepistemic shift leads to the conclusion that the National Curriculum Framework for Children from Birth to Four requires a fourth theme (with guiding principles), which would express a multispecies relationality and an ethics of care for the human as well as the nonhuman.

Social Norms and Family Child Labor: A Systematic Literature Review

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Inhuman hands and missing child: Touching a literacy event in a Finnish primary school

“…In place of human mastery over a narrowly construed literacy terrain, posthuman theories provide lines of flight, ways to disrupt and break from the narrowness of rutted paths and plug into more complex circuits.In their influential re-reading of New London Group’s (1996) multiliteracies manifesto, Leander and Boldt (2013) point out how the work of NLG is ‘very much an Enlightenment document that expresses the wish that using research, technique, and pedagogy grounded in expert knowledge will enlighten us with the means to create a better social future’ (p. 34). In contrast, posthumanists disrupt the expert/novice binary, developmentalism (Murris, 2019) and unilinear time the NLG’s approach assumes. For example, Leander and Boldt propose an e/mergent, nonrepresentational, embodied and affective alternative to literacy research.…”

Paroxysm: The Problem of the Fist

“…Moves to destabilize dualisms and work more adequately with assemblages, events, entanglements, milieus, multispecies, intra-actions, and ad hoc groupings in the early years are interrogated by scholars such as Rautio (2013), MacRae (2019), Hackett and Somerville (2017), Osgood and Robinson (2019), Murris (2019), Hohti and Tammi (2019), Jones et al (2012), Trafí-Prats (2019), Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al (2019), MacLure (2013a), and Pacini-Ketchabaw and Taylor (2015). These scholars resist preoccupations with the privileged human who can know, represent, and act on the world.…”