Much of the western or developed world, including New Zealand and Australia, is influenced by a political discourse called neoliberalism, University of New England School of Education Professor Margaret Sims writes.
Decisions about what are the best policies to shape what organisations should be doing are underpinned by a neoliberal ideology. In education this means that there has been a dramatic shift over the last few decades from positioning education as a tool aimed at addressing issues of social justice to seeing education as a tool responsible for producing employable citizens (Baltodana, 2012). Giroux (2015) claims schooling is no longer about education but rather about training. He argues that big business is increasingly becoming involved in education, setting the curriculum by defining the skills and knowledge people need to get a job when they graduate.
These skills and knowledge are increasingly standardised in order to prepare graduates for employment in a globalised world. The pressure for standardisation is then linked to the pressure for accountability: it is easier to determine education is ‘successful’ if the same measure of success can be performed across all children, across all states and even across all countries. In Australia we do this through NAPLAN and the AEDI; internationally this is done through PISA. Performance on these standardised tests has become all important, to the extent that in the US, Bill Gates is arguing that teachers’ pay rates should be determined by their students’ performance on the tests (Hursh & Henderson, 2011). Unfortunately this often means that, in order to be deemed successful, teachers have to teach to the test.
Lost elements
You may wonder what this means for early childhood. Firstly, while I support the intentions of the National Quality Framework (NQF), I argue that the increasing standardisation of curriculum for preservice teachers imposed by Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA) runs the risk of creating a body of required knowledge that prepares graduates for the workforce but does not prepare them to take the lead in transforming current knowledge into new forms for the future. Second, I argue that the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) and NQF serve to ‘re-professionalise’ early childhood teachers. By using the word ‘re-professionalise’, I am following the lead of researchers such as Oberhuemer (2005) and Williamson and Morgan (2009) from the UK. In the UK, neoliberal changes, begun under the New Labour regime of Tony Blair, introduced controls on what was acceptable knowledge and practice and what was not. In order to be perceived as professional, early childhood teachers needed to change their work to more closely fit the official discourse and in the process they believed they lost important elements of their work (O’Connell, 2011). In particular they believed that they lost the element of care and the emotional/relationship work they felt was so important in early childhood. This was, instead, replaced by a discourse of education where lesson plans, literacy and numeracy reigned paramount. I have previously reported on similar concerns I hold for the future of the Australian early childhood sector (Sims, 2014).
In an ideal world early childhood teachers would articulate their concerns and work together to lead the evolution of their profession in the directions they believe are in the best interests of Australian children, families and the teachers themselves. However, I sometimes feel rather like a voice in the wilderness. There is a substantial academic critique (Davis & Degotardi, 2015a, 2015b; Sims & Tausere-Tiko, 2016; Sims & Waniganayake, 2015b; Sumsion & Grieshaber, 2012; Sumsion, Grieshaber, McArdle & Shield, 2014) but at the level of practice, my experience is that many early childhood leaders prefer to focus on compliance: how they can best enact the EYLF and NQF in their services. Such a position was identified in our research (Sims, Forrest, Semann & Slattery, 2014; Sims & Waniganayake, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c) where early childhood leaders talked about the importance of making sure staff understood and followed the requirements outlined in the NQF and EYLF, rather than using the framework to “open up new spaces for conversations about ECEC pedagogy, curriculum and the discourses that underpin them” (Sumsion et al. ) as was hoped by the developers.
Is this how we want to enact professionalism? Should we resist or should we ‘go with the flow’? Some argue that simply surviving and doing the best job possible in the circumstance is, in itself an act of resistance (Springer, 2010). Others try to find ways to do things a little differently but still within the ‘rules’: I suggest that the growing popularity of alternative early childhood philosophies (such as Magda Gerber, Steiner, Reggio) is a sign of a more subtle resistance. This kind of approach can be seen as a way of disturbing the balance of power in a way that supports people to reflect on what is important and what is not (Tesar, 2014). We can also use humour to promote reflection. White (2014) calls this approach carnavalesque. Ultimately resistance begins with our ability to rethink what education is about, and what we want our role in that to be. We need educational leaders who will work with us all on this journey.
References
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Davis B & Degotardi S 2015b Who cares? Infant educators’ responses to professional discourses of care. Early Child Development and Care, 1-15. doi: 10.1080/03004430.2015.1028385
Giroux, H (2015) Dangerous thinking in the age of the new authoritarianism. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
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