99. Emerging Researchers' Group (for presentation at Emerging Researchers' Conference)
Paper
The Making of a Preschool Teacher. An Ethnological Study of Preschool Teacher Education and the Discursivity of the Preschool Mission
Nicole Pergament Crona
Södertörn University, Sweden
Presenting Author: Pergament Crona, Nicole
In recent decades, preschools as well as schools and other higher education have been increasingly influenced by international contexts with migration flows, global political actors, and multinational companies. What this has come to mean from a cultural, historical, and educational science perspective is what we study within the interdisciplinary doctoral school Education, Learning and Globalisation, in which I am included within the framework of my doctoral position in ethnology at Södertörn University. The doctoral school has among other focus areas, one of which is intercultural and norm-critical perspectives on preschool, school, and teacher education. It is this area my study connects to by using theoretical inspiration from the political discourse theory (PDT) to seek knowledge of how norms and value conflicts in the wake of migration and global political discourses affect the interpretation and implementation of the Swedish preschool's social mission.
The purpose of the thesis is to empirically examine how the construction of the subject position of a preschool teacher takes place in preschool teacher education in relation to the norm and value conflicts, contradictions, and dissonances that may arise while practicing this position. What drives people to work in preschools and what are their initial conceptions of the preschool teacher role and the preschool mission when entering the education? How does the understanding of the social mission of future preschool teachers change during the course of the education and what are the discourses that create this change? What ambiguities and dissonances emerge between different values and norms within the preschool assignment, and what consequences does this have for future preschool teachers during their internship periods? What intercultural tensions and conflicts of norms and values arise in the encounter between divergent discourses and perceptions of the preschool mission in everyday preschool life, and how are these experienced and handled by future preschool teachers during their internship periods?
I intend to use political discourse theory as my theoretical approach, especially as developed by Chantal Mouffe (2008). Pre-school education is to a considerable extent about the fosterage of democracy, and there is a long tradition of assigning children the role of ‘political utopia bearers’; not infrequently, children are regarded as ‘promises of a better future’ (Dolk 2013:114; Hörnfeldt 2009:14). Nevertheless, preschool teacher students often have problems answering exam questions about how the preschool mission is political. In her book On the Political (Mouffe 2008), Mouffe worries about democracy in relation to our inability to think politically. The reason for this inability is our delusion that there is such a thing as consensus, based on 'common sense' and universal consensus solutions. Is the preschool mission and its values an example of such a delusion? Mouffe completely dismisses the idea that it would be possible to ever reach a complete consensus, as the notion of such is a chimera: consensus is always based on exclusionary practices. Consensus is nothing but ‘the result of a hegemonic articulation’ (Laclau och Mouffe 2001:xviii). According to Mouffe, there are always groups and individuals who do not feel included in such supposedly universal consensual solutions (Mouffe 2008).
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThis is an ethnographic, qualitative study. My main category of material consists of semi-structured in-depth interviews, with 21 preschool teacher students, conducted in the spring/autumn of 2023. The interviews form the basis for analyses of how different discourses shape the preschool teacher students' view of their future role and societal mission. The interviews have been recorded with audio recording technology and/or via Zoom (with or without image) and then transcribed.
I have also conducted observations where I followed the interviewed preschool teacher students during certain educational elements. This includes their internship periods at the preschools. Thirteen such observations at five different preschools have been carried out. Other observations concern the introductory and reflection seminars given by the higher education institutions, where the students are assigned the tasks they will carry out during the internship. The seminars also allow the students to process their internship experiences and discuss both expectations and concerns with each other as well as with their teachers. Seventeen seminars in three different institutions were observed. A further interesting but somewhat sensitive observation has been the ‘tripartite dialogue’ between the student, the examining teacher, and the supervisor assigned to the student. During such a tripartite, the teacher and supervisor observe the student during a pedagogical activity at the preschool, after which they evaluate the student’s achievement together. I managed to take part in two such evaluations.
By supplementing the in-depth interviews with observations, I wanted to gain insight into discrepancies between ideals and practice, since when ‘generally accepted visions are put into practice’ they sometimes get ‘consequences that are not always in line with the ideals’ (Runfors 2003:38, my translation). This relates to the political discourse theory's view of discourses as being not only what is expressed in text or speech, but also what is articulated in everyday practice (Laclau och Howarth 2015:25).
Other material categories consist of various forms of reflection material that preschool teacher students are asked to produce throughout their education. Hereby they record what they see as significant, upsetting, or difficult to understand in the course literature or during the lectures and seminars, and not least during their periods of practical training.
The material described above will be contextualised using material from media archives, course literature, specialist journals, and various steering documents such as the Education Act, curricula, equal treatment plans, policies, etc.
