Going Beyond the Theory Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education: Introducing an Intra-Active Pedagogy (Contesting Early Childhood)

218 Pages·2009·6.01 MB·English

by  Hillevi Lenz Taguchi

Going Beyond the Theory/
Practice Divide in Early
Childhood Education
Introducing an intra-active pedagogy
Hillevi Lenz Taguchi
First published 2010
by Routledge
2Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX144RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk
©2010 Hillevi Lenz Taguchi
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Acatalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lenz-Taguchi, Hillevi.
Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education :
introducing an intra-active pedagogy / Hillevi Lenz-Taguchi.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Early childhood education–Philosophy. 2. Early childhood teachers–Training of.
I. Title.
LB1139.23.L46 2010
372.2101–dc22
2009005117
ISBN 0-203-87295-9 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 10: 0–415–46444–7 (hbk)
ISBN 10: 0–415–46445–5 (pbk)
ISBN 10: 0–203–87295–9 (ebk)
ISBN 13: 978–0–415–46444–4 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978–0–415–46445–1 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978–0–203–87295–6 (ebk)
Contents
Introduction by the series editors ix
Acknowledgements xxi
Introduction 1
1 Going beyond the theory/practice and
discourse/matter divides 20
2 Learning and becoming in an
onto-epistemology 42
3 Thetool of pedagogical documentation 63
4 An intra-active pedagogy and its dual
movements 90
5 Going beyond binary practices in early
childhood teacher education 117
6 The hybrid-writing process:going
beyond the theory/practice divide in
academic writing 139
7 An ethics of immanence and potentialities
for early childhood education 160
References 180
Index 192

Introduction by the 111111
222222
series editors
333333
444444
555555
Gunilla Dahlberg and Peter Moss
666666
777777
888888
999999
111111000000
111111111111
111111222222
One way of understanding the educational arena in a wider 111111333333
perspective today is that there are two strong contradictory move- 111111444444
ments at work; one of complexity and diversity increase, and one of 111111555555
complexity and diversity reduction ... The more we seem to know 111111666666
about the complexity of learning, children’s diverse strategies and 111111777777
multiple theories of knowledge, the more we seek to impose learning 111111888888
strategies and curriculum goals that reduce the complexities and 111111999999
diversities of learning and knowing. 222222000000
(Lenz Taguchi, 2008: 1) 222222111111
222222222222
This is the seventh book in the series Contesting Early Childhood.Theaim of 222222333333
the series is to contest dominant discourses, those paradigmatic perspec- 222222444444
tives and theories of learning that act as if they were self-evident and as if 222222555555
there are no alternatives; for example, child development and ‘develop- 222222666666
mentally appropriate practice’ and their assumptions of a true or ‘essential’ 222222777777
child. Such discourses contribute to the strategies of complexity reduction 222222888888
in early childhood education (but also elsewhere in education) that the 222222999999
author of this book has noted in the quotation with which we start this 333333000000
introduction. 333333111111
But the series has another, equally important, aim: not only to contest 333333222222
but also to relativise these discourses by showing that there are alternatives, 333333333333
and that the dominant discourses far from being self-evident are always 333333444444
just one of many choices facing us. In short, to free us from what Roberto 333333555555
Unger calls ‘a dictatorship of no alternatives’ (Unger, 2005: 1). This aim 333333666666
has been pursued not just through adopting different paradigmatic per- 333333777777
spectives and expounding new theories, or rather theories that are new to 333333888888
the world of early childhood education. We (and others) have also shown, 333333999999
in book after book and other numerous examples, how they can be put to 444444000000
work in everyday circumstances, by children and adults, to create new 444444111111
x Introduction by the series editors
understandings and enrich practice. In this very concrete way, the series
has shown that there are in fact alternatives and that, to take a key theme
of the present book, theory and practice do not represent a divide – an
either/or binary; rather, ‘practice is in fact continuously and already doing
and enacting educational theories’.
The Swedish context
Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, in this book, looks at this close relationship between
theory and practice in two everyday settings situated in a particular
context: early childhood centres (förskolaor ‘preschools’) and the educa-
tion of preschool teachers (förskollärare)in Sweden. Before looking in more
detail at the substance of her arguments, it may be helpful to non-Swedish
readers to say more about these settings and their national context.
