Policies of interlude and interruption: stories of governance as an assemblage

ABSTRACT

The early childhood education (ECE) sector has been subjected to increased governance, which has manifested in an increased focus on monitoring and steering the daily life of preschools. It is well documented that instruments of governance change teachers’ priorities and practices. Changes are not always in line with the aims of the governing instrument. Empirical studies concerning governance in children’s everyday lives have been rarer. Understanding the mechanisms of governance in the everyday lives of teachers and children requires theoretical tools which allow researchers to notice heterogeneous and situational elements that play a role in the act of governance. We explore governance in the contexts of ECE in two countries, Finland and Australia, with the help of ethnographic data and the concept of ‘assemblage’. We propose an ontological foundation for governance research in ECE. We argue that taking socio-materiality as an ontological foundation of the research inquiry helps to see how the density of the socio-material elements of the situation may intensify the possibility of governing instruments interrupting meaningful interaction between children and adults.

KEYWORDS:

• assemblage
• governance
• education policy
• early childhood education

Introduction

This article contributes to the discussion on how governance operates in early childhood education (ECE). By ECE we mean institutional settings for children from birth to the age of five, which can be preschools, day care centres or kindergartens. ECE has been increasingly recognised as an important service for families, children, and the whole of society by policy makers in many different places around the world (OECD 2019; Penn 2011). The emergent knowledge of early brain development together with the aims related to the knowledge economy have highlighted the role of ECE in children’s lives and society at large. At the same time, increasing economic pressures have been experienced by ECE providers (Lloyd and Penn 2014). At least partly as a result of the combination of these two developments, efficiency has been sought in producing good quality ECE to educate the future workforce and meet the other aims of ECE (see Paananen, 2017). This has intensified the aims to monitor and control daily life in ECE. Examples exist in various national contexts. For instance, Nygård (2017) has reported that because the quality of ECE moderates the effect of child outcomes, the Norwegian state has increased its aims to control, and steer ECE settings. The same has happened in many other places, such as Hong Kong (Rao and Li 2009), Australia (Hunkin 2018), and Finland (see Vlasov et al. 2019).

In other words, the ECE sector has been subjected to increased governance, which has manifested in an increased focus on monitoring and steering the daily life of educators and the settings in which they work. In practice, this has meant increased regulation, external evaluation and increased demand for documenting practices for showing compliance with regulation. This is related to other changes in the field, such as an increased focus on marketisation, and the use of corporate management models as the main drivers of improvement (Ball 2003; Roberts-Holmes and Bradbury 2016). However, in the policy discussion, the kind of influences different ways of governing ECE have in the realities of children and educators’ everyday lives is rarely considered. The type of governance that can help create the best possible conditions for children to develop, learn, and feel belonging has received little research attention. As the unintended consequences of governance remain underexplored, little is known about how governance works in the context of everyday life. We prompt this discussion by suggesting an ontological foundation for examining governance in the everyday lives of children.

Examining governance in ECE

Our approach to governance in ECE builds on earlier governance studies (e.g. Miller and Rose 1990; Paananen 2017; Watson, Millei and Peterson 2015). The roots of the interest in critiquing the modern form of governing go back to Michel Foucault’s (1977) work on government, governance, and governmentality in the course of his investigations of political power: government means techniques and procedures that direct human behaviour. ‘Governance’ is understood as a particular mode of government in which subjects are directed from ‘a distance’ without destroying their autonomy (Miller and Rose 1990). The concept of governance is used to describe a shift in the mode of governing populations where governing moves beyond the mere coercion of individuals (Foucault 1977; Miller and Rose 1990).

Studies in ECE have generally addressed governance by examining governing documents and policies to unravel how the societal roles of ECE become constructed (e.g. Bloch et al. 2003; Dahlberg and Moss 2004; Paananen et. al, 2015; Rudolph, Millei, and Alasuutari 2019) or how the imaginaries related to children and childhood are governed (e.g. Hultqvist and Dahlberg 2001; Millei and Joronen 2016). The empirical examination of how governance moulds everyday practices has most often taken the teacher’s perspective: how governance promotes teachers’ subjectification, such as the growth of the entrepreneurial self who is willing to act within the frames of the neoliberal project and perform effectively (Osgood 2006); how it narrows and instrumentalises teachers’ work (Roberts‐Holmes and Bradbury 2016; Öqvist and Cervantes 2018); how responsibility for policy-making is transferred to ECE actors (Millei, Gobby, and Gallagher 2017); and how governance shifts the teachers’ professional focus to the documentation of ‘quality of practice’ (Grant et al. 2018, 526). In sum, it is well documented that these instruments of governance change teachers’ priorities and practices and the ways in which teachers talk about their work. It has been systematically reported that changes are not always in line with the aims of the governing instrument.

