Charlotte Højholt, Roskilde University, Denmark, charh@ruc.dk
Child, families and communities
- Introducing reflections
Paper presented at the Research seminar ’Child, families and communities', 2nd November
2015, Hosted by Research program Diversity, Culture, and Change, DPU, Aarhus
University, Copenhagen.
Introduction
What brings together concepts such as child, families and communities?
Due to the initial idea for the book - International Handbook on Early Childhood
Education and Marilyn Fleer and Bert van Oers (editors) - it could be argued that this
combination of concepts, opens opportunities for bringing together material from
researchers who are currently paving new directions and providing new insights into
methodological problems and challenges for research, as well as practice related to
children’s life and development.
We are gathered here because we have a critique of early childhood education in
common (e. g. in regard to decontextualizing and individualising our approach to
children) – and we are working for rethinking concepts in relation to children’s
development.
It has been problematized how children, their ways of living, learning and developing
through abstract understandings have been isolated from the social world and its
multiplicity of relations.
Involving the social world in a concrete way raises new questions and matters. These
include for instance children’s significance for each other, the shared care between
different parties involved in the life of children and the political conflicts about
children’s learning and development.
Involving such attentions is not just a question of adding supplements to our concepts
– it gives new content to our concepts and in this way child, families and
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communities must be conceptualized in new ways and first and foremost in
connection to each other.
Such problematics, challenges and rethinking form a background for the heading of
this seminar. In this introduction I want to mention first some of the key theoretical
discussions related to methodologies developed in relation to exploring children, their
everyday life and their communities and families. And afterwards I will mention
some of the discussions related to changing perspectives on the 3 concepts: child,
families and communities
Some key theoretical problems
I have selected three related problematics of central importance to prioritize:
1) the critique of developmental concepts for being abstract, normative and
categorising children according to universal standards.
2) The continuous discussions about how to conceptualize the dynamic relationship
between an active and developing subject and the social contexts of development (
including social understandings, discourses and material conditions for development).
3) The tendencies to move back and forth between essentialist and relational
understandings of e.g. “child”, “developmental problems” and “a community”.
1) To me Erica Burman’s “Deconstructing Developmental Psychology” has been
very important. It illustrates how our widespread ways of thinking about development
are constituted through the twentieth century, closely connected with social policy,
family policy, educational policy and practical needs for social control and gender
differentiations - as well as differentiations between groups of people and their way
of living.
When we follow shifting abstract standards for children’s needs and behaviour, we
seem to displace the very attention to children’s developmental conditions.
Notions about children’s development and about early childhood education have been
used to distinguish between healthy and deviant development, and to pathologize
those individuals and groups who do not meet the idealised models, and especially
they have been used to point out problematic ways of upbringing.
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Erica Burman’s point about “mother-blaming” seems as relevant today (as it was
then) and politically the focus on optimizing developmental possibilities in relation to
individual competences and performance seem to be intensified with the global
competition. For instance the Danish unified school undergoes changes from serving
a welfare state to serve a competition state – as it is formulated in political conflicts.
2) Concerning the second selected discussion about how to conceptualize the
dynamic relation between an active and developing subject and the social contexts of
development - this issue appears especially central to cultural historical and related
approaches engaging in conceptual development concerning the inner connection
between the child and its social world.
Mariane Hedegaard, together with others, has turned methodology towards new ways
of exploring children’s everyday lives across contexts. And in continuation of this,
towards changes in our approach to the concept of family moving from
conceptualizing family as a quite isolated entity - to exploring family life in its
connections to other developmental contexts. And they have argued for involving the
child’s own contribution to its developmental contexts - as an active creator of shared
social situations
Concerning such dialectical formulations, Hanne Haavind’s study from 1987 has
inspired researchers in Scandinavia and elsewhere through developmental concepts,
focusing neither solely on the child nor on its surroundings, but exactly on
development in this relationship.
I have especially been inspired by her concepts for analysing how the mutuality
between child and caregivers is changing in specific ways. It is for instance concepts
dealing with an extended mutuality, involvement in new tasks and affairs, expanded
responsibilities, new kinds of contributions and increasing motivation.
She also accentuates how development should not be seen as having one objective
and one sequence, but must be understood as “exceeding processes”. It cannot be
controlled or predicted, but we may point to possibilities for development.
In the section Child, families and communities Hanne Haavind and Agnes Andenæs
follow up on the attention given to care for small children’s everyday life, with a
focus on sharing early care and “chains of care” - stressing how just “setting the
caregiver in plural” provokes key concepts related to development: generating
“conceptual and theoretical challenges in relation to grasping the connection between
care and development”.
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3) Returning to the problematic tendencies about moving back and forth between
essentialist and relational understandings – Bronwyn Davivies formulated a
breakthrough in relation to exploring how children are positioned as (gendered)
children in a historical and discursive social practice.
