scholarly journals From South to North in the globalised world of early childhood education and care: varied national and local responses in selected countries

Pedagogika ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Branislav Pupala ◽  
Ondrej Kaščák

This article analyses the neoliberal transformation of ECEC in five selected countries (Germany, Slovakia, Indonesia, Nepal, and Kenya). Both the Global South and the Global North are represented. The countries were selected either because of the authors’ involvement in research in the respective country or because of their long-term personal experience of that particular system of ECEC. The knowledge the authors acquired enabled them to delve deeper into the question of the point at which ECEC systems encounter neoliberal education policy and to describe the different ways in which the countries have adapted to the new policies. The article shows that neoliberal education policies require different types of adaptation and that these may have very different effects on the system of ECEC – from a change in concept to system convergence and practical resistance or total governance of the ECEC sector. The article contributes to a more granular understanding of the effect of the economising discourse on the ECEC sector. Keywords: ECEC, social investment approach, EU, Germany, Slovakia, Indonesia, Kenya, Nepal, Global North, Global South

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Salazar Pérez ◽  
Cinthya M. Saavedra

In this chapter, we call for onto-epistemological diversity in the field of early childhood education and care (ECEC). Specifically, we discuss the need to center the brilliance of children and communities of color, which we argue, can be facilitated by foregrounding global south perspectives, such as Black and Chicana feminisms. Mainstream perspectives in ECEC, however, have been dominantly constructed from global north perspectives, producing a normalized White, male, middle-class, heterosexual version of childhood, where minoritized children are viewed as deficit. Although there have been important challenges to the discourse of a normalized, deficit child, we argue much of this work has remained grounded in global north positionings, which separate theory from the lived realities of children of color. As such, we introduce Black and Chicana feminisms as global south visions to transform approaches to research and pedagogy in ECEC and, in turn, disrupt inequities.


Author(s):  
Margarita León

The chapter first examines at a conceptual level the links between theories of social investment and childcare expansion. Although ‘the perfect match’ between the two is often taken for granted in the specialized literature as well as in policy papers, it is here argued that a more nuance approach that ‘unpacks’ this relationship is needed. The chapter will then look for elements of variation in early childhood education and care (ECEC) expansion. Despite an increase in spending over the last two decades in many European and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, wide variation still exists in the way in which ECEC develops. A trade-off is often observed between coverage and quality of provision. A crucial dividing line that determines, to a large extent, the quality of provision in ECEC is the increasing differentiation between preschool education for children aged 3 and above and childcare for younger children.


Human Arenas ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niina Rutanen ◽  
Raija Raittila ◽  
Kaisa Harju ◽  
Yaiza Lucas Revilla ◽  
Maritta Hännikäinen

AbstractThis article continues the discussions of relational ethics put forward in Human Arenas in “Arena of Ethics” (Hilppö et al., 2019). Our aim in this article is to explore and discuss relational ethics, as ethics-in-action, in a long-term research relationship with a child. Our question is: How is ethics-in-action negotiated during critical incidents in the construction of a research space that involves a long-term research relationship with a young child? This article is based on a research project that focused on children’s transitions in early childhood education and care (ECEC). These transitions include the transition from home care to ECEC as well as transitions from child groups or settings to other ECEC groups or settings, and the transition to pre-primary education. We apply a particular lens to the corpus of data, analyzing and reflecting critical incidents vis-à-vis a negotiation of ethics-in-action during the construction of our research space, which involved a long-term research relationship with a child. Our results show that critical incidents in our study’s negotiation of ethics-in-action included (a) the focus child’s spontaneous contributions to the study’s interviews, (b) interdependencies between the child and diverse researchers, and (c) the child’s evolving expertise in data collection, which restructured our study’s research space. We conclude that ethical questions cannot be separated from the mutually constituted relationships or socio-spatial context in where they emerge; thus, they are relationally and spatially embedded.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (7) ◽  
pp. 637-640 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merete Moe ◽  
Anne B. Reinertsen

A threshold situation is a kind of crisis of, for example, deteriorating health. Fall 2014, a project was conducted, focusing on writing for well-being with a former employee and leader at an Early Childhood Education and Care, now on long-term sick leave. Here is her story and poem; her writings/Sis. Our stories and theory/practice/data/interpretive poems; our writings/Merete and Anne: Our companionship, company, and compassion: Sis/Merete/Anne.Com . We aim at Deleuze and Guattarian safespace writing. In modern working life participation, empowerment, governance, and self-leadership is considered vital for creating good psychosociological work environments. Foucault’s concept governmentality aims to elucidate how we are created as subjects, looking at how we are governed by others and by ourselves according to norms and expectations in organizations, society, and from ourselves. We think with poetry to open up, explore, and fabulate. We call it poeticalization and storying and work and worlds and words or rather work/world/word/making/melding/mattering/Sis/Merete/Anne: www.mmm.com .


