Scholarship in times of crises: towards a trans-discipline of early childhood

ABSTRACT

In this paper I argue for a necessary – and possible – paradigmatic shift in early childhood scholarship that embraces multiplicity, diversity, ambiguity, uncertainty and shared situated knowledge creation in response to a profoundly changed global context. The contours of the new paradigm are already emerging as three interconnected fields of tension: First, the increasing recognition, by some international actors, of the complexity and systemic characteristic of early childhood education – contradicted by the persistent promotion of decontextualised approaches by others including OECD. Second, a blurring of boundaries between the Global South and North, in the context of rising inequality within countries. Third, the inability of dominant theories of early childhood education, grounded in disciplinary traditions from outside the field, to conceptualise present experiences and future directions. In conclusion I argue for the need and possibility of a trans-discipline of early childhood with profound implications for comparative work in the field.

KEYWORDS:

• Comparative education
• early childhood education
• trans-discipline
• global south and north
• epistemologies of the south
• fields of tension
• paradigm shift
• reconceptualisation

The reason why life is so strange is that we have simply no idea what is around the next corner, something most of us have learned to forget. Colum McCann, Zoli

Introduction

The covid19 pandemic has thrown into sharp relief the crucial role of early childhood education as a common good and public service, essential for the functioning of societies. Despite significant differences of early childhood systems between countries, similar issues have emerged and ECE has become a ‘matter of concern’ (Latour, 2004) in both the Global South and North raising urgent questions about future directions of policy, practice, and research in the field. One such question concerns the ability of influential actors and organisations in the field to adequately embrace issues of diversity and context. This would require abandoning the dominant paradigm of early childhood education: the paradigm of the universal, individual child and its development, of decontextualised knowledge and its creation, of simplistic measurement and comparison, and of policies and practices as tools for solving distinct social problems by distinct professions and academic disciplines. There are several possible readings of the Covid-19 pandemic and its implications for the education of young children and, in consequence, for understanding, through international comparative enquiry, the institutions, policies and politics, and practices that come together in the systems of early childhood education. Considerable space in the international debate has been taken up trying to come to terms with the disruption of organised learning (due to the widespread closure of early childhood settings in many countries), and by various propositions about how to return to some level of ‘normality’ and to let children ‘catch up’ on ‘lost learning’. Often, these calls are embedded in a wider global debate on the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on education and how to mitigate them, as UNESCO reports that 150 countries permanently closed their schools in 2020 (UNESCO 2021). Available data on education includes the youngest children as far as they are enrolled in ‘pre-primary’ education, i.e. formal preschool settings one year before compulsory school age. Reliable information on early childhood settings and programmes for the youngest children (from birth to compulsory school age) is harder to come by as, at the time of writing (summer 2021) ‘research on COVID-19 is still new, largely self-reported and based on small samples’ (Gromada, Richardson, and Rees 2020, 7). However, the emerging picture is one of widespread disruption of early childhood services in all countries affected by the pandemic (Kenny and Yang 2021).

From early in the pandemic, the disruption of early childhood services was manifested at several layers that mutually reinforced each other:

• Children lost not only stimulating environments for learning and engagement but, in many cases, safe, caring, and nurturing spaces outside the family home. Children from disadvantaged, marginalised and impoverished communities have lost out on nutritious meals, access to basic hygiene, and other vital facilities.

• Families lost access to reliable childcare, making it difficult to work and therefore adding to financial distress caused by the pandemic.

• Early childhood educators, already in precarious employment, often lost their livelihoods due to the widespread closure of services.

• On a macro-societal scale, it quickly became apparent that the disruption of early childhood education and care services had far-reaching consequences. The absence of ‘childcare’, for instance, prevented ‘frontline workers’ from fulfilling their crucial roles in healthcare, retail, and other ‘essential services’.

Obviously, the extent of these experiences varies hugely between countries and crucially, within countries, as Jennifer Guevara (2022) shows in her contribution to this special issue. Understanding them requires careful attention to the specifics of local and regional contexts. My vantage point, in this paper, is that not only the differences but the commonality of experiences, too, require critical examination. They point, I will argue, to both the necessity and possibility of fundamental reconceptualisation of the practices and policies that have shaped early childhood systems in both the Global North and South.

