Resourcing Early Learners

New Networks, New Actors

Sue Nichols, Jennifer Rowsell, Helen Nixon, Sophia Rainbird

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136284588
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

The landscape of early childhood education and care is changing. Governments world-wide are assuming increasing authority in relation to child-rearing in the years before school entry, beyond the traditional role in assisting parents to do the best they can by their children. As part of a social agenda aimed at forming citizens well prepared to play an active part in a globalised knowledge economy, the idea of 'early learning' expresses the necessity of engaging caregivers right from the start of children's lives. Nichols, Rowsell, Rainbird, and Nixon investigate this trend over three years, in two countries, and three contrasting regions, by setting themselves the task of tracing every service and agent offering resources under the banner of early learning. Far from a dry catalogue, the study involves in-depth ethnographic research in fascinating spaces such as a church-run centre for African refugee women and children, a state-of-the-art community library and an Australian country town. Included is an unprecedented inventory of an entire suburban mall. Richly visually documented, the study employs emerging methods such as Google-mapping to trace the travels of actual parents as they search for particular resources. Each chapter features a context investigated in this large, international study: the library, the mall, the clinic, and the church. The author team unravels new spaces and new networks at work in early childhood literacy and development.

1 The Early Learning Agenda

RAISING EARLY LEARNERS

Debbie is married to a truck driver and the family lives on the outskirts of an Australian country town within reach of the suburban sprawl. With husband Andy, she is raising daughters Morgan (5) and Bonnie (2). Debbie did not complete high school but values education highly for her own children and wants them to attend a private school. She shops around for the cheapest educational toys and activities she can find and uses the Internet to source free materials. Debbie attends a church-run local playgroup and undertook the parenting class run by the state government’s health service. She is not a reader and never goes to the town’s library: Andy says ‘it’s called the Internet these days’.

Joanna and her two sons Sam and Alberto live with Sams’ father in an American university town. The library is Juliana’s favorite place to find materials and activities to support her children’s learning. Not only does it have a good selection of children’s books and DVDs in both Spanish and English, but it runs Spanish language classes which her eldest attends. Joanna reads parenting books like the ‘What to Expect’ series, and finds information through Google searches, but if she is ever worried about her children’s development she’ll talk to the pediatrician at their regular check-up.

Simon is the home-based father to Cassandra (6) and Brian (3), enabling his partner Kristine to work long hours at a well-paying job. Simon wants to ensure that his children’s lives are filled with enriching activities. This involves purchasing educational materials but, because Simon doesn’t like his children to spend too long in commercial environments, he does quite a bit of research online and goes to stores alone on the weekend. He likes Leapfrog products and educational DVDs which the children can watch in the van while he is driving. Simon has a favorite parenting website and says ‘the Internet has been wonderful’ in breaking down the isolation of being ‘almost a single parent’.

These are some of the parents who told us how and why they invested time, thought, and money in raising their young children to be academically and socially successful in their immediate and future lives. These brief summaries highlight some of the strategies they have used, the services they have accessed and the particular goals which have driven their resourcing practices. They are bringing up children at a time when there has been an upsurge in public interest in the young child as the subject of concern and active shaping. Around the world, there has been significant policy making, funding and service development aimed at bringing the smallest citizens and their carers into the spaces and networks of institutions offering to support them. Along with these initiatives come agendas that privilege particular beliefs about young children and their development and learning, that encourage particular ways of working with and caring for children, and that empower particular agents in the delivery of services aimed at producing early learners.

INVESTING IN EARLY LEARNING: THE SOCIOPOLITICAL CONTEXT

The president of the US office in 2010 released a fact sheet titled Promoting Early Learning for Success in School and in Life (US Departments of Education and Health and Human Services). In the statement’s opening sentence President Barak Obama is described as ‘committed to creating a 21st century workforce’ and as viewing early learning programs as ‘an integral component to creating an educational system that is internationally competitive’. Among the initiatives detailed in the sheet is an Early Learning Challenge Fund which will be accessed by state governments prepared to ‘establish model systems of early learning and development for children from birth to kindergarten’.

In making this commitment, Obama was in part responding to considerable lobbying pressure from a cluster of coalitions representing business, education, and community interests. The role of business leaders in promoting early learning is a notable characteristic of the contemporary scene. An example is Blake Wade, president of the Oklahoma Business Roundtable and a spokesperson for the coalition Oklahoma Champions for Early Opportunities (OCEO). This group provides speakers who attend organizational meetings to speak in favor of increased funding for early childhood education. Wade underlines the economic argument in a quote on the organization’s Facebook page:

This is an economic issue as much as it is an education issue. Businesses need to be able to tap a highly skilled workforce and benefit from the expertise of tomorrow’s leaders. Early learning makes good economic sense. (Oklahoma Champions for Early Opportunities 2011)

OCEO supports its campaign with reference to the notion of a critical period in brain development which is assumed to occur in the first four years of life:

About 85 percent of a child’s brain architecture is developed by the time he or she is 3 years old, but less than 4 percent of education dollars is typically spent on children by that time. (ibid.)

