Troubling Outcomes – A
Challenge for Early Childhood
Education
66th OMEP World Assembly and
International Conference
University College Cork
July 2014
Nóirín Hayes
School of Education, Trinity College Dublin
noirin.hayes@tcd.ie
Centre for Social and Educational Research, Dublin Institute of Technology
noirin.hayes@dit.ie
Troubling Outcomes
• Title reflects a growing personal concern with
the aims and direction of education
• Topic informed by:
– The conference theme – children’s cultural
worlds
– Evidence from research on young children’s
learning and the quality early educational
practice
– Influences on practice in early childhood
education
Education should not be the filling of a pail
but the lighting of a fire’ (W.B. Yeats)
• Children proverbially live in the present;
that is not only a fact ……… but it is an
excellence’ (Dewey, 1916/1967)
A perspective on early educational
practice
• Considering early childhood educational practice
within the frame of learning goals and outcomes
• Revisiting the importance of process and the
dynamics of day to day interactions within a
rights framework
• Referencing the concept of democratic practice
[Dewey and Moss] and the Capabilities
Approach articulated by Sen and Nussbaum.
The importance of quality early
childhood education
• Longitudinal studies show positive impact on
children for both school and social outcomes
• Availability improves access to education,
employment and social networks for parents
• Powerful and lasting impact on child development
– Key learning - aspiration, task commitment,
social skills, feelings of efficacy [Sylva, 1994]
• Brain research has highlighted the importance of
the 0-3 period in overall child development
• Enhances wellbeing and flourishing
Young children learning
• Rights-based lens
– Participation; Voice; All children
• Dynamics of human development
– Beyond Bronfenbrenner – dynamic systems approach
• Neuroscience
– The brain is only partially mature at birth and
continues to develop over the first years of life.
– The quality of early experiences can determine how
sturdy or fragile the foundations are for learning and
behaviour over time….. particularly the integrating
function of the pre-frontal cortex
UN Committee on Children’s Rights
• The aims of education:
‘…. not only include literacy and numeracy but
also
life skills such as the ability to make
well balanced decisions; to resolve conflicts
in a non-violent manner; and to develop a
healthy lifestyle, good social relationships
and responsibility, critical thinking, creative
talents, and other abilities which give children
the tools needed to pursue their options in life
(UN, 2001, para.9)
Rights and Young Children’s Learning
• Build from the focus of child wellbeing
• Recognise children as competent, strong, active
meaning-makers
• Facilitate real[istic] participation
• Attend to the development of ‘softer’ life skills
towards strengthening foundations of all learning
Children’s cultural contexts
Dynamics of Learning
• Proximal Processes – engines of
development
– progressively more complex reciprocal
interactions between an active biopsychological human and the persons,
objects and symbols in the immediate
environments [B&M1998/2006]
• Generative [or disruptive] dispositions
• Dynamic interplay of the Person, Process,
Context and Time [PPCT]
Dynamics of Learning
• Biological and Cultural influences
• Harmony between Individualisation [rights] and
Socialisation [democracy]
• Development - a process of holistic non-linear, emergent
self-organisation [Kim & Sankey, 2010]. A dynamic
systems approach
• Pedagogy directed towards the ripening function
[children’s knowing] rather than the ripe [what do you
know?]
Neuroscience and brain
development
• Early brain research confirms the interconnected
nature of social, emotional and cognitive
capacities
• Babies and young children require stable, caring
interactive relationships for healthy brain
development
• Social brain development depends on and
enables complex social interactions.
Early brain development
• Stress can compromise optimum brain development
• Skills necessary to control and coordinate information
are developed in the early years
• These skills are known as Executive Functions and map
on to life skills
• Development of executive function skills depends on the
biological maturity of the child
Executive Functions
• Executive functions help us self-regulate, plan, manage,
attend, problem solve, manage our world
• Develop dramatically during infancy and early childhood
• Seem to underpin later success in school, health and
income
• Quality early years practice important to the
development or inhibition of executive functions
Quality early years practice
•
•
•
•
Integrates care and education
Reflects respectful and engaged interactions
Adults are proactive and attuned
Shows evidence and application of Pedagogical
Content Knowledge
• Provides rich learning environments
A “nurturing pedagogy”
Nurturing pedagogy
• Learning environments are
– Respectful
– Reflective
– Risk Rich
• Pedagogical process is
– Relational
– Responsive
– Reciprocal
• Wellbeing of children a primary concern
Unrealistic expectations of early
education
• Economic
– End poverty
• Social
– Improve labour market participation
• Educational
– Combat educational disadvantage
– Improve literacy and numeracy
• Not a magic bullet
External demands
• Setting learning goals
• Identifying child outcomes
– Cognitive skills predominate over life skills
• Outcomes focus on specific competencies
– Vocabulary of literacy and numeracy
• A focus on outcomes influences practice
– Is the tail wagging the dog?
