Sustaining children's participation in early childhood settings? Discourse, power and the 'danger' of participation practices

© 2009 Cassandra Marie Kotsanas.This study explored the experiences of early childhood educators who sought to increase young children’s participation with the purpose of identifying how children’s participation can be made sustainable in early childhood settings. Increasing interest in young children’s participation rights as a result of the UNCRC, General Comment 7 and the new sociology of childhood, has led to a growing expectation that early childhood educators will enact participation rights in practice. There is a limited body of research on both young children’s participation and on the sustainability of early childhood practices. Of the available literature, the majority is framed within a modernist paradigm that fails to acknowledge the multiple and contradictory nature of early childhood practice. This study used Foucauldian discourse analysis and selected poststructuralist understandings of power, knowledge and truth to explore how socially constructed understandings of young children and of early childhood educators influence participation practices and their sustainability. Three semi-structured interviews were conducted with four early childhood educators across three settings. The analysis of interviews showed particular discourses of childhood informing early childhood practices and creating and maintaining regimes of truth. It highlighted the need to recognise that early childhood educators work within and through multiple and conflicting discourses, each offering a particular subjectivity. The analysis also illuminates the micro-practices of power that limit the possibilities for children’s participation and illustrate the ‘danger’ of assimilating children’s participation into existing early childhood practices without critically reflecting on that process. The study raised the question of whether—rather than how—children’s participation should be sustained if it is operating within a singular dominant discourse. The study’s selected poststructuraist approach enabled it to fill a gap in the existing research, and has implications for practice, policy and training and provides direction for future research in the area of children’s participation

Children's participation in theory and practice: (re)theorising the everyday enactment of children's participatory rights with early childhood educators

© 2014 Dr. Cassandra KotsanasThis participatory action research project sought to engage early childhood educators in the generation and promotion of critical and ethical early childhood theories and practices that support the enactment of children’s participation rights in the everyday in early childhood settings. Children’s participation is increasingly promoted in early childhood curriculum framework documents in Australia, and is subsequently tied to regulatory requirements and understandings of best practice. However, there are limited resources to support the enactment of young children’s participation in everyday early childhood practice. The basis of this study was to support educators on the ground to explore and generate ethical participatory practices for daily use in the classroom. In doing so, it recognised the need to address the divide between theory and practice that is perceived and experienced by early childhood educators, to account for existing critiques of participation rights, and to resist the maintenance of limiting neoliberal ideals. The methodology employed in this study was poststructural participatory action research. Participants were eight early childhood educators working with 3-5 year old children in different settings across metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. Data was generated by various means over the course of a year including semi-structured interviews, transcriptions from action research meetings, participant journals, artefacts, email correspondence, joint writing for conference presentations and shared analysis processes. This project was designed and undertaken using a poststructural conceptual framework. Two stages of analysis were undertaken the first with an emphasis on Derridean deconstruction and the second through the lens of Derrida’s ethic of hospitality. Findings from the deconstructive analysis demonstrated that children’s participation in early childhood is able to support established best practice, support the reconceptualisation of practice, and support resistance to structural and regulatory barriers. These were positive outcomes that support the sustainable practice of children’s rights in early childhood. However, the deconstructive analysis revealed that participatory practices in early childhood also enable maintenance of discourses, binaries and subject positions that limit the ethical possibilities of children’s participation and affect the wellbeing of children and educators. In response to these findings a concept was sought through which to (re)theorise participation for use in early childhood settings. Applying an ethic of hospitality (Derrida, 2000) as a framework demonstrated how educators can create opportunities to welcome and affirm children’s participation more ethically by cultivating passivity, providing provocation, responsiveness, and being open to surprise. This research concludes by exploring possibilities for an hospitality-informed ethics through which educators may encounter and interact with each child as other rather than normalising children and their participation, thus promoting critical and ethical participatory practices