The Gates Foundation uses the same comparison between brain development and financial investment in its detailed proposal to fund model early learning centers in Washington State (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 2005), and indeed versions appear in many places. The rhetorical device can be traced back to Voices for America’s Children, an organization which commissioned an analysis comparing public funding for early childhood education with funding for schools and colleges. In the report a graph appears which charts, on one line, brain development over time, and on another, state funding for education over time. The logic of this representation is that funding is being spent on a period where the pay-off is low as presumably the child’s brain has virtually stopped growing. This report Early Learning Left Out was widely quoted and quickly began appearing as links on the websites of other organizations in the US, such as Texans Care for Children and the Family Policy Center Iowa, and globally, including the Australian Council for Educational Research.

The notion of a critical period of brain development is central to contemporary concerns about the early years of children’s lives and the argument that these years ought to be spent in learning (Nadesan 2002). While the idea that children develop rapidly in the early years is not new, its contemporary reemergence owes much to media translations of developments in the field of neuroscience. Like many who write in the field of early childhood education, the authors of this book are not experts in neuroscience. However, it can be seen from the burgeoning of media and consumer products related to claims about infant brain development, that lack of specialist knowledge has not been an impediment to participation in public discourse.

In the process of translating neuroscience into concepts that laypeople can work with, the notion of the critical period has been made to carry a lot of weight. This notion presents the brain as actively growing and thus amenable to influence in the early years but as hard wired and fixed after this period of early growth is over. A structural model of the brain underpins claims such as this from the website of advocacy group First Five Nebraska:

By the time a child is five years old, the architecture of the brain, the foundation for all future learning, has been built. We can never go back and rewire the foundation. (First Five Nebraska 2011)

The task for those charged with child-rearing is to actively build young children’s brain architecture. Older children whose educational achievement is below average are thus positioned as structurally flawed, and their carers are judged as incompetent builders. When looked at retrospectively, given what is known about the composition of the category of ‘failing’ students, it is possible to see how the argument about brain development impacts differently on families depending on their class and race status. In a review of media and consumer texts, Nadesan has unpacked the class assumptions underpinning the early brain development debate. She notes that:

Working-class parents, who lack the cultural capital of their middleclass counterparts, are implicitly targeted as lacking the skills to adequately stimulate and prepare their infants. (Nadesan 2002, 422)

The message of neuroscience regarding stimulating young children’s brains is not new to middle-class parents who have for generations been consuming advice books and magazines promoting this very idea (Seiter 1993; Woollet and Phoenix 1996; Gram 2004). Thus an established middle-class mode of child-rearing is even more firmly cemented in its privileged position. The class inflection of the debate about early learning is seen even more clearly when considering the underpinning economic arguments. Preventing the next generation of welfare dependent adults from being created is explicitly part of the case presented by business leaders like Blake Wade, referred to earlier as promoting the idea of a critical period:

[C]hildren who take part in early learning are more likely to succeed in academics, graduate high school and attend college. They are less likely to experience teen pregnancy, have disciplinary problems or be forced to go on welfare programs. (Oklahoma Champions of Early Opportunities 2011 ibid.)

Early learning is thus being framed up, at least in part, as a welfare issue. As such it becomes the business of more than families and the education system.

‘Educare’—The Drive to Integration

The Starting Strong report, commissioned by the OECD, argued for the global adoption of the term ‘Early Childhood Education and Care’ to express a new ‘systemic and integrated approach for children from birth to 8 years’ (OECD 2006, 13). This new approach was described as involving the state and the family in a shared responsibility for young children’s socialization, bringing together its social and educational dimensions (Haddad 2001). While several countries had already moved in this direction (for instance Sweden), the drive for integration of education and care became policy in an increasing number of national jurisdictions in the following decade.

The hybridizing of education and care is expressed in the term ‘Educare’, the modern use of which can be traced back to American professor of pediatrics Bettye Caldwell, who described herself as ‘carrying on a one-woman campaign’ for its adoption (Caldwell 1991). She would have been delighted to learn that the British government named Educare a key element in its Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners (Department of Education and Skills 2004). Early childhood was but one element in this policy which covered infants up to university students and was based on the notion of ‘seamless service’ both between different agencies and from one stage in a child’s life to the next.