A global consensus

Over the past two decades, a global consensus has emerged on the importance of early childhood programmes and services. The consensus emphasises the benefits of increased access to early childhood programmes for all children on a range of levels – individual, community, economy – and often connects participation in early childhood programmes with socio-political and socio-economic agendas, e.g. alleviation of poverty (‘breaking intergenerational cycles of poverty’), lifelong educational attainment and employability. A good example for such a connection can be found in European Union policies that have evolved from urging EU member states to provide ‘childcare’ services to enable increased female labour market participation (Council of the European Communities 1992) to underlining the ‘need to increase participation in early childhood education’ because

Participation in high-quality early childhood education and care, with highly skilled staff and adequate child-to-staff ratios, produces positive results for all children and has highest benefits for the most disadvantaged. (Council of the European Union 2010, 3)

In the European context, this statement marks a substantial shift in the terminology used to refer to services for young children. Where the emphasis of the 1992 Recommendations was on providing ‘childcare’ as a service to parents; the 2010 Conclusions underlines the understanding that care and education for young children are inseparable, as expressed in the now ubiquitous construct early childhood education and care and its acronym ECEC. This is quite a remarkable shift as, for the first time, it recognises children as addressees of European Union policy and makes the realisation of their right to education (enshrined in article 14 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union) a priority. Starting with the 2010 Council Conclusions, all EU policy documents now refer to the field as ECEC, emphasise its importance for children, and make the connection to children's rights, for example:

Early childhood education and care provision needs to be part of an integrated child-rights based package of policy measures to improve outcomes for children and break intergenerational cycles of disadvantage. (Council of the European Union 2019, 4)

This is despite the fact that the EU has no official competence in the area of education; it rests entirely with individual member states. In addition, the statement introduces a concept into the policy discourse that has come to dominate the debate on programmes and services for young children globally: quality. A highly contested term that nonetheless has become the most influential driver of early childhood policy in almost any context. Peter Moss, who, with co-authors, has led the critical interrogation of quality for years (Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 1999, 2007; Pence and Moss 1994) sums up the dilemma:

Indeed, for those of us who value ECE but dislike the story of quality and high returns, the awkward fact is that the contemporary expansion of early childhood education would not have happened without this discourse gaining dominance. (Moss 2017, 14)

The uncritical proliferation of quality, he writes, is deeply rooted in what he calls the ‘story of quality and high returns’ (Moss 2014):

Find, invest in and apply the correct human technologies – aka ‘quality’ – during early childhood and you will get high returns on investment including improved education, employment and earnings and reduced social problems. A simple equation beckons and beguiles: ‘early intervention’ + ‘quality’= increased ‘human capital’ + national success (or at least survival) in a cut-throat global economy. Invest early and invest smartly and we will all live happily ever after in a world of more of the same – only more so. (ibid, p. 3)

It is not the notion of quality as such that is problematic – who could argue against wanting to make early childhood services better? Rather, as Moss writes, its equation with certainty and control(ability), and the persistent refusal of its main proponents to engage with but a ‘restricted range of theoretical perspectives, in particular developmental psychology and human capital economics’ (Moss 2017, 15).

The core of the critique of the discourse of quality is that it renders a value-bound and hence contested and profoundly political social practice – the education of young children–as a practice of applied technology, certainty and, if done right, one of (pre)determinable outcomes. In the international discourse, quality has assumed a hegemonic position, has become unquestionable and, as such, amounts to early childhood education policy's very own regime – its general politics – of truth (Foucault and Rabinow 1991).

Three fields of tension

Questions about the validity of the globally (still!) dominant discourse on early childhood education as characterised by predictability, linear developmental trajectories, upscaling of best practice solutions etc. are no longer confined to the margins of the field. They have entered the internal deliberations of policy actors including the World Bank, the OECD, the Group of 20 and others. There appears to be new awareness within these organisations of the social, economic, and to some extent cultural and political world that surrounds programmes and services for young children, marking what I call an emerging systemic turn at policy level. It gives rise to three fields of tension that currently characterise the state early childhood education globally.

1. A systemic tension that plays out between the increasing realisation of the complexity of the field and the hegemonic positions of those invested in standardised, one-size-fits-all approaches.

2. A geo-political tension, emerging from the persistent imaginary of fundamental difference between Global South and Global North (which has become untenable).

3. An epistemological tension in a field whose theoretical foundations continue to draw upon bodies of knowledge that originate in external disciplines, and the emerging realisation that the resulting absence of field-generated theory – i.e. grounded and integrated ways of knowing, being, and doing impedes the field's emancipation and leaves it subject to external domination.