Empirical studies concerning governance in children’s everyday lives have been rarer. Research on the local practices of governing that take place in ECE shows that not only policy documents govern teachers and children; everyday material objects also influence the way in which children are categorised. For example, Watson, Millei, and Petersen (2015) have shown in their ethnographic study conducted in Australia, how non-human actors such as a wrist band worn by an educator as a sign of responsibility, or a scooter board which is used exclusively with a child with a diagnosis while other children are discouraged from using it, contribute to the constitution of the ‘normal’, and thus, regulate both educators and children. Also, earlier research shows that children themselves are not passive in the process of governance and that they enact governance in their everyday lives. Using video-recordings, Cobb, Danby, and Farrell (2005) examined how children enacted governance in their everyday spaces in a preparatory year classroom. They manipulated materials and places to regulate each other’s actions in the interactive play spaces and created membership categories to exclude or include others. The present article seeks to address this gap by bridging the viewpoints presented on the one hand by Bloch et al. (2003), Dahlberg and Moss (2004), and on the other by Watson, Millei, and Petersen (2015) and Cobb, Danby, and Farrell (2005): it is not only policies formulated in internationally, nationally or locally nor material entities nor human actors using or manipulating material objects that govern every day lives in ECE; but rather, heterogeneous and emerging relations among various human and non-human entities coming together sometimes in unexpected ways that then regulate the ways in which educators and children act. It seems likely that different governance instruments influence the ways in which policies are enacted in ECE depending on the type of instrument, the focus of the instrument, how the instruments are used, and other elements that are involved in the situation. This interaction has not been discussed extensively in the field of ECE. In this article, a policy is not assumed to have homogeneous consequences; instead, our approach allows us to understand various consequences by taking into account the complex entanglement of both human and non-human agents in the processes of governance. This is done by examining governance in the everyday lives of children with the help of assemblage theory (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; DeLanda 2006, 2019).

Thinking with the concept of assemblage

Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of assemblage offers access to elusive phenomena in the field of the ‘social’. Therefore, it provides a tool for understanding governance of ECE, a social phenomenon that evades clear-cut explanations. By assemblage we mean a bundle of heterogeneous socio-material components such as material and physical entities and discourses which steer individuals and groups in particular directions (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; DeLanda 2006; see also Latour 2013).

The usefulness of the concept of assemblage in education policy studies has been discussed by Fenwick (2010), Gorur (2011), Youdell (2015) and Thompson, Sellar, and Buchanan (2021). The concept has been used in empirical research in education policy studies to examine how teaching standards constitute the practice and identity of the ‘accomplished’ teacher (Mulcahy 2011), how education policy works in the local context in globalised arenas (Koh 2011), how national policies are used in multiple ways in different contexts (Paananen et al. 2019), and how numbers such as child-staff ratios have various roles in steering the everyday life of the educational institution (Paananen 2020). In other words, the concept has helped researchers to point out that policies are not totalising external forces, but elements that act in combination with other varying elements in local situations. Questions have been asked about whether the concept of assemblage simply provides an intellectual way of saying something that has already been argued multiple times before, namely, that social reality is complex, or that policy-making and governance involve multiple interraleted actors (see Thompson, Sellar, and Buchanan 2021; Wallin 2012). In this article, we address the call by Thompson, Sellar and Buchanan to go beyond describing relations among things and explore the performative force of assemblages. They argue that focusing on ‘strata’ and ‘desire’ would help with this task. We develop this idea and bridge Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of ‘strata’ with Ferraris (2012) typology of entities existing in the world as it relates to his theory of the ontology of the social. We show how concepts that are embedded in socio-material ontology help us to examine how governance operates in the everyday lives of educators and children in ECE centres. To this end, in what follows, we examine the concepts of ‘socio-materiality’, ‘strata’ and ‘desire’ more closely.

Inspired by the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Ferraris (2012), we propose an ontological foundation for governance research in ECE in which the concept of assemblage is embedded, namely socio-materiality. By socio-materiality, we mean an ontological premise in which materiality is not ‘consolidated within artefacts, but is distributed’ (Fenwick, Edwards, and Sawchuk 2015, 17), meaning that social processes can be understood as fundamentally material. Materiality emphasizes the role of ‘nonhumans’, and especially the heterogeneous relations among them in the processes of becoming actors (see Ferrando 2013). In assemblage theory, this is conceptualized as assemblage. Assemblage is therefore a relational construct that aims to capture the ‘segmented’ nature of reality. By segmented we mean that assemblage, according to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘is between two layers, two strata’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 40). In our thinking, the assemblage is between at least two strata, but rather often there would be more than two strata in operation. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), in assemblage, diverse strata, inorganic (geological matter; such as sand), organic (biological matter; such as human bodies or trees) and alloplastic (social or techno-semilogical; such as text, computers) strata sediment and ‘act’ as a whole (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; see also Thompson, Sellar, and Buchanan 2021).

This is mostly in line with what Maurizio Ferraris (2012) wrote about the ontology of the ‘social’. According to Ferraris (2012), there are three different units of ontological entities (objects) in the world: natural (or physical), ideal, and social. Natural objects such as trees, rocks, animals and human bodies exist in space and time. Trees grow over time and then they fall, and finally decompose. Their existence is separate from the subjects who know them in the sense that they would exist regardless of the human existence and being known. Ferraris does not separate organic and non-organic as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) do, but it is easily understood that natural objects could be divided into two. To Ferraris (2012), natural (physical) objects may be built by subjects; examples include furniture, computers or houses. Natural (physical) objects may also have a function created by subjects, for example, a rock that serves as a paper weight. He calls them artifacts. They have a social element intertwined with them. This resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s alloplastic strata.