As a means to deliver ‘seamless’ service for young children and their families, the concept of the ‘one-stop shop’ has gained ground, manifesting in a range of variations in different national and regional contexts. Describing the UK version, government minister Charles Clark stated:

All parents [are] able to get local one-stop support through Children’s Centres that will provide childcare, education, health, employment and parenting support. (Department of Education and Skills 2004, 7)

One-stop shops are generally not new projects but have been created through processes of amalgamation and extension of existing services over which governments have had historical control, such as schools. Inevitably this has meant that the degree to which all the elements claimed to be part of an integrated service actually are present is highly variable. Much of the initial emphasis, by states moving toward integration, has been on the colocation of long-day child care and sessional kindergarten, enabling parents to enroll their children into the one center from infancy to preschool. It is difficult in practice to include substantial health services on sites not designed as clinics; where a health component is present, this has generally taken the form of simple health checks, information provision, and educational programs.

Critics of integration policy point out that the rhetoric of seamlessness draws attention from the tensions and turf-wars between sectors (Cardini 2006). Education has historically greater institutional strength than child care owing to its extensive school sector and more highly educated and paid practitioners. The downward extension of the curriculum, discussed ahead, has met with resistance from some in the care sector. Another tension is between the state, which has a mandate to deliver the public good, and the private sector, which is responsible to its shareholders. The business drive for early childhood resourcing is at the same time a strategy for getting government resources into the hands of private companies.

It does appear, though, that moves to integration have encouraged previously separate agents to increase their awareness of each other’s activities and to forge connections and relationships. At the same time, the rhetoric of collaboration and partnership creates openings for a diverse array of players to lobby, mobilize, forge alliances, attempt to influence the agenda, and jostle for resources. The context of integration has contributed to making ‘early learning’ a space of fuzzy and permeable boundaries, subject to continual redefinition in policy and practice.

The Early Learning Vaccine

Arguments for intervening in the lives and care of young children have gained ground in recent years and have been used to marshal a range of services and stakeholders to the agenda. At the heart of these arguments lie two convictions: that the child contains the seeds of future success and failure, and that the health of a society or nation can be calculated by balancing its successful citizens on one side of the ledger and its failures on the other. Typical of such arguments is the policy statement for the Australian Stronger Families and Communities Strategy :

[E]arly intervention [is] an important strategy for improving the life chances of all children and tackling the root cause of complex social problems’. (Department of Family and Community Services 2005, 3)

Then UK prime minister Tony Blair, interviewed in 2006, said ‘we should be intervening far earlier’. The idea that waiting until children are at school is too late is one of the beliefs underpinning early intervention initiatives. Blair based his argument on the assumption that it is possible to tell at an early age the children who will cause trouble for their society when they are older, and by targeted intervention prevent the emergence of full-blown disorder:

I think if you talk, as I do, to teachers sometimes they will tell you... at age 3, 4, 5 they are already noticing the symptoms of a child that when they are 14 or 15 is out on the street causing mayhem. (Quoted in Smeyers 2008, 730)

The school is here understood as the site where preexisting problems are rendered visible, rather than as contributing to the problems. These problems, it is believed, precede the child’s entry into formal education. By implication, they are being formed in the settings where young children are raised—their families and communities.

Intervention initiatives take two broad forms: targeted and universal. Interventions targeted at preschool children in disadvantaged populations have been a feature of the landscape for decades; the longest running example is Head Start in the US. Targeted interventions of this kind are specifically designed for problematic subpopulations. States use existing data on social outcomes such as unemployment, high school completion, and juvenile crime rates to identify the communities in which early intervention programs will be located. Programs such as this, which were focused on socializing children of marginalized communities, left the mainstream middle-class population largely untouched.

Universal intervention programs aim to deliver to a whole population some program or treatment which promotes practices believed to improve the life chances of every individual. Universal early childhood interventions are a sign that governments wish to more actively monitor how citizens are raising their children. In achieving this goal they have looked to existing universal services, such as primary health care, which can incorporate new dimensions without greatly altering their mode of delivery. The economic rationale is as attractive to policy makers as it was for vaccinating against polio: a cheap, simple solution administered to a whole population through the medium of universal primary health care.

In the US, where regular well-being checkups with the pediatrician are routine, families are being offered advice on reading to their young children. Reading to children is one practice that has been shown to confer certain advantages on children and has been hailed as an ideal focus for early intervention. Reach Out and Read involves pediatricians talking about reading to children in check-ups, offering advice on techniques, and providing families with free books (Needleman et al. 2005). A similar approach is taken in some Australian states through the nurse home visiting service for parents of infants. In South Australia, parents take their child’s ‘blue book’ (infant health records) to the library to receive their book bag.

Public commentary on these programs frequently uses medical language which represents early learning interventions as a form of vaccination or cure and health practitioners as the go-to people for literacy advice, as in this article from e-maga...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Routledge Research in Education
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Early Learning Agenda
• 2 Tracing Early Learning Resources
• 3 The Mall
• 4 The Clinic
• 5 The Church
• 6 The Library
• 7 The Networked Discursive Field of Early Learning
• Author Biographies
• Bibliography
• Index