From Developing Child to Competent Learner: A Genealogical Study of the Kindergarten Child and Progressive Reform in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

Historically through to the present day, early childhood education has been the focus of myriad and potent investments; a persistent, if variously inflected, feature is its reforming and progressive impulse. This thesis offers a history of the kindergarten child in Aotearoa New Zealand in which themes of subjectivity, knowledge, temporality, truth, and freedom are central. The history, a form of genealogy (Foucault 1984), examines two moments of significant early education reform in New Zealand. Analysis of these reforms is anchored by, and extends from, the landmark policy statements of Pre-School Education: Report of the Consultative Committee on Pre-School Educational Services (DOE 1947) and Education to be More: Report of the Early Childhood Care and Education Working Group (DOE 1988).Working with diverse historical sourcestextual, visual, socio-spatial, expert, professional, and practice orientedthe thesis develops a historical account of these reforms and their respective elaboration as self-consciously new and leading-edge practices. It explores the kindergarten child as the subject of changing progressive discourses through analysis of epistemological and affective investments and close examination of practices within what I conceptualize as free-play, developmental pedagogies of freedom (late 1940s and 1950s), and sociocultural learning pedagogies of empowerment (late 1990s and 2000s). The identified pedagogies and their respective conditions of reform are situated in juxtaposed rather than linear temporal relations. That is, I conceptualize them as two differently liberating "timespaces" (Baker 2001, 24), each animated by fervently held understandings of the nature of young children, and what their good education should entail. Engaging a nonbinary and practical understanding of processes of subject formation, I understand the pedagogies, spaces, concepts, materials, and practices under examination as technologies of government and subjectivity, and the forms of naturalfree or empoweredconduct that they presumed and promoted are analysed.Motivated by critical genealogical aims, the thesis seeks to unsettle current certainties and commitments to the truth of the child in early education, a subject who is commonly understood and called forth as a competent, social and culturally diverse learner. Overall, the thesis argues that these reforms and their respective pedagogies have a "double gesture" (Popkewitz 2009, 397), entailing a valorization and promotion of particular forms of liberated ii conduct and work-upon the self, whilst simultaneously foreclosing alternative possibilities.Developing a somewhat anti-progressivist account, the history illuminates the surprisingand often neglected in present-day critiqueforms of caring attention towards children as embodied, affective subjects within mid-century developmental pedagogies. It surfaces, too, the often overlooked essentializing effects of discourses of empowerment, diversity, and competence within recently ascendant learning-framed pedagogies.While il...

The Development of The Flows of Educational Philosophy: Theoretical Concept and Implementation in 21st-Century Learning

“…In other words, educators need to focus on the human being, on the children, and not on the education itself. This educational principle is taken from the progressivism principle as a reaction towards traditional education which emphasizes formal learning and gives less freedom to the students so that the students are not creative and they just follow the education program set by adults (Buchanan, 2018).…”