Ferraris (2012) typology brings additional value to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) idea of strata via ideal objects. Ideal objects exist independently of space and time and are also independent from the subjects who know them. For example, relations such as ‘smaller than’ or ‘more than’ are ideal objects (Ferraris 2012). If a rock rolling down a mountain is bigger than a crack in the mountain side it will not fall into the crack no matter who is observing it. The logic of a bigger object not fitting in a smaller crack does not change over time even if erosion might change the relations and the crack becomes bigger and the rock smaller. Therefore, these relations are not variable but static and methodic. For our purposes in this article, we call this methodic strata.

Conversely, the existence of social objects depends on the subjects who know them. If there were no subjects, ECE would not exist, and neither would money nor friendships. According to Ferraris (2012), social objects are acts that are inscribed in natural objects such as on paper or in the brain, and are recognized and sufficiently shared with at least two people. By definition, at least two subjects (two humans but why not any animal who has representations) are needed to form a social object. The world of natural objects exists independently, but not separately, of conceptual schemes and perceptions. In the world of social objects, however, belief determines being, given that these objects depend on subjects. So unless there are subjects which are capable of recognizing these social objects, such social objects do not exist. Only the natural objects on which these social objects are inscribed would exist (Ferraris 2012).

Governance of ECE belongs to alloplastic strata and includes social objects such as curriculum, daily routines in ECE, and culturally constructed gender roles. In addition to alloplastic strata, there are layers of methodic and physical (both organic and non-organic) strata involved in acts of governance. We illuminate this later in this article.

Stratification contributes to the fact that acts of governance are constituted by relations between various social, natural, methodic layers. On the one hand, these sediments are not fixed. Rather, assemblages that govern the daily life of ECE are in flux – they change, as ‘a component part of an assemblage may be detached from it and plugged into a different assemblage in which its interactions are different’ (DeLanda 2006, 10). This means that an assemblage is unstable – it receives and loses parts, and changes in this process. To be more specific, governance is an interrelated combination of elements from alloplastic strata such as national policies, context-specific regulations, cultural norms and views about the societal role of ECE, which become plugged into a combination of other entities present in ECE environments, such as children with their individual characteristics, and material environments situated in organic, non-organic, alloplastic and methodic strata.

On the other hand, conceptualising governance as assemblage calls for the examination of culturally and historically situated desires becoming part of assemblages of governance in everyday ECE practice. Desire works as a glue that sticks different elements of governing assemblages together. It is therefore necessary to understand how governance operates in ECE. Desire is a driver of actions: a productive force that forms relations between different elements of an assemblage. There are desires that reinforce social norms and desires that seek to disrupt them but in all, desire draws different entities – human and non-human – into relation with each other, and in the process generates social ‘forms’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; see also Thompson, Sellar, and Buchanan 2021). According to Deleuze (1972, 233), ‘desire is revolutionary by nature because it builds desiring‐machines which, when they are inserted into the social field, are capable of derailing something, displacing the social fabric’. In Deleuze and Guattari’s view (Deleuze 1972), desire is an active vital force which does not have object nor fixed subject. It is productive and actualisable only through practice. ‘Social wholes’ such as communities utilize desires in order to produce interests, which are collective and organised forms of desire. In the context of ECE this can mean a human’s basic desire to belong to a community, being a good and valued member of a community and thus performing actions that are culturally, and in certain communities, produced as signs of a good employee. Desire to belong to a community takes different forms depending on the governing assemblages present in the situation.

These concepts help understand the nature and the logic of governance in ECE as they allow us to consider governance both as ephemeral, contingent and culturally embedded at the same time. Therefore, we think that this approach is particularly useful for examining governance in the lives of children. The aim of the paper is two fold: we provide an empirical study of governance in children’s every day lives, and aim to illuminate how the concept of ‘assemblage’ is helpful as a theoretical tool – in this case it helps to understand how a policy can take on varied forms in the everyday lives of ECE settings. We argue that taking socio-materiality as an ontological foundation of the research inquiry helps to see how the density of the socio-material elements of the situation may intensify the possibility of governing instruments prioritizing certain desires over others, such as interrupting meaningful interaction between children and adults.

Methodology

Exploring governance with the help of the concept of assemblage calls for an ethnographic methodology (e.g. Gordon, Holland, and Lahelma 2001), as otherwise it would be difficult to understand the ways in which different entities of governance assemblage come together and apart again. Ethnography is suited to the task because it ‘entails “being there” as an ethnographer in “the field” among “the people” under study with the ambition of understanding and theorizing the meaning of lived experience’ (Trondman, Willis, and Lund 2018, 31). Such an understanding enables insight into the temporal aspects of everyday lives, specifically the operation of governance in children’s lives in ECE contexts. The data consist of ethnographic work in Australia and Finland.

In both Finland and Australia, ECE is governed by both national and local authorities. Binding norms define minimum requirements such as staff qualifications and child–staff ratios in both contexts. In both countries, ECE is organized as a mixture of private and public services. In Finland, municipalities are the main providers of ECE services. In Australia, private expenditure to ECE services is considerably higher, meaning that privately organized and run services are more common than in Finland (OECD 2015). In addition, the pedagogy is guided by Belongong being and becoming: The early years learning framework for Australia (Commonwealth of Australia 2009), the mandatory framework for the Australian before school sector, and the National Curriculum Guidelines in Finland (Finnish National Agency for Education 2018). In both contexts, providers are required to have their own curricula documents that specify their own pedagogical practices that guide educators work.