In the following section I will discuss these fields of tension and what characterises them. The fields intersect and are mutually dependent which, I argue, is both problematic and carries the possibility of transformation and reconceptualisation towards a new paradigm?

The systemic tension

The problems facing early childhood education are no longer limited to individual settings – the point of delivery; they are endemic in the entire ecosystem, the ‘critical ecology’ (Miller, Dalli, and Urban 2012) that surrounds, enables, and governs the daily practices of educating young children. The Covid-19 crisis has exposed the systemic challenges facing early childhood education to such an extent that their acknowledgement is no longer confined to critical academic discourse (Urban 2007, 2008, 2012, 2013a, 2019a; Urban et al. 2012). Instead, they are now increasingly acknowledged by actors in the areas of policy and governance. To give just one example, a recent World Bank report (Devercelli and Beaton-Day 2020) maintains building human capital as the main reason why countries should invest in early childhood education–a position that has been widely and persistently criticised (e.g. Klees et al. 2020; Klees, Smoff, and Stromquist 2012; Tan 2014) – but indicates the systemic ‘inadequacies’ revealed by the pandemic. As the World Bank explains:

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the deep inadequacies in the current system of childcare provision, including uneven access, poor quality, the need for public finance, poor terms of employment for the workforce, and the overall vulnerability of the sector. (Devercelli and Beaton-Day 2020, 8)

The diagnosis of systemic failure does not lead the World Bank to consider systemic responses, let alone systemic change. Rather, its recommendations aim at reinstating a prepandemic status quo ante, mainly through channelling funds – ‘smart investments’ – to the ‘childcare industry’:

In many countries, this may include channelling resources to childcare providers in financial difficulty so they can reopen. (ibid)

The crisis comes with an opportunity, the World Bank states, as it may

increase public empathy, and generate policy momentum to address inadequacies in childcare provision worldwide that leave so many families with limited choices and children in settings that do not ensure their safety, let alone promote development. (ibid)

While the World Bank counts on public empathy and (presumably public) money for the ‘industry’, another influential actor in the international early childhood policy arena takes a more critical stance. In a recent report, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) comes to the following diagnosis of widespread systemic failure exposed by the pandemic:

Discontent is rising around the world, reflecting dysfunctions and injustices that have emerged in economic, social and political systems. It is also a response to the damage humankind is inflicting on the world's natural systems and thus, inevitably, upon itself. The COVID-19 pandemic […] has exposed these defects to devastating effect. (OECD 2021, 9)

The OECD report, too, identifies opportunities in the crisis. However, unlike the World Bank report on ‘childcare’ that mainly wants to return to a prepandemic normal, the OECD report points to the need and possibility of more radical reform:

As countries plan their recovery from the multiple crises triggered by the pandemic, they have an opportunity to make these systems more inclusive, more sustainable, more resilient and more responsive. (ibid)

Rather than advocating a monetary solution (more funds for childcare providers) the way forward is systemic change which, the authors state,

can only happen with the active participation of citizens in new forms of collective action at the local, national and international level. (ibid)

As it continues to solidify its position as the lynchpin of global education policy through the promotion of International Large-scale Standardised Assessments (ILSAs), the approach to early childhood education taken by OECD is increasingly at odds with developments in other global policy arenas. Set up as an international forum to address issues of global relevance that require multilateral policy responses, the G20¹ has extended its agenda from a mainly macro-economic focus to include wider issues of global concern, aligned with the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) framework: the promotion of strong sustainable and balanced growth; protection of the planet from degradation; and furthering co-operation with low-income and developing countries (G20 2016). Since 2018, on initiative of the Argentinian presidency, the G20 has included a focus on education. More specifically, early childhood development has become a standing item on the agenda, and G20 leaders announced a major early childhood initiative at the 2018 summit (G20 2018). G20 policies are informed by a number of official engagement groups. One of them is Think20 (T20), a global network of ‘leading think tanks and research centres’ that ‘serves as the “ideas bank” of the G20 and aims to provide research-based policy recommendations to the G20 leaders’ (https://www.t20italy.org/about/think20/).

