(Un)doing the Chilean Child and Aunty in a Chilean early years classroom

Chile’s history of (neo)colonisation and neoliberalism in education impacted early childhood education (ECE) and its curriculum. Its untroubled philosophical and pedagogical roots promote normalised ideas of ‘childhood’, and the (re)production of a specific subject: ‘the Child’. Consequently, regimes of truth about ‘the Child’ are (re)established in pedagogical and curricular practices. Drawing on Butler’s concept of performativity and Foucault’s understandings of power and discourse, I explored how the Child is not born, but made. During 2013 I spent approximately five months in an EC classroom with 32 young children and four female practitioners. The approach was framed under a postmodern rationale. It was ethnographically informed, which involved participating and observing the everyday routines in the classroom. The ‘data’ that was generated throughout that period was analysed using Haraway’s metaphor of a ‘cat’s cradle’, which had Rapa Nuian influences. This resulted in three Kai-Kai figures, where I (dis)entangled several discourses of ‘the Child’ and ‘the Aunty’. Analysis suggest that ‘the Child’ is made in the ECE classroom, and cannot exist without ‘the Aunty’ (female practitioner), who is accountable for producing child subjects. Both subjects are bound in a binary logic, creating polarised relationships of need and dependency, and care and facilitation. Discourses of ‘the Child’ and ‘the Aunty’ are made through pedagogies informed by the ECE curriculum, produced and regulated by all the subjects, but also resisted and transformed