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Lunchtime Seminar Series 2010
Seminar 7:
Children’s rights to early education and care: What and whose ‘education’ and ‘care’ for ‘all’: A discussion of social inclusions/exclusions in the discourse of universal children’s and human rights.
The Unesco (2007) and (OECD, 2006) documents related to education and care for ‘all’ arguments for “Education for All” construct healthy child development, child care and early education as universal rights of the young child. Nonetheless, given the influence of global capitalism, and increasingly strong neoliberal ideas related to privatization, efficiency of markets, decentralization, standards, and accountability that are traveling globally, many countries, including the USA, have pushed early education and child care models that may appear ‘standardized,’ and good for ‘all’, but indeed represent a reproduction and production of exclusionary policies, pedagogies, and practices, in the name of social inclusion. My brief presentation and discussion focus on the ways in which social exclusionary ideas and practices are maintained or produced within a universal children’s rights conception. I then speak to a micropolitical (Rose, 1999; Dahlberg & Moss, 2007) perspective that examines the ways in which historically and culturally contingent rights and needs of families, women, and children are and might be reconceptualized. Given the dangerous veil that constrains our reasoning about which ‘all’ we are talking about in need of new education and child care—in standardized , accountable ways, the presentation asks ‘what and whose education and care for all’ is being pushed. Whose voices and ideas are embedded in the pedagogical options and practices that are proposed? Whose ideas and practices are left out of or excluded from the discussion of ‘best practices,’ a developmental curriculum, readiness for school, or care for all. Who is at the table constructing “education and care” for different groups of people, different “humans?” In what ways, when we have parents, children, teachers, different cultural or social groups at the table for policy discussions, do we shape or fabricate different ways of acting, belief, and truths about what education or care is “best,” when, for whom, and where? Some illustrations from the USA—which is struggling over universalist ideas that retain many exclusions---will be presented.
Facilitator: Professor Marianne N. Bloch
Department of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Marianne (Mimi) Bloch has been a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction (as well as Human Development & Family Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for thirty years. Prior to that, she did postdoctoral research in West Africa on women’s work and child care, and taught at several other universities with her focus on cross-cultural and cross-national child care and early education policy. She is one of the founding members of the Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education (RECE) conference. Her research has focused on gender and child care policy, children’s play, cultural histories of American early education/child care, and critical cultural studies of how “science” and evidence frame or govern children, teachers, and families.
When: Wednesday 17th November 1.00-2.00pm
Where: Meeting Room 2, Alica Hoy Building, University of Melbourne
RSVP: Anne Farrelly (annef@unimelb.edu.au) by Friday 12th November