The T20 has adopted annual policy briefs that address early childhood development, education and care, produced by an international group of early childhood research centres, and coordinated by the author.² The series of policy briefs outlines public policies that enable integrated, multi-sectoral, ‘whole-systems’ approaches to services for young children. They form a coherent body of policy recommendations grounded in the concept of a ‘competent system’ (Urban et al. 2012) focusing on

• The need for whole-systems approaches (Urban, Cardini, and Flórez-Romero 2018)

• Early childhood in the context of sustainability (Urban et al. 2019)

• Social justice and locally and culturally appropriate early childhood services and programmes (Urban et al. 2020b)

• Reframing of early childhood services in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic (Urban et al. 2020a)

• The need for integrated data, monitoring and evaluation systems (Urban et al. 2021)

In addition, in 2020, the T20 Task Force on Social Cohesion and the State published a statement declaring early childhood education (together with health and social welfare systems) as one of three essential ‘domains in which intervention is of primary importance to maintain social cohesion’ (Blofield et al. 2020). Failure to protect these areas during the pandemic, the group argues, can lead to political crises, ‘where citizens question the legitimacy of institutions incapable of providing basic levels of welfare’ (ibid).

The systemic stance taken by T20 / G20 is summarised in the Communiqué adopted at the 2019 summit in Tokyo:

Strengthen G20-level commitment to ensuring access to locally and culturally appropriate early childhood development, education and care (ECD/ECEC) of high quality for all children from birth, and forge international consensus on government responsibility for developing, resourcing, and governing a ‘whole-systems’ approach to ECD/ECEC policies. (Think20 2019)

The statements above encapsulate the systemic field of tension that has been present in the debate for some time. It predates Covid-19 but has been pushed into the spotlight by the global crisis caused by the pandemic. It is remarkable, though, to see the tension play out between major global players in the field of early childhood policy – i.e. the OECD, the World Bank, the G20. On the one hand there has been an increasing recognition of the complexities surrounding programmes, services and policies for young children, their families and communities, requiring not only deeper understanding but proactive engagement with complex, self-organising systems and their contexts. This is contrasted, on the other hand, by equally strong and influential attempts to instate decontextualised regimes of policymaking, practice, and evaluation and assessment in the field. It is important to note that both positions coexist, often interchangeably, and cannot simply be wholly identified with one or the other of the actors.

While in the examples above the World Bank report appears to be uncritically backing no-change, more-of-the-same solutions, it has previously – in its otherwise much criticised SABER initiative (Klees et al. 2020) – argued the case for better understanding of how early childhood programmes and policies are embedded in complex socio-economic and socio-cultural systems (Powers and Paulsell 2018). Similarly, the OECD (2021), arguing in Perspectives on Global Development 2021 for responsivity, sustainability, participation and collective action, has also become the main proponent of a global education regime of large-scale standardised assessments, decontextualised testing, managerialism and toolbox approaches (Auld and Morris 2016; Morris 2016; Urban and Swadener 2016). With IELS, its International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (OECD 2020), a cross-national assessment of 5-year-olds on four ‘early learning domains’ (early literacy and numeracy skills, self-regulation, and social and emotional skills), the first round of which took place between 208 and 2020, the OECD has shown its determination to draw early childhood education into the space occupied by PISA and the related array of standardised, league-table producing assessments in education (Moss et al. 2016; Moss and Urban 2017, 2018, 2020; Urban, Guevara, and Moss 2022, in print). Indeed, both organisations are increasingly occupying the same argumentative space, albeit with the OECD focussing (broadly) on the Global North and the World Bank on the Global South (Auld, Rappleye, and Morris 2019). With PISA for Development (PISA-D, https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-for-development/) the OECD is now rapidly moving into the Global South. The G20, as a relatively new entrant to the field, appears to embrace the complexity of early childhood education as an integral part of its own shift from a focus on fiscal policies only to a wider concern for general sustainability and broad multilateral collaboration.

