Academic rigour and ideology are not incompatible in early childhood research

The times they are indeed a-changin’. Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), today, is situated in paradoxical times. While the international awareness on the importance of the early years, of the educational quality of childcare and on the value of the early years’ professions increases, many countries face a retreat of public responsibilities and a crisis of the workforce. At the same time educational scholars are increasingly accused of being biased. An interesting aspect of this paradox may be that it finally brings politics back into the nursery, as Moss (2007) pleaded for more than a decade ago.

The times where childcare was just about care, or when it was reduced to an issue of female employment lay definitely behind us. An eloquent example is how the Barcelona norms have been revised by the European Commission. In 2002, the European Parliament approved the Barcelona norms as a part of the Lisbon agreement, that aimed at involving more women in the labour market, in order to face the demographic challenges of the ageing population and falling birth rates. The Barcelona norms recommended all European Member States to provide publicly funded ECEC for 30% of the children below three years of age and 90% of the children from three years to compulsory school age (European Parliament 2002). The vision on ECEC was purely economic and, as a result, it was a policy on quantity, rather than on quality. In 2022, the Directorate General for Justice of the European Commission took the initiative to revise the Barcelona norms, after a consultation with an international group of experts. The new document not only increased the quantitative norms to 45% for the youngest children and 96% for the older ones, it also explicitly referred to the quality of ECEC (Council of the European Union 2022). The new text states (§ 21):

A high quality of ECEC is essential for ensuring that children benefit from participation in ECEC. While there is no single way to define and measure the concept of quality in ECEC settings, its essence lies in the quality of interaction between adults and children, irrespective of the ECEC system in place. Member States should ensure the provision of high-quality ECEC taking into account the various dimensions set out in the Recommendation on High-Quality Early Childhood Education and Care Systems, including access to ECEC services, the qualifications and working conditions of staff, the pedagogical curriculum, monitoring and evaluation, and the governance and financing of ECEC services. Of particular importance are elements such as staff-child ratio, staff qualifications, and continuous professional development.

The reference to the European Quality Framework and its quality indicators (European Commission 2018) is explicit and especially the workforce element of the EQF is mentioned as key. It is completely in line with the most recent Starting Strong Report of the OECD (2021). That report focuses on what is now called process quality: the meaningful interactions between adults and children, taking into account both emotional and educational support. It is safe to say that we have moved beyond the mere discussion on the economic function of ECEC and have now very well understood its pedagogical function, understanding pedagogy as education in the broadest sense. The most recent initiative of the European Commission (2020) is the Child Guarantee and it goes one step further. It frames ECEC as an essential right of children amidst other fundamental rights, including housing, nutrition and health. It recommends the European Member States to address barriers for childcare uptake of children from vulnerable families and promises considerable investments of ESF+ and the Recovery and Resilience Funds to do so. Therefore, it has asked the Member States to provide National Action Plans, detailing how (among others) to increase the participation of children from vulnerable families in ECEC (Council Recommendation 2021.1004 of 14 June 2021). Some of these National Action Plans are quite elaborate and have the potential to substantially decrease inequality (examples include, but are not limited to Bulgaria and Italy), others are shallower and do not include clear ambitions to do so (Flanders, France and some others) (Vandenbroeck and Morabito 2023; see also León et al. 2023). Despite the at times disappointing national action plans, in sum, international organisations, as well as researchers, agree that ECEC combines economic, pedagogic and social missions and that, in order to fulfil these missions, the workforce is essential. There is a general consensus that this requires substantial investments in staff qualifications, continuous professional development, better adult-child ratios, and leadership; in sum: a competent system (Urban et al. 2012).

De-professionalisation?

It is a remarkable paradox that while in the last two decades the awareness of the importance of the workforce and the quality of provision has substantially increased (OECD 2022), the crisis of the workforce – often driven by the retreat of public responsibilities – has also gained ground. There are several examples to be given, but the case of France is probably one of the more salient ones. For many years, France was known as a country where childcare was first and foremost a public responsibility (Lloyd and Penn 2013). Over the last decade, the growth of childcare in France has mainly been caused by an increase of smaller, less funded and less regulated centres, called ‘micro-crèches’ (Haut Conseil de la famille, de l’enfance et de l’âge 2018). More than half of them (80,000 places), totalling 20% of all childcare available in France is in the hands of four major commercial companies, realising between 1,1 and 1,4 billion Euro, whose chairholders expect a substantial return on their investment. The result is that this ‘run for profit’ has put an extreme pressure on both the workforce and the quality, defined as ‘dehumanising early childhood’ in a book by two investigative journalists (Gastaldi and Périsse 2023) after the tragic death of an 11-month-old child, poisoned by an overworked and overstressed childcare worker ‘who had lost it’. Following that tragic event, the national French inspection inquired many of these micro-crèches and published a report stating that:

(…) the effective staffing levels, professional training and the general ability to meet children's needs are disparate, leading to serious inequalities between regions. The deterioration in quality can lead to shortcomings in the emotional security and development of children, as well as burnout among professionals, who are no longer able to care for children in the required conditions. From this point of view, the shortage of professionals affecting the sector is an aggravating factor as much as a symptom. Low levels of pay, poor quality of working life and the feeling of not being able to give children the time they need make it difficult to attract and retain staff. (Bohic et al. 2023, 5)

A very similar evolution happened in Flanders. Between 2000 and 2010 over 25,000 childcare places were created in small childcare centres, without much funding, with the lowest qualified and poorly paid staff who had hardly any supervision or professional development opportunities. The combination of high adult/staff ratio’s, poor qualifications and little supervision provided the circumstances of the dramatic event of a baby dying from shaken infant syndrome and a subsequent parliamentary inquiry that led the competent minister to resign and the parliament to prescribe 75 recommendations to revise the control over the childcare sector. However, since then, many childcare centres have been forced to reduce their capacities as they lacked available staff. The problem of staff shortages is not limited to these two examples. Rather, we face more global workforce crisis, as Mona Sakr and her colleagues label it in their article in this issue. In 2021, the DG Education of the European Commission published a report on the issue and so did the OECD in 2022. Both international organisations agree on what needs to be done: increase the recognition of the profession, focus on the educational and social value of ECEC, among other by establishing a common set of core competences. And improve professional development opportunities, career prospects, salaries and working conditions. While there is agreement on what is at the roots of the workforce crisis and what needs to be done, policies evolve in various directions: some countries like Denmark increase their levels of professional requirements and lower their adult/staff ratios, while other countries evolve in opposite directions and continue to explore avenues to create maximal numbers of childcare places with minimal budgets, despite fierce political debates.

The education wars

The political debates on education have recently discovered a new arena: the war on woke. It has been argued that soft-hearted pedagogues who embraced postmodernism, social constructivism and child-centredness have eroded the knowledge base of education. These so-called leftist academics are accused of censoring every debate with their post-humanist, post-colonial political correctness and their ideologies of gender fluidity. To sum up the argument, the woke brigade is a threat to Western civilisation and needs to be stopped. While this is a short-cut, it is not even a caricature of some of the political debates that are currently going on in the European political arena,¹ while in the state of Florida nearly 400 books are banned from schools for not being aligned with heteronormativity or other norms of the moral crusaders. The books that are banned from schools include a graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary and a children’s book on Michelangelo, because of the nudity of some of the statues.

The accusation that the academia is disproportionally left-wing and liberal (among others by the Adam Smith Institute) deserves a good debate. For one thing, there is research about this issue showing that it is educational level, rather than anything else that is the determining factor here: for comparative (higher) levels of education, there is hardly any differences between academics and other highly educated populations. There is no greater homogeneity of political orientations among the professoriate relative to other specific professions, suggesting that there is a diversity of opinions which is similar to what professionals would find in other occupations (Van der Werfhorst 2019). The accusation, however, suggests that the academia, because of its alleged political bias, produces biased research, or put otherwise: that ideology is incompatible with academic rigour and this suggests that the liberal ideology of educational researchers hinders objective, firm, robust empirical research. That is indeed a peculiar statement that deserves some critical scrutiny.

It is difficult to imagine educational research without ideology. Education always has to do with the central question that Biesta (2015) puts forward:

The real quality question, therefore, is not whether particular educational processes and practices are effective and efficient but has to begin with asking what such processes and practices are supposed to be for.