Sweden, today, has one of the most extensive and developed systems of
early childhood education in the world – a recent league table of ‘early
childhood education and care in economically advanced countries’ places
it first out of twenty-five rich countries (UNICEF, 2008). This has been
the result of years of sustained policy development built on strong
democratic processes and social responsibility for young children and
awillingness to back this with adequate tax-based resourcing. The author
of this book, writing earlier with a colleague in a review of recent
developments in Swedish policy, has summarised this achievement of the
Swedish welfare state:
What was once viewed as either a privilege of the wealthy for afew
hours a day, or an institution for needy children and single mothers,
has become, after 70 years of political vision and policy-making, an
unquestionable right of children and families. Furthermore, parents
now expect a holistic pedagogy that includes health care, nurturing
and education for their preschoolers.
(Lenz Taguchi and Munkhammar, 2003: 23)
Central to this endeavour has been the förskola or preschool, the early
childhood centre that provides for Swedish children between 12 months
(before then they are at home with parents taking well-paid parental
leave) and the age of 6 years, when children move into school. All Swedish
children are legally entitled to attend the preschool from 12 months of
age, whether or not their parents are employed or studying. In 2006,
43 per cent of 1 year olds, 85 percent of 2 and 3 year olds and 91 percent
of 4 and 5year olds went to these centres (Skolverket, 2006). It is truly a
Introduction by the series editors xi
universal arena for early childhood education, where the society takes
responsibility for the upbringing of its youngest members – education in
its broadest sense (‘holistic pedagogy’) and as a community project.
The staff in these preschools, who we will meet in this book, are a
mixture of preschool teachers (förskollärare)and assistants (barnskötare), the
workforce divided roughly 50/50 between these two groups. The latter
have a three-year education at an upper secondary school level. The
former have a three and a half-year university education, leading to a
graduate teaching qualification with a specialisation in work with young
children between 1 and 6 years of age.
Preschools, since 1996, are in the education system, under the aegis of
the Ministry of Education. Their purpose is to provide to all children
a ‘pedagogical approach where care, nurturing and learning together
form a coherent whole’ (Ministry of Education and Science, 1998: 14).
Children under and over 3 years of age share the same provision, the
same workforce and the same preschool curriculum, and a single system
of funding applies across the system. Unlike many countries, therefore,
Swedish ECEC is fully integrated, both conceptually and structurally.
Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, who works in the Department of Education at
the University of Stockholm, draws on work undertaken both inpreschools
and in the education of preschool teachers at this university. Her scope is
learning and education of both children and adults, with the application of
similar perspectives and practices to both. Indeed, she and her colleagues
‘basically decided that teacher education should be engaged in and
perform the same kinds ofeducational practices with student-teachers, as
we as educators wanted and taught the students to do with children once
they become professional teachers’.
What is striking to someone from outside Sweden (as one of usis), both
in this book and the previous volume in this series by Liselott Mariett
Olsson – Movement and Experimentation in YoungChildren’s Learning: Deleuze and
Guattari in Early Childhood Education–is the way that ‘ordinary’ preschools,
preschool teachers and teacher educators in Sweden come to be working
with ‘alternative’ theories from theorists who have usually not written
about early childhood education and who are unlikely to figure on the
reading lists of 99 per cent of courses for early childhood workers, theorists
such as the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (in both
books) and the feminist physicist Karen Barad (in this book). We do not
wish to exaggerate by suggesting that this is the case throughout Swedish
preschools and teacher education. But there does seem to be a potentiality
in the Swedish system forworking with new thinking and experimentation.
If that potentiality and its realisation seems important, as we think it
xii Introduction by the series editors
is,then we should reflect on how it may emerge and flourish. How can we
create a context within which new thinking and experimentation are not
only tolerated but positively encouraged and flourish?
Sweden suggests three possible components in such a context. First,
a strong decentralisation of responsibility to both local authorities and indi-
vidual preschools, epitomised by a preschool curriculum of only nineteen
pages (in the English edition), a framework document which sets out broad
values, tasks and goals, but leaves considerable space for local inter-
pretation and implementation (Ministry of Education and Science, 1998).