The geo-political tension

If there are no conditions at home for doing homework, if seven of them live in a small space. Everything is done there—the cooking, baking, smoking, changing babies, sleeping … all seven of them! How can a child learn and be at peace? What else do I have to say? Which factors have an impact on their development? I have mentioned enough—poverty, malnutrition, [and] hunger. (Šikić-Mićanović et al. 2015, 80)

The above quote by a teacher was recorded by a research project that documented and compared early childhood education and care experiences – not in an impoverished country in the so-called ‘developing’ world but in the European Union, one of the most affluent regions on earth. It is ‘normal’, report the authors of the study, that children growing up in communities of the significant Roma population ‘are mostly sick, with diarrhoea, bronchitis, vomiting’ (ibid, p. 42). Reporting on ‘the rise of mass poverty’ in the United Kingdom, a member of the G7 forum of ‘the world's most influential and open societies and advanced economies’ (www.g7uk.org), the authors find that a significant number of British children suffer from hunger, malnutrition, and cold (Lansley and Mack 2015). These reports, which I have discussed in more detail elsewhere (Urban 2016b), are only two of many examples of a shocking rise in inequality in wealthy countries – including rapidly modernising countries like China (Rozelle and Hell 2020). Childhood experiences some once thought could be safely relegated to the ‘third world’ have become a ‘new normal’ for an increasing number of children in the Global North: displacement and forced migration, violence, malnutrition, exclusion, poverty, and marginalisation.

Why does this matter? While unfinished (and unequal), the expansion of early childhood programmes has been, broadly, a global success story (United Nations 2019). It is a story, however, that has played out differently in the Global South and North. This is captured, for instance, in the terminology used to refer to programmes and services. European Union early childhood policy has initially focused on the provision of childcare as a tool for achieving macro-economic goals, most importantly increased participation of women in the labour market (Council of the European Communities 1992). Over the past two decades the emphasis has shifted to include young children's right to education into the picture. From 2009, all relevant EU policy documents adopt the OECD definition and refer to the field as early childhood education and care (ECEC). The 2011 Council Conclusions on ECEC further emphasise the commitment of the EU to the integration of early education and care (Council of the European Union 2011). ECEC as an inseparable concept is now widely accepted–although in the reality of service provision the institutional and conceptual split persists in many countries (Van Laere, Peeters, and Vandenbroeck 2012). The EU conceptualisation of services for young children as institutional settings that combine childcare services (for working parents) with educational offers (for young children) is mirrored in much of the Global North.

In the Global South, namely Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, the focus over the past three decades has been on initiating and upscaling programmes that provide nutrition, health, and general early childhood development (ECD) support, mainly for children from disadvantaged communities (Dachyshyn 2016; Young and Richardson 2007). In recent years some countries, namely in Latin America but also in India and a number of African countries, have begun a comprehensive integration of services incorporating nutrition, health, well-being, education, care, social cohesion and equality (Flórez Romero et al. 2014; Floréz Romero and Torrado 2013; Floréz Romero et al. 2013; Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar 2015; Nelson and Grossberg 1988; Republic of Colombia 2013; Urban 2013b, 2014; Vargas-Barón 2015).³

Such a comprehensive understanding of early childhood services is largely absent from the European and North American debate. Some countries and bodies including the European Union (EU) (Council of the European Union 2011) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (OECD 2001, 2006, 2010) have adopted ECEC to promote a successful shift towards the inseparability of care and education, but in doing so continue to exclude crucial aspects of holistic development from the picture: i.e. health, nutrition, well-being, children's rights. The prepandemic EU, for instance, was slow to adopt integrated policy approaches that would have required coordination across separate Department Generals. Two developments stand out that define the geo-political field of tension for early childhood:

First, while countries are aiming to increase early childhood provision to meet global (e.g. SDG 4.2) or regional (e.g. the EU's Barcelona targets) targets, stark differences and inequalities emerge not only between but within countries. This has been documented in both the Global South (Guevara and Cardini 2021) and North (European Trade Union Confederation 2020).

Second, rising inequality, exacerbated–not caused–by the Covid-19 pandemic (Blofield and Filgueira 2020), together with the localised provision of early childhood services (Neuman 2005) has led to similar life experiences for children from marginalised groups regardless of their global location, as mentioned at the beginning of this section. This, arguably, is a broad and overly simplifying proposition that might rightly be contested by those living and working in the reality of post- and neo-colonial disadvantage as they insist that marked differences remain between the Global South and North. However, together with the proposition that the Global South is not a geographical concept (de Sousa Santos 2018) this points to a ‘blurring of boundaries’ and ‘paradoxes, power dissymmetries and fragmentations of the present historical context’ (Braidotti 2011, 14), reflected in early childhood services. Some countries, most notably in South America, have begun to address these discrepancies through more integrated and multi-sectoral early childhood policies that bring together early childhood development (ECD) and education (see previous section). Although the EU lags behind, the recent proclamation of the EU Child's Right Guarantee (European Commission 2021) is a first step in the right direction. Realising its ambition requires addressing and overcoming the divide between ECD and ECEC both conceptually and operationally. Europe–the Global North–will have to learn from and with countries is the Global South how to go about it.