This provides us with a focus on how children become persons through learning the
discursive practices in which all people are positioned as either male or female. In
Davies ways of listening to the children and acknowledging their perspectives on
gender, she not only introduced a new analytical practice related to poststructuralist
theory, but also illustrated new scientific practices involving children in the research.
This presents conceptualizations of social dynamics between persons and represents
an alternative to the short circuit about universal essence beyond historical and
cultural interplay. And by her analysis of the concept of community in the book
Davies illustrates how material matters are part of the human interplay and how
persons, nature, things (‘non-human participants’) and communities “affect” one
another and emerge through their meetings. Doing/becoming community comes into
focus, in contrast to ideas about stable homogeneous entities: communities become
emergent in ongoing encounters among co-existing multiplicities.
Now I want to touch on problematics related to the 3 concepts from our common
heading:
Changing perspectives on Child, Families and Communities
Child: In a very general sense, critical researchers and practitioners seem to pay
attention to the “child” in a way changing from a kind of an exceptional being on its
way to becoming a real person – to different kinds of approaches to children as
persons with agency and different perspectives on the daily life they share with each
other and with their adults.
For a long time, there has been fundamental critique of several developmental models
referring to their ways of detaching analyses from the children’s life contexts and not
including the subjectivity and social participation that mediate persons in
development. This was mostly expressed as a critique of developmental studies – but
I think that the research of all of us at this seminar illustrates that a period of critique
has been followed up by a multiplicity of empirical as well as theoretical studies.
The new kinds of studies are building on the theoretical critique and developing new
modes of conducting research, developing contextual understandings and going
beyond different disciplines and methodologies. And they involve children as
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subjects in new ways, as well as they involve the many other subjects engaged in
children’s everyday life, learning and development. The focus on a child taking part
in a common world, opens up for involving societal analyses, structural and
structuring dynamics as well as analyses of situated interplay between children.
Such conceptualizations raise political as well as pedagogical questions about
unequal developmental conditions, how to explore the personal meanings of this and
how to work explicitly with social conditions for learning and developing as a person
in a particular context.
In addition these attentions entail new ways of understanding social problems, taking
into account how categories from developmental psychology evolve in relation to and
have consequences for specific possibilities for investigating and dealing with
problems linked to early childhood education.
Thus, instead of universal standardizations psychological research should inspire
caregivers to concrete kinds of exploration of situations in children’s life and deliver
concepts for being curious about children’s perspectives on what is at stake in their
everyday life.
In relation to work for developmental conditions the attention could be turned in
direction of the importance of giving children experiences of contributing to
communities and being influential in relation to what matters to them.
Families: The concept of family seems almost as much of a key concept as the
“child” in discussions about early childhood education. Even though the very focus
on family has been criticized, the use of the concept does not decrease – but the use
seems to be enmeshed in conflictual change.
This implies the ways the family is investigated as a compound community, where
different participants with different lives across other contexts and with different
perspectives and contributions, make up the conditions for each other.
Moreover, it concerns the way the family is explored in connection with other
societal institutions and global structures, constituting conditions for being parents,
exercising care and cooperating with other caregivers. Parental tasks are undergoing
changes and are under new kinds of pressure.
Parental collaboration comes into the focus as a central issue to investigate. Exactly
the collaboration between the various care-takers seems to be troubled by conflicts
and by displacements of responsibility between the involved parties - for instance
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conflicts about when something is a problem, about what is the right way of being a
parent or about whether to give priority to the work of supporting child communities.
Opening up for acknowledging the plurality of perspectives on children’s lives,
development and education paves the way for new ways of understanding the
conflicts about the “right” way of giving care and for exploring the different
educational perspectives and practices around the world.
Our way of thinking about what should be the best for children is at one and the same
time connected to intimate and local cultures, to broader historical movements and to
structural distributions of tasks, responsibilities, positions and power.
Communities: The concept of community has been criticized for overlooking such
social differences, alluding to something harmonious, homogeneous, static, and in
this way for being imbued with ideological components. In relation to this critique, a
point of departure in ‘community’ may have excluding and preserving significations.
Still, the concept is also part of theoretical movements aimed at analysing the ways
persons constitute the conditions for each other, the ways persons are connected in
structuring interplay and the ways participants are connected through their different
relations to common matters.
In other words: Community becomes connected to emergence in ongoing encounters
and individual agency is to be found in the emergent and multiple encounters through
which communities are established and maintained.
In this way the concept of community goes up against individualism - especially the
individualization of developmental problems as something a child “has” or “has not”.
To understand developmental problems we have to involve the communities of the
social practices were children live and take part – and sometimes find themselves in
problematic situations. In this way the concept might be central to the point that the
behaviour of a child must be understood in the light of what the child is participating
in
So, the concept of communities seems to be used to prompt restrictions and
adjustments as well as to attempts for analysing social interplay and opening up for
democratic development in the educative practices for children.
These contradictions call for theoretical investigations and discussions – and today
we have time for that!
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References
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