The ethnographic work in these two contexts aimed to generate descriptions of how governing tools operate in the everyday lives of early learning contexts. The data generation in Finland took place with a group of children aged 3–5 years and three educators, from September to November 2018. The data generation in Australia took place in a nursery room of a long day care centre with 12 children aged 1–2 years and four educators. The ethnographic data were generated in Australia from March to June 2019. Author one was responsible for doing the ethnographic work in Finland, while both authors did the ethnographic work in Australia. During the ethnographic observation phase, we visited the sites approximately 2–3 times per week for 11 weeks. Since the study paid close attention to the assemblages that govern the everyday life of ECE settings, we also interviewed the educators/teachers responsible for the activities, pedagogical decisions and rules, regulations and guidelines that govern their work and decision making. We paid attention to policies, documents, and regulations that were used or followed in the everyday life of ECE in these two sites, such as instructions provided to the staff and the policies they enacted.

To illustrate the usefulness of a socio-material assemblage approach, two examples are presented, one from each ethnographic site. The first example, from the Finnish data, uses a mobile app to record the children’s arrival and departure and to keep track of the child-staff ratio. The second is from the Australian data. It concerns the Sun Smart policies that promote sun protection and skin cancer prevention. We show how they become plugged into heterogenous combinations of physical objects such as paint, hats, and dry sand by mapping the kinds of entities involved in the processes of governing, and how these assemblages are held together by desires related to economy, safety and pedagogy. Our focus is the connections between alloplastic, non-organic and methodic strata that guide happenings in these settings. These two examples were selected because they demonstrate the usefulness of the concepts of assemblage, strata and desire to better understand the processes by which governance takes place. Firstly, they show how artefacts for governance such as a mobile app and a Sun Smart policy become plugged into different kinds of assemblages and have differing consequences depending on the other entities of the assemblage and desires that hold it together. Secondly, they show the importance of starting from micro perspectives when examining governance in ECE. We begin with the mobile app.

Stratified nature of governance technologies: DaycareApp

In this section, we present a Finnish case of the use of a software tool for governing ECE. We call the application the DaycareApp.¹ Technology, software, and databases have become dominant techniques of governing (Ozga et al. 2011; Piattoeva 2015). The concept of assemblage is particularly useful in understanding how governing artefacts, which immanently have an element of alloplastic strata – material devices, software, and databases, govern children and educators in various ways as they become assembled with organic, non-organic and methodic elements in everyday encounters in ECE.

The DaycareApp is software designed to record each child’s attendance. It includes a mobile app that educators and parents can use to sign children in and out by tapping a fob on the centre’s mobile phone. The app was adopted as it provides real-time information concerning the time the children arrive and the time their guardians pick them up. Municipalities receive funding from the central government to organise services, and this funding is based on certain factors, including the number of residents of different age groups. Municipalities decide how they divide funding between different services (such as social welfare, healthcare services, and educational and cultural services), for which each municipality is responsible. Government funding covers approximately 30% of the costs of municipal ECE services and the rest is covered by the munipality and ECE fees (that are regulated nationally). Municipalities therefore have an incentive to reduce their ECE costs. This can be done by monitoring child-staff ratios so that educators can transit to other groups if child-staff ratios allow, and there is need in another group. The DaycareApp was adopted as the municipality aims to monitor efficiency and use the software to aid resource planning. This is an example of how increasing governance has materialized in ECE. Excerpt 1 was written based on the observation notes from the Finnish context and describes the morning when the mobile app was introduced and the educators handed the fobs to the parents as they dropped off their children. All the names presented in the excerpts are pseudonyms.

Excerpt 1:

There is an envelope for each child containing new fobs that are to be used for logging the child in on arrival and logging out when leaving the ECE centre. When a parent arrives, the educators demonstrate how the fob is used. Päivi gives the tags to Taavi’s father and explains what it is. He rolls his eyes: ‘Are they useful for you?’ Päivi: ‘We don’t know any more about them than you do’. Salla: ‘Think about if you had four children, then you would have eight fobs in total. Now you have only two children and four fobs – easy!’ Taavi’s father thinks it is good that there are two fobs for each child – one for each parent – but wonders what happens if for example granny comes to pick up the children. ‘You can give a fob to her beforehand or we can log them out manually’, Päivi explains.

The excerpt shows how both parents and educators were at least a bit cynical about the usefulness of the app: a father of one of the children rolled his eyes and educators joked about the handiness of having two fobs for each child. The educators continued being critical about the app later: they explained that it does not add value to their work and it takes time to make sure that it is updated. Sometimes the number of children signed in was not accurate and the educators needed to find out why the numbers did not match. The researcher witnessed this several times during the ethnographic data-gathering period. Each time the reason for the problem was that a parent had forgotten to check in a child with the fob or the system had been down when a child arrived. The DaycareApp was not the only software the educators in this municipality used for monitoring purposes. They also used another software program for documenting and monitoring child-staff ratios, which was completed manually by the educators once a day. They had similar types of functions that partly overlapped. One teacher stated that the software produces ‘triple work’.

The software sometimes intervened in the pedagogical work of the educators, as the next excerpt from the observation notes of the first author exemplify.

Excerpt 2:

A group is playing outdoors. Some of the children are playing restaurant in the sand pit, some are playing floorball, some are involved in a statues game. All three educators present discuss the DaycareApp and how it has not been working this morning and how they have been trying to find out what is wrong with it. Leena has crawled under the bench and seems upset. Salla had to fetch the laminated manual list of children from inside. On the way back she notices Leena crying and goes to comfort her. Leena has been crying for about 10 minutes.

