En/countering the doings of standards in early childhood education: drawing on Actor-Network Theory to trace enactments of and resistances to emerging sociomaterial policy assemblages

ABSTRACT

There has been an increasing move worldwide in education policy towards standardization in combination with a global trust in digital quantification and calculation. These policies cause frictions in early childhood education (ECE). Hence, this paper examines the way standards ‘work’ in ECE. The empirical study draws on the ideas of Actor-Network Theory to recount and examine the highly material processes of calculation and representation, in which standards become enacted and act in practice. The data was drawn from extensive interviews with early childhood teachers in the Netherlands as well as additional ‘object interviews’. The analysis describes how a particular standard becomes enacted as an assemblage, which both invites and compels teachers and managers to engage in particular educational practices. Foregrounding standards and highlighting the way professionals work with, through or around them, enables educational professionals to (re)consider the doings of standards and creates a space to imagine how practices – and policies that shape these practices – might be assembled differently. We advance the argument that it is important for professionals to critically analyse their professional practices in light of increasing datafication. Enhancing sociomaterial sensibilities of teachers might support them to offset persuasive powers of sociomaterial policy assemblages.

KEYWORDS:

• Standards
• early childhood education
• Actor-Network Theory
• datafication
• education policy

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the four anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, some of which we integrated in the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Declarations and ethical approval

This study complies with the EECERA Ethical Code for Early Childhood Researchers (Bertram 2015) and was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of, and with approval from the Ethics Review Committee of the Department of Pedagogical and Educational Sciences, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Groningen and archived in the PhD publication Package. Informed written consent to take part in the research has been obtained from the participants prior to the commencement of the study.

Notes

1. The figures in this paper are meant as illustrations and are not the originals.

2. Every Dutch school has an IS: a colleague who is exempted from teaching duties to contribute to the educational needs policy of the school.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Arda Oosterhoff

Arda Oosterhoff is a research lecturer in the Academy of Primary Education at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands. Her research focuses on the way teachers experience their professional autonomy and agency and examines the influence of the work environment on these experiences.

Terrie Lynn Thompson

Terrie Lynn Thompson is a senior lecturer in Digital Media and Professional Education at the University of Stirling. Her research examines the digital mediation of work and learning, in both the global south and north; the innovative use of more-than-human theory and methods to understand the politics and ethics of what digital things do; changes to professional work-learning as AI and data systems change the distribution of labour; and data activism particularly as related to data-bodies and data about (female) bodies.

Ineke Oenema-Mostert

Ineke Oenema-Mostert is Professor of Early Childhood in the Academy of Primary Education at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences, Leeuwarden, and an Assistant Professor of Special Needs Education and Youth Care at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. The focus of her early childhood studies is on the various ways young children develop and what is most essential when it comes to their education and parenting.

Alexander Minnaert

Alexander Minnaert is Professor of Special Needs Education, Youth Care and Clinical Educational Sciences at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. His research aims at the development, implementation, and evaluation of conditions conducive for learning and development at various levels of (pre-school) education. One of his research programmes focuses on the intertwining role of motivation, emotion and self-regulation in learners and teachers.