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ximena Galdames Castillo

In accordance with the white patriarchal foundations of the early childhood education field of the global north, Chile’s early childhood education has a colonial and androcentric origin which has been left unquestioned. Reviews of Chilean early childhood education omit/ignore other socio-political agendas, such as class, gender, and ethnicity that still shape the current landscape. This article reconstructs the foundations of Chilean early childhood education through a reconceptualized mestiza history of the present. This approach challenges the neutrality of Chilean early childhood education and seeks to reclaim it by examining the underpinning regimes of truth that re-colonize children and women moving within and inhabiting the field. Analyses show how two main strands shape(d) early childhood education and care: social (and currently, multiagency) policies, and curriculum and pedagogy. The relationship between these strands has been recursive and contradictory and overlapping over time. However, their mixture creates an illusion of literal transposition as a syncretic effect, which under close examination exposes its fault lines.


Focaal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (77) ◽  
pp. 76-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Newberry

Early childhood education and care programs in Indonesia developed rapidly in the aftermath of the 2006 earthquake centered south of Yogyakarta. The newly empowered self-directed learner at the center of these programs seemed to follow from the emergence of another child in this devastated landscape: the traumatized child in need of healing. The appearance of these images of childhood along with Indonesia’s neoliberal democratization reiterates the long-standing relationship between childhood and rule. Grounded in long-term ethnographic work in the Yogyakarta area, this article traces a conceptual link between the shift to transparent and accountable good governance in post-Suharto Indonesia and the desire to produce a newly transparent childhood ready for intervention. The generative power of history, trauma, and the interior self is contrasted with risk management, nongovernmental governance, and the exteriorization of self and state to challenge the unquestioned good of empowerment and transparency.


2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 657-683 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda A. White

Abstract.This article examines whether current shifts in government spending on early childhood education and care (ECEC) and maternal employment-promoting policies such as maternity and parental leave reveal a paradigm shift toward a social investment strategy in liberal welfare states. It finds that while governments in liberal welfare states increasingly adhere to the rhetoric of social investment focused on lifelong learning and labour activation, their policies and programs exhibit so much variation in goals, instruments and settings related to the family, maternal employment and the child that it is difficult to claim that any new policy approach has taken hold that is indicative of a social investment “paradigm.” Instead, liberal welfare states appear to be becoming even more liberal—in terms of reliance on markets for delivery of social investment goals—at the same time as spending is increasing.Résumé.Cet article examine si les changements actuels des dépenses de gouvernement sur la première éducation d'enfance et le soin (ECEC) et les politiques promouvant emploi maternelles comme la maternité et le congé parental révèlent un changement de paradigme vers une stratégie sociale d'investissement dans les Etats-providences libéraux. Il constate que pendant que les gouvernements dans les Etats-providences libéraux adhèrent de plus en plus à la rhétorique d'investissement social s'est concentré sur l'apprentissage de toute une vie et l'activation de la main-d'œuvre, leurs politiques et programmes exposent tant de variation dans les buts, les instruments et les cadres rattachés à la famille, l'emploi maternel et l'enfant qu'il est difficile de réclamer que n'importe quelle nouvelle approche de politique a attrapé qui est indicatif “d'un paradigme” social d'investissement. Au lieu de cela les Etats-providences libéraux ont l'air de devenir encore plus libéraux – du point de vue de la dépendance aux marchés pour la livraison de buts sociaux d'investissement – en même temps comme les dépenses augmentent.


Focaal ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (83) ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore Powers ◽  
Theodoros Rakopoulos

This introduction posits that austerity is an instantiation of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and thus must be revisited in two ways, involving its historical and geographical rendering. First, anthropological accounts should think of austerity in the long term, providing encompassing genealogies of the concept rather than seeing it as breach to historical continuity. Second, the discipline should employ the comparative approach to bring together analyses of SAPs in the Global South and austerity measures in the Global North, providing a more comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon. We are interested in what austerity does to people’s temporal consciousness, and what such people do toward a policy process that impacts their lives. We find, in this comparative pursuit, instead of Foucauldian internalization, dissent and dissatisfaction.


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