Researching self-evaluation in early childhood education

This study combines the data from three linked research activities which examined how teachers and other practitioners in the Early Years of education (0-8) can improve their practice through evaluating their own work. The major thesis of the research is that the practitioners' observation and research of children's educational interactions and experiences provide effective data both for judging the appropriateness of the curriculum provided and for developing more appropriate ways of providing for learning. Starting with an exploratory pilot stage (Phase One), and a second stage of action research undertaken jointly by the researcher and a number of practitioners (Phase Two), the research proceeded to a third stage (Phase Three) in which it formed a part of a national project in practitioner self-evaluation through action research. Analysis and interpretation of the data from these three research activities highlight aspects of the nature and the requirements of practitioner self-evaluation in the Early Years, and cast light on how educational improvement can be initiated, directed and implemented both by practitioners and by policy makers. In particular, differences between approaches to evaluation are traced to differences in the curriculum model employed, and the important role of observation in self-evaluation and thus in curriculum improvement is shown to be related to the adoption of a developmental approach to the curriculum in the Early Years

Midwife of An-arché: Toward a Poetics of Becoming-with-Woman

This project explores the connections between midwifery and the ethical demands attendant to poetic practice. Through verse and prose, I unfold a figuration of the midwife that traverses the boundaries between Levinasian heteronomy and Deleuzian heteromorphism, and is a constitutive factor in sites of resistance to the biomedical territorialisation of the creative body. Chief archival and methodological components that inform the thesis include: a historiography of childbirth - tracing the development of ‘holistic’ and ‘interventionist’ paradigms, and the ideological underpinnings of the phallocratic takeover of the birthing room in certain Western countries; idiographic insights gathered from dialogues with maternal practitioners and mothers, including residents of The Farm in Tennessee - where I participated in a midwifery workshop week; an experiential inquiry into Holotropic Breathwork - to facilitate access to non-ordinary states of consciousness; and a negotiation between Marxist-feminist and poststructuralist articulations of ethico-political agency. Subject matter ranges from a consideration of the ethical import of the placental economy to the bio-intelligent tissue of the psoas, the banishment of Anne Hutchinson from Massachusetts Bay to the legacy of the ‘Twilight Sleep’ movement. Sustained critical attention is devoted to Mina Loy’s “Parturition”, and contemporary poets that have acknowledged Loy as an influence, such as Lara Glenum. I suggest that, despite the absence of a birth attendant on the symbolic level, Loy’s poem resonates with the investments of midwifery, instating a ‘subjectin- process’ that woks through and against abstruse and instrumental discourses, defying both the technocratic erasure of maternal knowing and the fetishistic reduction of labour to an end-product. Art’s capacity for opening up a corporeallycharged zone of between-ness is further elaborated in an essay on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker - through which the treatment of spatiotemporality is aligned with the imperatives of midwifery guardianship.

'In front of your nose': the existentialism of George Orwell

George Orwell’s reputation as a writer rests largely upon his final two works, selected essays and some of his journalism. As a novelist, he is often considered limited, and it is for this reason that his writing has perhaps received less serious attention than that of many of his contemporaries. Some recent publications have sought to redress this balance, identifying an impressive level of artistry, not only in his more recognised works, but in the neglected novels of the 1930s. Yet, aside from studies focused upon his political beliefs, there has been a lack of attention given to the wider ideas underpinning Orwell’s writing, in particular, those which might be considered, in popular terms, ‘existential’. Given its unusually firm grounding in the many experiences he underwent, Orwell’s thought, I argue, can be viewed profitably from this philosophical standpoint. By engaging his writing in a dialogue with that of the phenomenological-existentialist thinkers, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Emmanuel Levinas, this project aims to make sense of the ideas implicit within his work. Where the work of the aforementioned figures is often opaque and highly abstracted, it will be shown that Orwell’s offers the reader literary and real-life exemplars as a means of making difficult ideas understood. The study is divided into four two-part chapters, which track the Orwell canon in a broadly chronological fashion. In parallel with this, the ideas of the existential philosophers are, too, introduced chronologically: Heidegger, Sartre and, Levinas. The thesis attempts to argue that understanding the implicit existentialism in the work of Orwell not only offers a more complete insight into the man, and the tensions inherent in his character, but also affords the reader many much-needed exemplifications, and in some cases augmentations, of some of the most important ideas in existentialist philosophy