Problematizing the photographic images of pedagogical documentation: A Foucauldian Analysis

<p>Photographic practices and the images they generate play a dominant role in documenting and assessing children’s learning and development in the early childhood education environments of Aotearoa-New Zealand. In the context of pedagogical documentation these visual practices are predominantly enacted through the medium of digital photography, utilized both locally (through assessment documentation) and nationally (through various policy documents). My concerns are in regards to the normalizing and regulatory effects of such visual practices, and how the photographic image is implicated in the construction of particular subjectivities in diverse populations of young children. The revised Aotearoa-New Zealand early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki (2017a) is the first iteration of the national document to include photographic images and thus presents a timely opportunity to engage with questions concerning this contemporary visual politic. By means of addressing these concerns I work within a post-structural epistemological framework, drawing methodological insights from the philosophy of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari. This Rhizomatic epistemology, inspired by both Deleuzio-Guattarian and Foucauldian scholarship, is an experimental mode of inquiry that acts to illuminate, resist and transgress dominant discursive constructs and the subjectivities they produce. Each chapter of this thesis takes the diffuse realm of photographic practices and processes of subjectivity in the context of education as their impetus, making linkages between texts, concepts and the child subject. This thesis suggests that an entanglement of both neoliberal and ‘psy’ rationalities are constitutive of particular visual-discursive practices, which mutually serve individualizing ends and construct particular subjectivities at this point in history. These predominant discourses and the subjectivities they are productive of are perceived to be problematic on the grounds that they place burdensome levels of responsibility on the young citizen and act to erode other educational values such as collective responsibility and community. It is further suggested that these predominant discourses are problematic in the sense that they act to foreclose other ways of thinking and being in educational settings to the effect of limiting other possible subject-positions (thought or unthought) that both child and teacher might come to inhabit within these spaces.</p>

Problematizing the photographic images of pedagogical documentation: A Foucauldian Analysis

<p>Photographic practices and the images they generate play a dominant role in documenting and assessing children’s learning and development in the early childhood education environments of Aotearoa-New Zealand. In the context of pedagogical documentation these visual practices are predominantly enacted through the medium of digital photography, utilized both locally (through assessment documentation) and nationally (through various policy documents). My concerns are in regards to the normalizing and regulatory effects of such visual practices, and how the photographic image is implicated in the construction of particular subjectivities in diverse populations of young children. The revised Aotearoa-New Zealand early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki (2017a) is the first iteration of the national document to include photographic images and thus presents a timely opportunity to engage with questions concerning this contemporary visual politic. By means of addressing these concerns I work within a post-structural epistemological framework, drawing methodological insights from the philosophy of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari. This Rhizomatic epistemology, inspired by both Deleuzio-Guattarian and Foucauldian scholarship, is an experimental mode of inquiry that acts to illuminate, resist and transgress dominant discursive constructs and the subjectivities they produce. Each chapter of this thesis takes the diffuse realm of photographic practices and processes of subjectivity in the context of education as their impetus, making linkages between texts, concepts and the child subject. This thesis suggests that an entanglement of both neoliberal and ‘psy’ rationalities are constitutive of particular visual-discursive practices, which mutually serve individualizing ends and construct particular subjectivities at this point in history. These predominant discourses and the subjectivities they are productive of are perceived to be problematic on the grounds that they place burdensome levels of responsibility on the young citizen and act to erode other educational values such as collective responsibility and community. It is further suggested that these predominant discourses are problematic in the sense that they act to foreclose other ways of thinking and being in educational settings to the effect of limiting other possible subject-positions (thought or unthought) that both child and teacher might come to inhabit within these spaces.</p>

Relationship with a physician in the narratives of children and adolescents hospitalized due to cancer

The key value of the physician-patient relationship has been strongly emphasized in scientific literature for a long time. This relationship impacts significantly the patient’s therapeutic process. In case of children and adolescents suffering from cancer, the relationship with physician is of a specific value due to both the age of such patients and the type of disease. Children and adolescents meet various specialists (physicians) during their treatment; however, they establish a long-term and quite intensive relationship with their treating physician. This relationship is, by definition, most important during intensive and maintenance therapy. The physician’s involvement is indisputable and it is directly related to the therapeutic process and its success. However, what is also extremely important is the physician’s interest in a particular patient and a personalized nature of this relationship: treating physician (subject) – child (subject). The manner in which the physician communicates with and treats his or her patient has a significant impact on the patient’s wellbeing during treatment and afterwards. The relationship with a physician also determines the patient’s subjectivity and self-esteem in later everyday life. The paper presents the results of research focused on the opinions of children and adolescents concerning relationships with their treating physicians. The study was conducted in three institutions which belong to the Polish Paediatric Leukaemia and Lymphoma Study Group. It involved 62 children aged 7–17 years old at different stages of their cancer treatment.

From Text Comprehension to Creative Writing from the Aspect of Cognitive Linguistics

Text comprehension is understood as a social and cultural phenomenon in which it is possible to identify the developmental phases, that is ontogenesis, from the aspect of communicating entity. The age-receptive value, as well as the age-receptive variability of text, is reflected in the texts for children. Works of folk or authorial provenance anticipate the mental dispositions of a child subject. Developing the understanding by children is resulting from formal and content criteria. Understanding – like speech – grows. The supreme level of text comprehension is the improvisation of larger narrative formations: Compared with the primary contact with the text in the form of rhymes, the form is released and the epic breadth of expression increases. The child as authorial subject produces a text that is characterized by such variability of expression values which is contained in the child´s current mental model reached through conventions and receptive experience. The study will demonstrate the expressive value of text using examples of creative writing of children. Methodologically, it relies on the semantic communication model of text and the expressive value of text.

The Reality of Moral Imperatives in Liberal Religion

God has made man with the instinctive love of justice in him,which gradually gets developed in the world …. I do not pretendto understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eyereaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and completethe figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience.And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.Theodore Parker (1853)A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in therevolutions of her … hurryings through the abysses of space, hasbrought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but giftedwith sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity ofjudging all the works of his unthinking mother. [Gradually, asmorality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world begins to befelt, [giving rise to the claim] that, in some hidden manner, theworld of fact is really harmonious with the world of ideals. Thusman creates God, all-powerful and all-good, the mystic unity ofwhat is and what should be.