In this situation, the educators were gathered around a governing artefact that consists of a physical non-organic object, namely, a mobile phone and database including information concerning children’s presence. The methodic strata, that is, the fact that the artefact is rather small compared to the human bodies using it to access the information, requires that human bodies come close to the artefact. It therefore required educators to gather around it to understand why the app was not working and registering the children as it should. The relation between alloplastic strata (data generated to keep track of children’s attendance, child-staff ratios and efficiency of the use of resources), non-organic strata (mobile phone as a physical object and the malfunction of the app) and methodic strata (the size of the physical device) invited human bodies, the educators, to come together to focus intensively on the hand-held device. This assemblage that was formed by the software, its malfunction, the physical device, and its size, guided educators’ actions. The assemblage was held together by a desire of being a good employee, which took the form of complying with required practices to monitor efficiency and aid resource planning – an economic, culturally produced rationale embedded in the use of the app. The laminated manual list of children that was used for the purpose of keeping track of children’s attendance for safety reasons did not have the same influence – it functions differently and does not invite educators to gather around it. In the excerpt, Salla noticed Leena crying under a bench as part of the process of replacing the app with the laminated list. Even though the educators did not make a conscious choice between focusing on the app and comforting the crying Leena, it can be concluded that the assemblage that it was part of was one of the factors that prevented educators noticing her. The assemblage that directed the educator’s desire of being a good employee produced acts of compliance: i.e. employees who followed monitoring regulations set by the municipality. Desire takes the form of prioritising a managerial (economic) task over a pedagogical task, and holds the governing assemblage together.

However, not all of the situations where the governing assemblage included the DaycareApp were related to the malfunction of the app. For example, the fobs played an important part in situations when they became plugged into governing assemblages, as the next excerpt illustrates.

Excerpt 3:

A group of children and Anna [teacher] are playing outdoors. The children ask Anna for help with different things, such as providing equipment and material they need, helping them to carry equipment, solving quarrels, and other social situations.

Aatos, a new boy in the group who needs adult support in joining in play with others and making friends, is seemingly upset, as Anna has said he can’t ride a bike through a group of children playing with skipping ropes. Anna reminds Aatos: ‘You are part of the Paw Patrol play’. Salla [an educator] arrives at work and comes to Anna for an update concerning the day’s plan. She notices Aatos is upset: ‘Where have you been for these last few days?’ [with a cheerful, delighted tone]. A parent with a child arrives, and the parent approaches Anna with the child’s electronic fob that is used for signing in. Anna engages with the parent. Someone starts to cry in another part of the yard and Salla goes to help. Aatos rides slowly away.

In this excerpt, a fob becomes plugged into the governing assemblage. It directs a parent to approach Anna, who had the mobile phone; the parent needed to tap the phone with the fob to sign in the child, even though Anna was in the middle of a conversation with Aatos and Salla. As in the previous excerpt, the governing assemblage was held together by the municipality’s aim to monitor the use of resources with the help of software and educator desire to be a good employee. The assemblage in this example consists of dense relations among an assemblage formed between alloplastic, organic, non-organic and methodic strata i.e. the mobile phone (alloplastic strata) that Anna (organic human body) is in possession of; a fob in the possession of the parent (alloplastic strata and a human body); a proximity that is needed between a fob and a phone (methodic strata) to sign a child in; the wildly waving skipping ropes (alloplastic strata); the cheerful children playing with them that have caught Aatos’ attention (human bodies); the bike (alloplastic strata) that he’s riding that is in danger of getting entangled in the ropes (methodic strata), and a crying child (human body).

When a fob became plugged into the governing assemblage in this situation, it interrupted the conversation Aatos, Anna, and Salla were having – pedagogical desire was overridden by managerial desire. At the beginning of the excerpt, the situation is animated by a governing assemblage that included a child’s individual ECE plan, adult and child bodies, Paw Patrol play, bike, and skipping ropes. Both Anna and Salla communicated to Aatos that he is part of the group. Anna did so by stating that he is already part of a group playing Paw Patrol. This was related to a governing instrument, Aatos’ individual ECE plan. In Finland, each child attending ECE is provided with an invidual ECE plan that is drafted together with educators and parents. The child’s individual plan is a pedagogical plan for how the child’s strengths and individual needs will be taken into account in ECE activities. It is guided by the Act on Early Childhood Education and Care and the National core curriculum for ECEC (Act on Early Childhood Education and Care 2018) and local curricula for ECE. Individual plans became mandatory in 2017 and are one example of increased governance in ECE in Finland.

The Paw Patrol play had been set up days earlier with the help of the educators to support Aatos in joining play and making friends as was agreed on Aatos’ ECE plan. Aatos was interested in Paw Patrol, and this was picked up by the educators. Therefore, the educators invited children to design and make Paw Patrol logos and to plan a role play. As Aatos was very knowledgeable about the characters, it was easy for him to become a central figure in the play with 3 or 4 other children. The play had lasted for days. Salla communicated how Aatos belonged to the group by showing how glad she was to see him and saying that she had missed him when he wasn’t around. These pedagogical actions were deliberate and considered important for Aatos, as he had difficulties joining the group – he had been crying, explicitly stating that he missed his mother, and was anxious in the new group. The desire related to the role of ECE in enhancing children’s feeling of belonging to a group held together a governing assemblage animating the first part of the situation. In the latter part of the situation, the fob injected a new focus and directed educators’ desire towards acts of monitoring economic efficiency into the situation. A governing assemblage of the staff-child ratio monitoring policy became an interruption that overrode the pedagogical aim. While Anna engaged the parent with the fob and Salla left to check on and comfort a crying child, they also ended the interaction where they were scaffolding Aatos’ feeling of belonging. The situation unravelled and Aatos exited looking gloomy.