Methodologically, this implies text and discourse analyses.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings‘The preschool shall actively and consciously influence and stimulate children to gradually embrace the common values of our society’, says the Swedish preschool curriculum (Skolverket 2018:12). Previous research, however, has shown that there seems to be an overconfidence that these values are necessarily perceived as common and unproblematic in a society characterised by increasing diversification (Dolk 2013; Hill 2021; Zackariasson 2015). The feasibility of the assignment is further complicated by the fact that there is a contradictory ‘dissonance’ between some of these values and norms (León Rosales 2010:58ff). At the time of this application, I had barely begun any analytical work, but so far, my material has to a low extent revealed the dissonance promised by previous research. This might be due to my involuntary selection. The students, preschools, and parents who have given their consent to participate in the study are probably not the ones with the major problems. Still, there are problems, I hear them mentioned - but I cannot say that they are prominent in my material. Instead, the Swedish preschool appears as a ‘better version of reality’ as one student put it. When reading the curriculum, the Education Act, and the course literature; when visiting preschools, and listening to teachers and students, it sometimes seems hard not to be blinded by an image of The Preschool as a politically correct micro-society, exclusively inhabited by democratic and open-minded citizens, of whom all are being listened to, equal and self-actualised, as well as safe, happy and sugar-free. The preschool is a place with zero tolerance for violence; where everyone's individual interests are safeguarded; and where there is every opportunity for constant learning, as well as becoming one's potential ‘best self’. A world where you want to be - even as an adult. A quasi-world to fall in love with.
ReferencesDolk, Klara. 2013. Bångstyriga barn: makt, normer och delaktighet i förskolan. Stockholm: Ordfront.
Hill, Helena. 2021. ”Normkritisk vaccination. Normkritik och normkritisk pedagogik i Skolverkets rapporter och råd 2009 – 2014”. Pedagogisk forskning i Sverige, Vol. 26 (2–3):38–60.
Hörnfeldt, Helena. 2009. Prima barn, helt u.a. : normalisering och utvecklingstänkande i svensk barnhälsovård 1923-2007. Göteborg: Makadam.
Laclau, Ernesto, och David R. Howarth. 2015. Ernesto Laclau : post-marxism, populism, and critique. London ; Routledge.
Laclau, Ernesto, och Chantal Mouffe. 2001. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso.
León Rosales, René. 2010. Vid framtidens hitersta gräns: om maskulina elevpositioner i en multietnisk skola. Stockholm ; Botkyrka: Mångkulturellt centrum, Elanders.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2008. Om det politiska. Hägersten: Tankekraft.
Runfors, Ann. 2003. Mångfald, motsägelser och marginaliseringar: en studie av hur invandrarskap formas i skolan. Stockholm: Prisma.
Skolverket. 2018. Läroplan för förskolan. Lpfö 18.
Zackariasson, Maria. 2015. ”Caught between expectations: Swedish student teachers’ experiences of working with gender and sexuality issues”. Nordic studies in education (3–04):217–32.
99. Emerging Researchers' Group (for presentation at Emerging Researchers' Conference)
Paper
Relational Pedagogies: Re-orienting Learning for an Epistemology of Entanglement
Sarah Sharp
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Presenting Author: Sharp, Sarah
We live in a critical ecological moment. We face unstable climates, intensifying environmental disasters, and escalating extinction rates, all of which threaten the survival of a vast array of species, including humans (Tsing et al. 2017). A significant shift in the way in which humans interact with the world is urgently needed (Taylor et al. 2020).
This paper contributes to the body of work that approaches such a shift through Environmental Education (EE), helping us to imagine ways we might learn to live sustainably. I propose that an exploration of how we understand our relationship with the world through embodied creative activities could help us consider ourselves as ‘entangled’ in the world’s interconnected and affective state of becoming - knowing that our actions and futures are constantly engaged in relation with all else. I explore ways we can apply the concepts of ‘entanglement’ and ‘relationality’ to the process of learning, suggesting that an understanding of the world through these concepts could encourage mindset shifts towards sustainability. The goal of this paper is to explore a pedagogy for an onto-epistemology of relationality, with the hope of helping schools nurture mindsets capable of learning to live sustainably in a changing climate.
A global approach is needed to face the international climate crisis and a large proportion of EE research currently stems from Europe and the Global North. Much of current EE in Western Europe is predominantly focussed on scientific knowledge transmission about climate change and conservation. It perpetuates ideas of human exceptionalism by separating human activity from ‘nature’, teaching about the environment rather than acknowledging how we live within it (Dunlop & Rushton 2022). This has resulted in inadequate pedagogic practices to address the challenges of the current environmental crisis (Taylor et al. 2020).
My research grows from the idea that there is a link between ineffective EE practices and the compartmentalised learning necessitated by Western European education systems. Secondary school learning is a very structured operation, it is characterised by the study of different subjects which require different books and often different teachers with little acknowledgment of the relationality of the experience. My suggestion is that the absence of relational learning is complicit in the justification of the exploitation and destruction of multi-species ecologies that have caused the current climate crisis. To address this, we need to diversify the epistemologies with which we engage in order to facilitate research into effective EE (Blaser and Cadena 2018). Combining EE with global ideologies of entanglement and relationality through arts-based approaches will diversify approaches to EE by helping us to explore ways of learning that enable us to understand our relationship with/in it. Understanding ourselves as entangled entities, deconstructing human exceptionalism, and resisting anthropocentric philosophies is the imagining required to live within a changing world (Haraway 2016).
