Navigating the entanglements: Curriculum and assessment priorities in transitioning to school in Aotearoa-New Zealand

<p>This thesis critically examines the curriculum and assessment priorities children encounter as they transition from early childhood to school and the modes of being, doing, knowing, and relating these priorities promote or make difficult. An initial focus on children’s multimodal ways of operating shifted as this study progressed toward a more relational materialist conception of multimodality, drawing on the thinking of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Karen Barad. A key focus became tracing the heterogeneous forces and entities that authorise and prioritise particular constructions of learning and learners. The thesis follows the curriculum and assessment priorities six focus children met with in their last six months at kindergarten and their first six months in a new entrant classroom, and explores how these priorities relate to those of the children and their families. Data drawn on include a range of policy and practice-related documentation, interviews, fieldnotes and video-recorded observations. Excerpts of video are incorporated into the thesis as ‘cases to think with’ about key dimensions of everyday pedagogical activity not well represented by words. While it may be a truism to say children navigate the move from early childhood to school differently, this thesis brings attention to the multiplicity of forces at play in how this move unfolds for particular children. It offers critical insights into the complex ways the global, local and ‘here and now’ specificities operate in entanglement to produce pedagogical priorities and learner-subjectivities. It highlights that the curriculum and assessment priorities for children in this study being/becoming new entrants strongly favoured children who were lingusitically adept, and willing and able to adjust to tightly prescribed classroom normativities, many of which centred around control of the body. This thesis challenges the ongoing privileging of the verbal, arguing for the importance of making space for children’s other modes of being, doing, knowing and relating. It questions the recent narrowing and intensifying emphasis on standards-based assessment and the strongly individualistic, regulatory discourse of self-managing learners. It foregrounds the ways in which transition to school agendas have escalated nationally and internationally and become part of day-to-day curriculum and assessment priorities. On the basis of these findings I call for greater ethical regard for the heterogeneity of children and the capacities they bring and are capable of, including the capacity to engage with ‘real world’ multiplicity and difference-making interconnectivities with human and more-than-human others.</p>

Navigating the entanglements: Curriculum and assessment priorities in transitioning to school in Aotearoa-New Zealand

<p>This thesis critically examines the curriculum and assessment priorities children encounter as they transition from early childhood to school and the modes of being, doing, knowing, and relating these priorities promote or make difficult. An initial focus on children’s multimodal ways of operating shifted as this study progressed toward a more relational materialist conception of multimodality, drawing on the thinking of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Karen Barad. A key focus became tracing the heterogeneous forces and entities that authorise and prioritise particular constructions of learning and learners. The thesis follows the curriculum and assessment priorities six focus children met with in their last six months at kindergarten and their first six months in a new entrant classroom, and explores how these priorities relate to those of the children and their families. Data drawn on include a range of policy and practice-related documentation, interviews, fieldnotes and video-recorded observations. Excerpts of video are incorporated into the thesis as ‘cases to think with’ about key dimensions of everyday pedagogical activity not well represented by words. While it may be a truism to say children navigate the move from early childhood to school differently, this thesis brings attention to the multiplicity of forces at play in how this move unfolds for particular children. It offers critical insights into the complex ways the global, local and ‘here and now’ specificities operate in entanglement to produce pedagogical priorities and learner-subjectivities. It highlights that the curriculum and assessment priorities for children in this study being/becoming new entrants strongly favoured children who were lingusitically adept, and willing and able to adjust to tightly prescribed classroom normativities, many of which centred around control of the body. This thesis challenges the ongoing privileging of the verbal, arguing for the importance of making space for children’s other modes of being, doing, knowing and relating. It questions the recent narrowing and intensifying emphasis on standards-based assessment and the strongly individualistic, regulatory discourse of self-managing learners. It foregrounds the ways in which transition to school agendas have escalated nationally and internationally and become part of day-to-day curriculum and assessment priorities. On the basis of these findings I call for greater ethical regard for the heterogeneity of children and the capacities they bring and are capable of, including the capacity to engage with ‘real world’ multiplicity and difference-making interconnectivities with human and more-than-human others.</p>

Thinking Structurally: A Cognitive Framework for Understanding How People Infer Structural Causes of Inequality

To accurately explain social group inequalities, people must consider structural explanations, which are causal explanations that appeal to societal factors such as discriminatory institutions and policies. Structural explanations are a distinct type of extrinsic explanation—they identify stable societal forces that are experienced by specific social groups. We argue that a novel framework is needed to specify how people infer structural causes of inequality. The proposed framework is rooted in counterfactual theories of causal judgment, positing that people infer structural causes by discerning whether structural factors were “difference-making” for the inequality they observe. Building on this foundation, our framework makes the following novel contributions: First, we propose specific types of evidence that support this inference, and second, we consider the unique contextual, cognitive, and motivational barriers to the availability and acceptance of this evidence. We conclude by exploring how the framework might be applied in future research examining people’s explanations for inequality.

Searching Probabilistic Difference-Making within Specificity

The idea that good explanations come with strong changes in probabilities has been very common. This criterion is called probabilistic difference-making. Since it is an intuitive criterion and has a long tradition in the literature on scientific explanation, it comes as a surprise that probabilistic difference-making is rarely discussed in the context of interventionist causal explanation. Specificity, proportionality, and stability are usually employed to measure explanatory power instead. This paper is a first step into the larger project of connecting difference-making to the interventionist debate, and it starts by investigating whether probabilistic difference-making is contained in the notion of specificity. The choice of specificity is motivated by the observation that both probabilistic difference-making and specificity build on similar underlying intuitions. When comparing measures for both specificity and probabilistic difference-making, it turns out that the measures are not strictly correlated, and so the thesis that probabilistic difference-making is encoded within specificity has to be rejected. Some consequences of this result are discussed as well.

Black-Boxing 101

This chapter breaks down the black-boxing process into three constitutive steps. First, in the framing stage, the explanandum is sharpened by placing the object of explanation in the appropriate context. This is typically accomplished by constructing a frame, a placeholder that stands in for patterns of behavior in need of explanation. Second, the difference-making stage provides a causal explanation of the framed explanandum. This involves identifying the relevant difference-makers, placeholders that stand in for the mechanisms producing these patterns. The final representation stage determines which mechanistic components and activities should be explicitly represented, and which can be idealized or abstracted away. The outcome of this process is a model of the explanandum, a depiction of the relevant portion of the world. This analysis provides the general definition the reader has been looking for. A black box is a placeholder—frame or difference-maker—in a causal explanation represented in a model.

Making a difference in virtue epistemology

Virtue Reliabilism holds that knowledge is a cognitive achievement—an epistemic success that is creditable to the cognitive abilities of the knowing subject. Beyond this consensus, there is much disagreement amongst proponents of virtue reliabilism about the conditions under which the credit-relation between an epistemic success and a person’s cognitive abilities holds. This paper aims to establish a new and attractive view of this crucial relation in terms of difference-making. We will argue that the resulting theory, Difference-Making Virtue Epistemology, can deal with cases of epistemic luck and testimonial knowledge while revealing the common core of knowledge and other achievements.