Density of assemblages at focus: Micro-policies of Sun Smart

Similarities were found in the Australian data, where the stratified organic, non-organic, social and methodic elements of the assembly governed educators’ work. We illuminate this with an example related to the Sun Smart policy, an Australian government policy that is enacted to encourage behaviours to minimise the risk of skin cancer. Ultraviolet (UV) radiation levels in Australia are high especially from mid-August until the end of April. Over exposure to UV during childhood increases the risk of skin cancer. ECE centres are expected to develop and implement procedures to avoid extended sun exposure such as using sun protection, including hats, sunscreen, clothing, shade, and sunglasses when playing outdoors. Sun Smart policies were applied in the centre in which the ethnographic work in Australia took place. The centre had Sun Smart posters on the wall, and both children and educators were required to wear a hat which protected the face, neck, and ears. The children were also asked to have their own sunscreen, which was applied before they moved to play outdoors. Before the ethnographic work began, the researchers were also informed about the requirement for them to wear a broad-brimmed hat when outdoors. Hats were stored near the door in a cart or they were hung outside on the wall next to the door in the nursery room’s fenced yard.

Hats are a very visible part of life in the nursery room. The educators actively reminded the children to wear hats, and there are multiple notes about hats in our ethnographic diaries. They sometimes used slogans such as ‘No hat, no play’ or informed children that if they did not wear hats they needed to play indoors. At the beginning of May, educators discussed not having to constantly remind children to wear their hats, as the period they needed to enact the Sun Smart policy had ended. This is why we are confident that the educators’ acts to make sure the children wore hats were at least partly related to the Sun Smart policy rather than merely due to their knowledge of the harmfulness of UV radiation.

Although not all the children (aged 1–2 years) appeared to be keen on wearing their hats, they were familiar with putting their hats on when going out. This is exemplified in the excerpt below:

Excerpt 4:

The children are finishing lunch. The educators help the last ones to finish and pack away their bowls and bottles. Some children have finished and begin to engage with the materials, such as pens and paper, dolls, and animal figurines provided in the classroom.

The educators open the door so that the children can freely go outside to the fenced yard. I’m sitting on a sofa facing the door writing my notes. One of the children takes my hat from a cart that is used for storing the hats, brings it to me, handing it over, and looks me in the eyes.

Teacher to one of the children: ‘Could you give Laura’s hat to her?’

The excerpt describes very typical activities after lunch in this nursery room: some of the children are transitioning to outdoor play in a flexible manner. A child who does not form sentences yet uses an artifact that is familiar to all of the members of the nursery room in transitioning to outdoors – a hat – to invite me to play outdoors. The Sun Smart policy that is enacted in the nursery room governs the educators’ work so they constantly remind the children to wear their hats to the extent that a hat had become a symbol of transition from inside to the yard.

This excerpt also has an example of an assemblage: the Sun Smart policy became entangled with a core pedagogical focus of the nursery room. The room leader explained that they emphasised both the children’s capabilities and agency – they encourage children to try doing things such as bringing their own water bottles to the table and scraping their bowls after lunch on their own – and helping others. It was very typical for the educators to ask a child to hand something to another child or find something for someone. Often, it was a hat they were looking for. In this ephemeral transition, the Sun Smart policy became plugged into the governing assemblage together with educator desire that takes the form of a pedagogical aim as the teacher asked a child (as she did multiple other times in the data) to help another child with her hat.

The Sun Smart policy became plugged into other kinds of assemblages too. The next two excerpts illustrate what it means to conceptualise governance as an assemblage: it is a combination of heterogenous social, organic, non-organic and methodic elements that come together in ephemeral, contingent, and culturally and historically embedded situations (see DeLanda 2006).

Excerpt 5

Two children paint outside at an easel. Two educators, Evelyn and Becca, are helping them: cleaning their hands and making sure that they (mostly) paint on the paper rather than on themselves. A group of children has gathered around the easel eagerly waiting for their turn and trying to participate.

The teacher approaches the sand pit which is not far from the easel. ‘Come look!’ she invites children watching the others paint. ‘I make lines and rounds with my stick’ [makes lines and rounds in sand with a stick]. A group of children joins her. Some of them watch and some of them grab a stick and start to draw in the sand. The teacher notices that one of them does not have her hat on. She asks Evelyn to look for the child’s hat: ‘I know you are busy [with water and towels needed for painting] but could you, after you’ve finished, try to find Sam’s hat?’ I can’t hear Evelyn’s reply.

The teacher goes inside to get water for the sand pit to moisten the sand. Children follow her to the door. As the teacher goes in, the children stay outside and watch her through the glass door. When coming back, the teacher stops to negotiate with Becca about something I can’t hear. ‘Would you like me to do it?’ the teacher asks in a tense tone of voice. Teacher: ‘Maria, go find your hat. Tamara, where is your hat?’

