Lighting the fuse...

I've just discovered What Kind of Citizen? The Politics of Educating for Democracy by Joel Westheimer, as part of a wider look at the social sciences in early childhood education.

Social science is a vague subject that really goes undefined in Te Whāriki yet when you get an understanding of what it entails it's ends up being a core learning area. This is the problem with a prescriptive curriculum! Not that I'm complaining, it's just a gamble leaving it up to individual teachers to click onto social science...

The links in Te Whāriki are cringingly obvious though:

“equitable opportunities for learning, irrespective of gender, ability, age, ethnicity, or background”

“each child has the right to active and equitable participation in the community”

Yeah it's all about relationships, accepting of diversity, and participating in society.

Citizenship is a social contract between an individual and the state and infers all sorts of rights/responsibilities as a participating member of society. This article looks at the different types of citizens and is new territory for me so is a good place to start:

The Personally Responsible citizen: to solve social problems and improve society, citizens must have good character, be honest, responsible and law abiding... work and pays taxes, recycles, gives blood; volunteers etc. This sounds like pretty much like most people we know right? Well the straight ones at least.

The Participatory citizen: to solve social problems and improve society, citizens must be active in community structures and positions. So rather than just giving, they're out in the organising committee's hustling for change – by the rules of course.

The Justice Orientated citizen: to solve social problems and improve society, citizens must question and change established systems and structures when they reproduce patterns of injustice over time. Justice orientated citizens “ critically assess social, political, and economic structures and consider collective strategies that challenge injustice and where possible address root causes of the problem” (p.3). This is the shit.

Westheimer goes on to say “the limits of character education and of volunteerism and the conservative political orientation reflected... distracts attention from analysis” (p.5). In other words kindness is a way of avoiding the problem.

I'm hearing 'the most important thing you can do in a democracy is vote' type shit. Can you?

I've always had trouble around citizenship, especially the arbitrary line that determines a citizen from a non-citizen and how many basic rights can quickly crumble if you are on the wrong side. Who gave the State the authority to impose or grant rights? For me, citizenship is all tangled up with nationalism, blind obedience and the mass control of society in a similar way that religion operates. So it's great to read that critical thinking, analysis and a mandate to explore deeper social issues with children is being promoted – and that it's best done collectively. Sure we need 'nice' people who are responsible citizens, but as Westheimer says, “they hinder rather than make possible democratic participation and change.”

Tinkerbell

Pulling machinery apart is fun. Car engines, computers, clocks, pumps... there's nothing like dismantling a creation to see how it works.

It only gets tricky when you have to put it back together, and while that kind of task can be undertaken in the centre with some equipment that needs repairing, you can safely assume that when the case comes off the CPU it's well and truly all over for that computer!

Tinkering - as a bloke with a workshop - is part of my life, and it's been interesting to watch many colleagues who rarely, if ever, pick up a spanner or screw driver, get up to speed with its potential as a fun 'learning experience'.

Check out Let the Children Play on the blogroll to see how others are enjoying it. The Austin Tinkering School is of course heaven - they get to do it all day!!

Jealous or what.

From play to empathy...

Sitting around the kitchen at a friends while the kids riot in the lounge produced some interesting ideas...

I have never considered the link between imaginative play, empathy and democracy before. Have you?

Novelist Ian McEwan opines that empathy, as in the ability to think and feel what it might be like to be someone else, sits at the centre of morality and is the most important competency our children should be learning.

As children we develop empathy through our play, particularly make-believe or fantasy play. It is here that children get to try out social roles that are outside their world and practice social interactions safely within the context of 'it's just play'. Dramatic play is by its nature full of confrontation and challenge, it the schizophrenic plot and ensuing tension that keeps play interesting as well as throwing up social dilemmas to be worked through where we learn to think outside of ourselves.

Apparently (no references sorry) research of the top one thousand USA crims found that their commonality was a lack of play as children. A lack of empathy enables you to kill randomly, to hurt without caring, to exploit without hesitation. Sound familiar these days?

The totalitarianism of the individual as championed under neoliberalism does not need or nor want empathy. Capitalism does not need or want empathy.

Empathy leads to truer more authentic democracy based on equality, community and mutual aid.

Dramatic play provides the foundation for developing empathy, but to enhance this learning we need to get in there, to be a co-player, to be throwing open-questions, ideas and challenges into the play that keeps it dynamic, but also allows the learners to build social competence.

Think Vygotsky, the Zone of Proximal Development and social justice education.

Now, play like it really matters.

Look Ma, life-long learners....

I've really come to hate that phrase 'life-long learners'. It oozes political bullshit, another hegemonic whitewash that covers up the reality of neoliberalism, globalisation and the Global Knowledge Economy, or 'GKE' to the academics. It's the education buzz-word of the decade...

Life-long learners are the drones of the GKE; those whose jobs are constantly being disestablished as we (as a nation) move further and further away from producing tangible products to play the game of hyper-capitalism - ideas, knowledge, data, information - all that shit that poorer countries can't under-cut us on... “Designed in New Zealand, Made in fucking China.”

Jane Gilbert's 'Catching the Knowledge Wave' (2003) dives into the festering sore of neoliberalism to explain that 'knowledge' in the neo-liberal context does not mean old knowledge, but innovation, as in a process.

“Minds, instead of being like containers – databases of stored knowledge, will need to be thought of as being like processors and/or resources that are connectible to other minds – to generate new knowledge.”

So knowledge is no longer “matter”, but an “energy” that “causes things to happen”, the knowledge we gain is not to be used as intended, but rather as a catalyst to modify and improve; ie, to generate new knowledge.

Thus we are 'life-long learners' who do not dilly-dally with content, but put that knowledge to use to generate new knowledge, new ways of making and selling shit to the plebs. Knowledge is the product of societies that don't actually do much any more. We don't produce tangible goods, we just design the packaging. The actual hard work is left to third world countries where costs are cheapest. The knowledge wave is essentially hyper-capitalism and by aligning with it as a country we are aligning with the exploitation and oppression of the world's poor.

In early childhood education this way of learning if fundamental. Children are building upon prior learning as they meet new challenges and assimilate or accomodate this new knowledge. We ain't too worried about content, it's dispositions to learn that matter: motivation, perseverance, collaboration, reflection...

It's a catch-22 situation countered by a critical analysis of power that is rooted in social justice, equity, and the freedom to live ones life as they want. It's a tough job but someones gotta do it eh?

Life-long learners don't have to be mindless sheep. My new mantra.

dis//able

I recently had the good fortune of getting to visit a few centres on the business of disability. I was primarily an observer – and I'm a bloody good observer – but I also got to talk with the experts and get the inside story...

To be honest I'm really disappointed at the piss-poor effort to include children with disabilities. In fact some centres were like the dark ages with teachers (yes qualified and under the dictate of Te Whāriki) refusing to work alongside these children. What the fuck?

Ignored, left sitting alone for long periods, denied resources (“She just spills paint so we've stopped giving her any”), or subtly placed into an 'island of inclusion' where they are of course welcome, but we'll get in an expert to look after them and essentially they'll have their own 'special' curriculum and have sweet fuck-all to do with the centre community... (as long as they're quiet eh?).

Too often 'inclusion' came across as a product rather than a process with responsibility abdicated to support workers and specialists. Part of the problem is the curriculum, Te Whāriki, loaded as it is with deficit discourses concerning disability, it essentially provides an opt-out clause to establish a separate, adult-controlled curriculum for disabled learners. It also uses that fatal word “assumes”.

“The curriculum assumes that their care and education will be encompassed within the principles, strands blah blah...” It talks of “activities” (read: teacher controlled, not self-initiated), IEP's with “realistic objectives” and finally puts the boot in with the term 'special needs' just in case those personal discourses weren't already peaking about how some freak is going to totally fuck with your morning session...

Back to school you lot, or back into your closet.

Oh, it's not all doom and gloom. I witnessed some beautiful relationships, some joyous friendships and heaps of laughs... what inclusion is all about.

And so the babies go out with the bath water....

After an interesting week spent visiting several centres on work-related stuff it's become very clear that parents haven't sucked up the results of funding cuts but are simply pulling their kids out of hours above their 20-hour-free allocation. Some centres in the middle-class 'burbs are retaining a good percentage of their 'extras', but in the poorer areas they are reporting to be losing over half of the children who attended longer than 20 hours.

So obviously not many parents are able or prepared to pay fees. Centres do not collect and so look forward to experiencing a budget shortfall. How long will they suffer before staff are fired and the bastard State wins?

National Twists the Knife...

Pre-budget briefing papers released today show that the NACT Government is not intending to pass on wage increases won by Kindergarten teachers to other types of early childhood services.

How bizarre. Or not.

This amounts to a further $20 million cut on top of the $285 already cut from centres employing more than 80% qualified staff. NZEI's Judith Nowotarski says, “with no flow-on funding, early childhood services will struggle to pay teachers the same rates as their kindergarten colleagues. That represents a huge step backwards for early childhood teachers in their fight to have their professional status recognised.”

The sad reality is that the Kindergarten model as we know it is being gradually killed off as the cheaper (with less qualified staff) and more flexible private sector explodes in growth. Their business model is more acceptable to neo-liberalism and it's odd they've been dealt an underhand here. I just hope any anger is not directed at Kindergarten teachers...

There are so many overlapping discourses it's hard to know who to kick:

 -   Free-market capitalism for creating 'investment opportunities' and thus dumbing down educare;

-   The private sector destroying the hard-fought-for standard of professionalism by simply dragging it's arse in the pursuit of profit;

-   A neoliberal Government shedding community assets on the sly;

-  A piss-weak union...

Kick 'em all I guess.

Now we do know that the Government dropped any notion of cutting the 20hrs-free policy beacuse it's so popular hence the cutting off of every other limb. Are we seeing the softening of the population to accept rising childcare fees? If NACT make it back for a second round will they attempt to further shed the private sectors reliance on funding and firmly put the 'neo' back in neo-liberal?


These moves, and a dozen others in various areas, show a Government hung up on ideology rather than pragmatic thought-out strategies for lifting the standard of education and thus the health of the nation. Unequal societies crap out in every measurable way, from GDP, teen pregnancy, hospital admissions and suicide rates... you name it and we bomb. Aotearoa ranks third or fourth in the world for inequality. This is no paradise.

While this Government continues to systematically shift the wealth of the nation further into the hands of the rich by slashing funding at every opportunity, we're essentially stuffed as a country.

Our strength is in numbers, but it also lies in a critical analysis of knowing just what the fuck is going on in education today and at the present time while we have unionised numbers, we simply don't have this knowledge or ideological unity.

In the words of the old-school IWW union, or Wobblies, lets educate, organise and agitate for real change.