This paper outlines my experience of working with a secondary school in the UK to explore ways of knowing as curricula to approach EE. I collaborate with a small group of students to creatively explore their learning experience through a series of school based workshops. We use drama and storytelling approaches (Burrows and O’Sullivan 2019) to consider their whole school experience, exploring how learning itself can be relational.
My research is framed around these lines of inquiry:
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What are the relationships of a compartmental pedagogy with the climate crisis?
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In what ways might arts-based approaches to storytelling support an understanding of entanglement through relational pedagogy?
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What is relational pedagogy and how can school learning engage with it?
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In what ways can schools facilitate beyond-anthropocentric ways of being in the world that embody an understanding of relationality?
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThe focus of this paper is an exploration of relational research methods that can help young people understand concepts of entanglement and relationality.
My relational methodological approach is consistent with my onto-epistemic justification for the research and includes ethnographic and arts-based techniques as well as taking inspiration from emergent post-qualitative inquiries. My methods include extended observation, informal interviews, and a participatory creative project that culminates in an collaborative artistic artefact. Informed by Judith Green and David Bloome’s (2005) approach to ethnography, I interrogate relational knowledge encounters by using “ethnographic tools” (p.4). These tools include situating myself in the place of my research and paying attention to the conversations or informal interviews, participant observations, and subsequent personal explorations which emerge from the experience. I am inspired by Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole (2008) who advocate for research in which the art is the research as opposed to an object to be researched. My process draws on new-materialist arts-informed research to consider the art co-created by participants as the materiality of the research conducted, and the ‘data’ as the stories of relational knowledge which emerge. I draw on Elizabeth St. Pierre’s (1997) ideas about post-qualitative data analysis which aims to “produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently” (p.175). Analysing the stories which emerge through co-creating relational art is a process of generative difference and close attentiveness to the a/effects of difference. Arts-informed research and ethnographic tools as outlined above will enable me to explore ways that difference can be produced from within entanglement in order to “make difference” (Barad 2007, p.91). As a result, the relational pedagogy explored helps me reveal a relational inquiry that facilitates its creation.
I create space for both qualitative and post-qualitative approaches in my research because both engage with ways of thinking that are productive to exploring radical encounters of relational pedagogy. My work goes beyond conceptual research into tangible participatory practice, where some qualitative methods (e.g. interviews and ethnographic journaling) provide vital insights. However, weaving through a post-qualitative critique allows me to unpack what the qualitative methods make visible but also what they exclude from view. A post-qualitative approach of acknowledging the students’ learning experience as entanglement enables me to take into consideration all encounters with my research and know that they can all hold insights as part of my scholarly practice.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThis paper has proposed an exploration of the experience of school learning through concepts of entanglement and relationality, an interrogation of the ways we learn, not changing what we learn. What could follow is an application of this to how we understand our relationship with/in the world. Considering our affective relationality with the world might help young people understand the need to consider beyond-anthropocentric impacts of the choices they make. My hope is that doing so will allow for imagining sustainable lifestyles of response-able relationships to unfold.
The implications of this research could contribute to the development of pedagogic practice in EE. The ongoing climate crisis demonstrates that dominant humanist approaches to EE in Europe and the Global North have failed to teach us how we live with the world. I have outlined how EE which implies a separation between human and nature is complicit in the justification of exploitation and unsustainable consumption of resources. Alternative approaches to EE, such as the one I propose, can facilitate the onto-epistemological shift of an understanding of entanglement, opening beyond-anthropocentric pedagogic possibilities for learning to live sustainably. Rather than encourage schools to add more of EE initiatives and then show students how these things connect together, I want to start with how schools address relational thinking by engaging in holistic and embodied learning techniques, and then apply this to EE in what might then be considered effective learning for the environment. My work addresses the discipline literature gap on how to approach this, exploring relational learning in mainstream secondary education practice. As a result, my research could contribute to international policy debate around designing future EE.
My hope is that teaching for relationality will enable schools to support the development of young people capable of critical beyond-anthropocentric thinking within a changing climate.
ReferencesBarad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Blaser, M., & de la Cadena, M. (2018). A World of Many Worlds. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Burrows, D. & O’Sullivan, S. (2019). Fictioning: The Myth-functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Dunlop, L., and Rushton, E.A.C. (2022). Putting climate change at the heart of education: Is England's strategy a placebo for policy? British Educational Research Journal, 48(6), pp.1083-1101.
Green, J. & Bloome, D. (2005) Ethnography and ethnographers of and in education: A situated perspective. In Flood, J., Heath, S. B., & Lapp, D. (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching literacy through the communicative and visual arts, pp.181-202. New York: Macmillan Publishers.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Knowles, G. J. & Cole, A. L. (2008). Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. California: Sage Publications, Inc.
St. Pierre, E. A. (1997) Methodology in the fold and the irruption of transgressive data, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(2), pp.175-189.
Taylor, A., Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Blaise, M., & Silova, I. (2020). Learning to become with the world: Education for future survival. Common Worlds Research Collective. Paper commissioned for the UNESCO Futures of Education report.
Tsing, A. L., Bubandt, N., Gan, E. & Swanson, H. (Eds) (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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