The teacher returns to the sand pit and the children follow. She starts mixing water and sand with the children.

In Excerpt 5, the Sun Smart policy became plugged into a voluminous and dense combination of artefacts (alloplastic strata) such as paint, easels and hats, natural elements (organic strata) such as eager children and sticks, elements such as dry sand and UV-radiation (non-organic strata), and social entities (alloplastic strata) such as the distribution of work, curriculum guidelines and the educators’ culturally constructed desires related to cleanliness and good pedagogical practices. All of these things became combined in assemblages that govern the teachers’ work and children’s lives in this particular situation. In this nursery room, art activities were part of weekly if not daily routines. Painting was a popular activity among the children, and in this example, the easel, paints, and perhaps also the educators’ close interaction with the children who are painting attract the other children’s attention. Educators considered art activities an important part of pedagogical experiences: the room leader explained how children explore and experiment through art and they learn new concepts as educators encourage and extend their language while doing art activities. The first assemblage we highlight is held together by educator desire that takes the form of providing children with meaningful experiences through art activities. The teacher noticed that the children’s focus was directed at the easels and painting. They were fascinated and eager to participate, even though the messiness of painting did not allow many children to paint at the same time. This messiness required the attention of two educators. The teacher made a pedagogical decision to offer alternative activities to children who were eagerly waiting their turn. She invited children to explore sand as a medium for art. She carefully conceptualised what she was doing by naming the concepts of ‘line’ and ‘round’ to extend children’s language. Following this, many children became engaged with the sand drawing and did not need to wait for their turn to be actively involved with the art activities at the easels.

In this voluminous situation, another governing assemblage that includes the Sun Smart policy became a disruption to both the educators’ work and the children’s engagement in activities. The Sun Smart policy became plugged into the assemblage that governed the teacher’s action: as she noticed that one of the children did not have his hat on, she discontinued supporting the children’s engagement with the sand. The Sun Smart policy that is assembled with hats, messy paints, and easels prioritized safety through educator desire to be a good employee, and interrupted both her and her colleagues’ pedagogical work.

In the next excerpt, the same policy became plugged into a different assemblage. It shows the situational contingency that is related to other elements of the governing assemblage.

Excerpt 6.

Ronny is on a climbing frame. The teacher takes Ronny onto her lap so that there is enough room for Lenny to push a toy car along the climbing frame. The teacher talks with a group of children while holding Ronny on her lap. The teacher notices that she herself is not wearing a hat. Harper and Ronny go to look for her hat. The teacher stays with Lenny and supports him to continue the car play with encouraging gestures and facial expressions (driving continues with intense focus). The teacher supports the searchers verbally from a distance.

Later, another child, Brian, joins the group searching for the teacher’s hat. Brian finds it and brings it to the teacher with a smile on his face. Then Brian places the pink wide brimmed hat on his own head with a widening smile. Others follow them, smiling. The teacher and Brian joke around. The teacher asks the educators next door to come to see Brian’s new hat.

The productive force of a governance assemblage in this excerpt differs from the earlier one even though the same Sun Smart policy operates in both and takes part in the assemblage that governs the situation. In this assemblage, a hat again played a central role: the hat was missing and it needed to be found. This was because of the Sun Smart policy: the teacher must show a good example by wearing a hat (also stated in the centre’s policy documents). In this excerpt, a teacher became a central part of the governance assemblage. She made sure that Lenny, who was engaged in playing with his car could continue his play with an intensive focus by first moving Ronny gently out of Lenny’s way. Instead of asking Ronny to step aside, she took him onto her lap. This allowed the teacher to continue to talk with the children. Then she again ensured Lenny’s play could continue by encouraging the children to look for her hat instead of doing so herself. She both directed the children’s search verbally from a distance and continued supporting Lenny’s engagement in play. The situation ended when Brian found her hat and they shared a playful moment where they expressed joy together. Contrary to Excerpt 5, this governance assemblage did not act as an interruption, even though the Sun Smart policy, hat, some of the same children, one of the adults, and desires related to sun safety and pedagogy operated in both situations. Rather it produced an interlude that connected and aligned well with the desires present in the situation. In Excerpt 5, the combination of the cultural constructions of cleanliness and messiness, eager children, paint, and perhaps also the distribution of duties among professionals combined with the Sun Smart policy, produced interruptions to pedagogy and following that, children’s involvement. Excerpt 6 did not have as many assembled elements: the teacher did not need to negotiate the distribution of work and there were no particular material elements drawing the children’s attention and focus that needed to be redirected, as in the case of the painting. We suggest that it is the density, the number of conflicting elements that come together as in earlier examples of a governing entanglement that constitute interruptions in the everyday lives of children.

Discussion

This article has provided an empirical study of governance in children’s everyday lives and illuminated how taking socio-materiality as an ontological starting point, and especially the concepts assemblage, strata and desire help to understand how a policy takes on varied forms in the everyday lives of ECE centres. Firstly, the concept of assemblage offers ontological foundations for studying governance and thus directs the empirical investigation to begin with the everyday lives of ECE settings. Secondly, by doing so, it assists in noticing that policies have heterogeneous consequences depending on the organic, non-organic, social and methodic strata in which assemblages become formed. Earlier research on local practices of governing that take place in ECE centres has shown that material everyday objects take part in the processes of governance (Watson, Millei, and Petersen 2015). In this article, examples related to material devices of monitoring children’s attendance and hats, paints, and sand illuminated how it is the relations that become formed between organic, non-organic, social and methodic strata that govern everyday life.

The usefulness of the concept of assemblage in education policy studies has been discussed previously (Fenwick 2010; Gorur 2011; Youdell 2015; Thompson, Sellar, and Buchanan 2021). Thompson, Sellar, and Buchanan (2021) critique earlier research using assemblage approaches for constituting the social as interaction among agentic materials that function as a whole in a systematic way. They argue that it is clear that materials and agents identified in the classroom rarely function systematically. They suggest going beyond merely describing the relations between things to examine strata and desire specifically. By using the example of the OECD as an assemblage that has agentic force in global education policy, they argue that broadening the conceptual apparatus by leaning on Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory helps avoid simplistic interpretations of how assemblages operate. We put the concept of strata in dialogue with Ferraris (2012) ontology of the ‘social’ and suggested methodic entities be added as a layer in stratified social reality. Aligning with Thompson, Sellar, and Buchanan’s (2021) argument, we showed that by focusing on diverse strata of social life in ECE and desires that act as a constituting clue, assemblages can indeed help understand variance in the animating power of governing assemblages. This simply means that a governing artefact, a tool that is used for governing purposes such as a policy document or matrix for accounting, has situationally varying implications depending on who is involved in the situation, what other governing practices are related to the situation, and what kinds of material elements are involved. The fluctuating nature of assemblages and the fact that the entities involved in governance change, complicate the interrelationship between policy and its impacts. The value of this article lies in demonstrating how educator desires related to being good and valued members of a work community who conscientiously fullfilled their duties as employees, become bound to national and local policies. These desires hold governing assemblages together in the ECE environment. Stratification changes power relations in ECE settings i.e. which policies become prioritized and which yield.

Contrasting to the argument by Thompson, Sellar, and Buchanan (2021), we suggest that some elements of the animating power of assemblages could potentially be systematic. This might be related to methodic strata, which we suggested were included in the typology of elements layered in the ‘social’. Our examination showed that the density of the socio-material elements of the situation may intensify the possibility of governing instruments interrupting meaningful interaction between children and adults, and forming a barrier that prevents pedagogical aims being met. In this way it changes power relations and privileges certain policies over others. In socio-materially less dense assemblages where educators can have an active role in plugging in and unplugging the elements of governing assemblages, governing can act as an interlude, a short piece between the parts of a longer pedagogical composition that does not interrupt meaningful interaction and the children’s involvement in the situations they are focused on. Notions concerning the density of the situations are the result of the switch in how we have defined the ontological groundings of governance. More research is need about what other elements shift power relations including possibilities to prioritize and enact certain desires over others.

Conclusion

We have discussed how taking socio-material ontology as a foundation for governance research assists researchers to question how the daily work of educators and the daily lives of children are shaped by complex, discursive and material relations. This is important as it directs us to focus on governance in the everyday contexts of children. Doing so makes it possible to notice that assemblages that govern the daily life of ECE are in flux – they change when part of an assemblage is detached or another part becomes attached (DeLanda 2006). It enables an unravelling of the contingent nature of the role of institutional governing of practices in ECE centres and children’s lives. From the point of view of policy making, this means that we need to examine potential unintended consequences of policies in addition to assessing the intended consequences. It is also worthwhile to hear about the experiences of educators, children and parents when evaluating the influences of policies, and pay attention to the relations among different governing instruments.

The assemblage approach made visible interruptions produced by dense governing assemblages, i.e. situations with multiple different and competing aims and material entities related to them. On the one hand, governance might cause interruptions in children’s play and engagement, especially when the assemblages of governance are dense as they are filled with competing rationalities entangled with material entities. On the other hand, by being part of the assemblage, teachers might be able to align competing rationalities, as was evident in our analysis of the situation where the children searched for the teacher’s hat (Excerpt 6). This seems to be possible when the governing assemblage is not particularly dense. From the point of view of policy, this indicates that requirements related to efficiency that make governing assemblages more dense might have a detrimental influence on the possibilities for teachers to use their professional expertise.

In evaluating our research process, we stress that in ethnographic research it is impossible to capture everything that is happening in the contexts where the research took place and researchers are forced to decide where they direct the researcher gaze. We have directed our gaze to those moments in which we have been able notice governing documents and tools operating. We have captured only some of the moments where governing tools operate in these settings, and some have been missed. It would be important to systematically examine dense and sparse assemblages to be able to see whether dense governing assemblages produce unintended consequences such as marginalization. Overall, research utilising the concept of assemblage and its ontological underpinnings helps to provide more nuanced insight into institutional lives of educators and children. Thus, it has a potential to advance understanding of socially sustainable ways of governing, for example, by examining more closely the density of governing assemblages in the production of marginalization of certain children.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maiju Paananen

Maiju Paananen is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education and Culture at Tampere University where she leads Child politics in Early Childhood research group. Her research focuses on potential sources of inequality in early childhood education, and the intersection of policies and everyday lives of children and families.

Susan Grieshaber

Susan Grieshaber is Professor of Early Childhood Education in the School of Education. Her research interests are informed by a range of critical, feminist, and feminist poststructural theories that address social justice and equity, and include early childhood curriculum, policy, pedagogies and women in higher education.

Notes

1. Pseudonym of the app is used for anonymity.