It steers without unduly prescribing, enabling preschools to combine
working with this national document whilst exploring new approaches to
learning and creating more local knowledges. Second, astrong emphasis on
democracy which forms, the curriculum says, ‘the foundation of the pre-
school’ (Ministry of Education and Science, 1998: 6). Democracy is a
fundamental value in Swedish early childhood education, and this matters
because democracy recognises, values and enacts pluralism, the idea that
there are always alternatives, differing perspectives, other possibilities –
and hence contestations to be had and choices to be made. Third, astrong
workforceof well-educated preschool teachers, from among whom emerge
substantial numbers who feel the need to be challenged, who are curious to
know more about different theories and approaches to learning, and who
are willing and able to work with them in their practice, especially in
collaboration with gifted educators. Indeed, we might add to the third
condition by noting a cadre of academics – both educating teachers and
doing research – who have come to form a critical mass that desires to
work with new discourses and to go deeply into their potential for learning
and early childhood education. Hillevi Lenz Taguchi and Liselott Mariett
Olsson are part of this cadre of experimenters.
The desire to experiment and create new thinking has been
intensified from another source: the pedagogical work in Reggio Emilia,
two of whose leading exponents (Carlina Rinaldi and Vea Vecchi) are
also contributors to this series (Rinaldi, 2006; Vecchi, in preparation).
No other country in Europe has been so closely connected to Reggio as
Sweden, expressed through the wide-ranging work of the Reggio
Institute in Stockholm, and the many networks of Swedish preschools
connected with the Institute and working with inspiration from Reggio
Emilia. Policy, too, has been explicitly influenced by Reggio Emilia’s
approach to early childhood education.
It has not been a simple matter of transmission, of Sweden buying
the ‘Reggio programme’. Rather there seems to have been much in
common between the Italian city and the Nordic country: shared values,
Introduction by the series editors xiii
shared traditions, shared interests, shared ways of thinking about chil-
dren and learning – ‘the fact that the Reggio Emilia approach became so
widely disseminated in Sweden could well be because in some respects
it resembled that of the Swedish pre-school, but in a more audacious
and sharper form’ (Korpi, 2007: 66). This common ground – what might
be termed a pedagogical meeting place – has enabled a productive
and long-running exchange and dialogue, which has provoked experi-
mentation. Neither Reggio Emilia nor those in Sweden working with
inspiration from Reggio see early childhood education as a search for
the one right answer, a time-limited project that will conclude with the
application of a universal best practice or definition of good quality to
the achievement of a set of predefined learning and developmental
outcomes; both see early childhood education as a continuous process
involving border crossings, the introduction of new perspectives and the
creation of new understandings.
Central to this continuous process of dialogue and learning through
experimentation is the tool of pedagogical documentation, originating in
Reggio Emilia, but today in use throughout the world, and widespread
in Sweden. It is not coincidence that pedagogical documentation plays
such a central role in this book by Hillevi Lenz Taguchi as well as in the
previous one in our series by Liselott Mariett Olsson. Nor that it features in
other books in the series, by Carlina Rinaldi, Vea Vecchi and ourselves.
The idea is simple – making practice visible or material, thence
subject to research, dialogue, reflection and interpretation (meaning-
making). But its application, doing documentation, is anything but
simple, as are its consequences. For it acknowledges and welcomes sub-
jectivity, diversity of position and multiple perspectives: in short, it values
plurality. As Hillevi Lenz Taguchi notes ‘it produces different kinds of
knowledge depending on the ontological and/or epistemological per-
spectives we bring with us in our usage of it’.
Documentation is not only a multi-purpose tool, of use in evaluation,
researching, professional development and planning. Nor is it just a tool
for bringing democratic politics into the preschool, opening up peda-
gogical work to the public gaze and to public argumentation, offering (as
Loris Malaguzzi put it) ‘the possibility to discuss and to dialogue everything
with everyone’ (Hoyuelos, 2004: 7). It also provides the means – vividly
illustrated by Hillevi Lenz Taguchi in this book, and Liselott Mariett
Olsson in the previous volume – to bring new ideas and perspectives into
the preschool, to look at how new theories can offer new understandings
and new directions for pedagogical work, and by so doing contributing to
what Hillevi Lenz Taguchi describes in this book: