The promise of the new: genealogies of youth, nation and educational reform in Australia

McLeod, Julie; Wright, Katie

doi:10.1080/00220620.2012.713926

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 9 publications

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“…More specifically, this study contributes to scholarship that studies progressivism in education not only as intellectual, pedagogical, or sociocultural movements, but also as subject forming practices (e.g. McLeod 2014McLeod , 2012. This study has, moreover, made a distinct contribution to such work through attention to epistemological and affective modes of argumentation in progressive reform, illuminating the centrality of morally charged discourses of truth, liberation, and personhood in reforms, a point to which I return below.…”

Section: The Historical Study and Conceptualization Of Progressivismmentioning

confidence: 72%

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

Buchanan

2018

Structuring the Thesis

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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...

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Section: The Historical Study and Conceptualization Of Progressivismmentioning

confidence: 72%

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

Buchanan

2018

Structuring the Thesis

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The ‘Digital’ as Problem and Purpose in Education Policy

Duggan

2019

Education Policy, Digital Disruption and the Future of Work

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The logic of history in ‘gap’ discourse and related research

Rudolph

2016

Aust. Educ. Res.

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The Closing the Gap in Indigenous Disadvantage policy emerged in 2008 following the National Apology to the Stolen Generations. The policy articulates one of its purposes as being to address historical injustices. On the other hand policy reform is naturally oriented to the future in its aims to improve and develop. These temporal tensions are the analytical focus of this article. Through examining the way in which the logic of 'history' is engaged in Australian Indigenous policy and related 'gap' oriented research a range of political effects are illuminated. It is argued that the logic of history is deployed in three key ways: 1) history as over; 2) history as a single presence; 3) history as context. In mapping these different orientations to history in the policy and literature the following questions are asked: how might history be better understood as operating in the present and what sort of transformational possibilities might this afford?

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The promise of the new: genealogies of youth, nation and educational reform in Australia

Cited by 5 publications

References 9 publications

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

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

The ‘Digital’ as Problem and Purpose in Education Policy

The logic of history in ‘gap’ discourse and related research

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