– Schoolification?
Support for the outcomes approach
• Reflects the economic discourse
– ‘causal link between cognitive learning outcomes and
economic growth [World Bank]
– The quality of education, as measured in terms of
learning outcomes - - – ‘What works’ to raise learning outcomes
– Importance of product; future focused
And what of the child’s now?
Because children grow up, we think a child’s
purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to
be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only
for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each
moment (Tom Stoppard, 2002)
Making the most of children’s moments
• Wellbeing is key to realising children’s rights and a
central element of democratic practice
• Children’s wellbeing recognised as a central dimension
of sustainable development
• Kickbusch (2012) notes that children’s wellbeing:
– Is a value in its own right
– Contributes to a better and just society
– Is about our present and our future
An enabling environment
• Positive environments enhance young children’s positive
sense of self
• Wellbeing is a basis for mastery and a belief that one
has a certain degree of control
• Adults can enable children’s engagement and
democratic rights through hearing their voice and
encouraging active participation
• The Irish curriculum framework - Aistear ‘offers potential
to promote active citizenship and values of social justice’
Wellbeing and learning
•UNESCO’s four pillars of learning
– Learning to know
– Learning to do
– Learning to live together
– Learning to be [DeLors, 1996]
•Process and context of early learning enhances a
children’s mastery and capabilities thus strengthening
sense of wellbeing and belonging.
Impact of enabling environments
• Valuing children’s strengths empowers them in
their development and learning
• Children often know what helps their positive
development and wellbeing
• Framing early years practice within this idea of
providing opportunities for children to be and to
do links the pillars of learning to the ideas
behind the Capabilities Approach [Sen;
Nussbaum]
The Capabilities Approach [CA]
• CA emerged from development economics, now applied
to a number of context – limited educational research
• CA stresses the importance of individual and group
freedoms and functions
• CA asks what a child is actually able to do and to be
• Capabilities are the possibilities for acting and doing
• Nussbaum identifies 10 central capabilities
Capabilities approach and education
• CA highlights the importance of education in
– Assisting children develop fundamental capabilities
which, in turn
– Help children think critically and creatively
– Solve problems
– Make informed decisions
– Manage change
– Communicate effectively
• A life skills rather than a cognitive skills focus,
particularly relevant in early education
CA in early education
• A rights based approach to early educational
practice can provide opportunities that
strengthen children’s capabilities
• We can protect ‘particular capabilities now in a
way that reduces the need for the state to
support related capabilities in the future’ [Dixon
& Nussbaum, 2012)
A new language of early years practice
•Attend to creating opportunities that enhance
children’s capabilities and grow the executive
function platform necessary for future achievement
and success
•Orient early years practice towards the child’s
present continuous [process/opportunity] - not
towards the yesterday of child development
[product/outcome]
A powerful potential for change
• Understanding child development and how children learn
is a key ingredient to quality early years practice
• Attending to the day-to-day, ordinary opportunities
provides for children to be and to do in their now
• Strengthening the development of young children’s
executive function empowers them to avail of the
opportunities to be and to do
From competencies to capabilities
• An outcomes focus emphasises
– Competence
– Product
– Past learning
• An opportunities focus emphasises
– Capabilities
– Process
– Present continuous
A capabilities approach for all
• Aspiring to equality of opportunity is more than improving
access to early childhood education
• Real equality of opportunity focuses on the quality of the
day-to-day, the ordinary early educational opportunities
• Quality practice happens in the now and provides
children with rich opportunities to do and to be
• Let outcomes frame the system but look to opportunities
in the now to guide early educational practice.
Thank You 