That is inevitably an ideological question, as it is a question about imagined futures, untested feasibilities and possible utopias. Education is always intertwined with questions of what is fair, what is quality, what matters and this with explicit or implicit opinions on how the world our children grow up in, may look like. Questions of efficiency, effectivity or success, are always dependent on what we mean by ‘the good life’. That is why the answer to the question what education is for, has – according to Paulo Freire – always to do with ‘to understand the world in order to change it’. And he adds:

Only ideologically can I say that ideology disappeared. The discourse that denies the existence of ideology is, in itself, tremendously ideological. (Freire, Freire, and de Oliveira 2014, 28)

Every educational research is inevitably political in the sense that it always entails a choice: a choice of the image of the child; a choice of whose perspective is investigated and whose isn’t; an opinion on what early childhood education is for; and so many other choices. There is nothing wrong with that, not more than something would be wrong with the fact that the sun rises every day. It is just how it is and it has nothing to do with methodological choices. All too often it has been argued that quantitative research may be more objective and qualitative studies then are presented as more subjective. But of course, every quantitative study (as well as every case study, focus group, interview or observation) implies a choice of what to study, what matters, which questions to ask and what variables to consider as dependent. Equally so, qualitative studies require rigorous methodologies, validation of interpretations and transparency to avoid cherry picking. It only becomes problematic when the choice is obscured, when research questions are presented to us as self-evident, as obvious, as undisputable and when paradigmatic choices are presented as natural, universal and thus hegemonic. What is troublesome is when these choices are not presented as what they are: one possibility among many others possible perspectives and research questions, as that would obscure the responsibility of the researcher to stand up for his or her paradigmatic and – indeed – ideological choice.

The latter is probably the most obvious advantage of the paradoxical times we live in, when quality of ECEC is now generally accepted, yet policies often go in different directions and when researchers are accused to be too much involved in political standpoints. It makes it more obvious that all academic work entails an ideological and thus political position and it has the potential to bring back politics into the nursery (Moss 2007).

This is also obvious in this journal. One of the unique features of this journal is that it brings together research from several paradigms and methodologies, creating a forum beyond the paradigmatic divides, without therefore being lenient on academic rigour.

In the present volume, five studies explicitly study ECEC from the perspective of the child, a perspective that is embedded in a pedagogical tradition that is historically influenced by sociology of childhood, considering children as active agents (Mayall 2002). As a consequence, the authors also imply a perspective on what ECEC is for. Barbora Ludova and her colleagues address this more explicitly when looking at different approaches to curriculum planning, focusing both on child centredness and teacher autonomy. Lone Hatting takes the perspective of pursuing the child’s interest, and his or her development of curiosity and enjoyment as central in her study of outdoor play. In the same vein, Anna Ekström and Asta Cekaite look at peer relations and human sociality, by studying ECEC as a social community, beyond individual learning. Despina Kalessopoulou and her colleagues put forward the awareness of social justice as one of the potential answers to the question what ECEC is for, relying on Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. The contribution of Katja Tervahartiala and her Finnish colleagues can serve as an illustration that various methodologies may be used for common concerns. Based on data of a cohort study, they looked at the impact of childcare use on socio-emotional development. In addition, three articles complement the previous analyses from the perspective of the professionals and are therefore inscribed in the growing awareness of the need for professionalisation that we have illustrated above. Lesly Wood and Marinda Neethling focus on the need of professionalisation of staff in South Africa and plead for managerial training. Mona Sakr and colleagues discuss the workforce crisis and plead for leadership as an integral part of a competent system. It is interesting to read both, as they both remain rather implicit in what their common concern on quality is about, but may have a different take on what leadership versus management may mean. Quite another take at the same discussion is given by Mo Wang and Xiumin Hong who document job positions in relation to early childhood leadership in China and who illustrate (and question) the hierarchy of these positions. Finally, three articles in this volume explore quite different avenues of the early years. Ahmet Sami Konca and colleagues study the efficiency of emerging apps that claim to foster STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Suzannie Leung and Kimburley Choi also look at digital devices in preschool classrooms, yet focus on the teachers’ perspectives on their use in visual arts education. Both these articles have a more outcome-based approach than most of the previously discussed contributions. Finally, Jessie-Lee McIsaac contributes to a series of previously published articles that are concerned with the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Taken together, these articles illustrate the variety of possible perspectives, children, parents professionals, starting from different concerns (children’s self-directed learning as well as developmental outcomes defined by professionals), and using diverse paradigms and methodologies (from telephone interviews to cohort data). These have all been choices by individuals and/or research groups and/or funders. What matters is to continue to see them as what they are: choice amidst other possibilities, that reflect opinions of their authors on what matters. In that sense, all of these contributions are in some way ideological. Yet they are all quite rigorous pieces of scholarly work. The advantage of this journal and the present volume is precisely to continue to have an open view on these possibilities.

Notes

1 One example of exactly proclaiming this in Flanders is a book named “Over Woke” (About Woke) by the chair of the largest political party, Bart De Wever.