The epistemological tension

As early childhood has become a highly visible ‘matter of concern’ (Latour 2004) in the Global North and South, several initially distinct lines of disciplinary and professional attention have begun to converge. The theoretical foundations of early childhood education as a field, however, continue to be borrowed from a wide range of areas including developmental psychology, attachment theory, nursing, education, economics, legal studies, neuroscience, organisational theory and management studies. While these varied and largely disconnected disciplines continue to influence practice and policy, historically, the main emphasis has been on developmental psychology – or rather, a narrow reading of it (Burman 2008). A body of critical (i.e. reconceptualist, indigenous, anti-colonial) scholarship concerning young children exists (Bloch, Swadener, and Cannella 2014a, 2014b, 2018; Burman 2008; Cannella, Salazar Pérez, and Lee 2016; Carr, Mitchell, and Rameka 2016; Miller, Dalli, and Urban 2012; Moss et al. 2016; Moss and Urban 2017, 2018). While this body of critical early childhood scholarship continues to be marginalised in mainstream thought and by influential trans-national actors (Moss 2017; Urban and Swadener 2016) it arguably draws on travelling discourses, disciplines, theories and ‘educational borrowing’ (Steiner-Khamsi 2004) from outside the field of early childhood as much as the mainstream.

A third field of tension emerges from these contexts: While early childhood development, education and care has gained more visibility, the theoretical base informing this growing field relies on theories that are external to the field. Yet, epistemological silos persist and concepts presented as universal (viewed as certainties) about ‘best practice’ based on an array of disciplines are increasingly imposed on nations and communities, regularly without meaningful reference to their ‘underlying assumptions about childhood and education’ (OECD 2001, 63).

The issue at stake here is not so much whether or not the array of theories informing early childhood research, policy and practice historically originate outside the field. Rather, the task in hand for contemporary early childhood scholars is to critically appreciate and interrogate these distinct bodies of knowledge for their relevance to an – as yet absent – theory of early childhood rooted within the field. Critical for such an undertaking, I would argue, is to question how they relate to, contribute to, or counter the historic colonisation of the field and its practices and theorisations by disciplines (e.g. developmental psychology), practices (e.g. developmentally appropriate practice / DAP), and policies (e.g. standardised assessments) (Cannella and Viruru 2004; Diaz Soto and Swadener 2002; Ritchie and Skerrett 2014; Urban 2019b).

I refer to this as an epistemological task, or field of tension because knowledge transcends geography. Simply equating the geo-political field of tension (above) with the epistemological one would create a false dichotomy. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos reminds us, the Global South is not a geographical concept, neither is the Global North. Rather, it encapsulates a frame of thinking, a possible epistemology, that enables us to fundamentally question what he calls the abyssal line that separates Eurocentric, colonialist thinking including its equally Eurocentric critique – i.e. critical theory – from other forms of knowing, being, and doing. This does not, he argues, ‘come to an end with the end of historical colonialism’ (de Sousa Santos 2018, 42); it continues in the persistent ‘duality of knowledge as regulation and knowledge as emancipation’ (ibid). Firmly underpinning Eurocentric epistemologies, he writes, is the concept of objectivity, which ‘is today more than ever linked to guaranteeing a type of order possible only through appropriation and violence, that is, through radical forms of epistemological or socio-political exclusion’ (ibid). Early childhood, as a field, has been subject to its own abyssal divide, its inherent tension between imposed knowledge as regulation (i.e. standardised assessments, managerialism, technical accountability) and the promise of a real utopia (Moss 2014), a space for the co-creation of emancipatory knowledges and practices.

Towards a new paradigm

We don't need another theory of revolution; we need rather to revolutionise theory. (de Sousa Santos 2018, p. ix)

The way we think and learn about early childhood has reached a critical juncture. So far, the expansion of early childhood development, education and care provision has been a global success story, albeit an unequal one. Connected to the broad consensus that early childhood provision should be on top of national and international policy agendas is the parallel success story of early childhood as a field of academic interest, of scholarship and research. A drive towards ‘what works’ approaches and evidence-based policy making has helped to establish mainstream research into early childhood, and to secure its place in the academy. It has become ‘normal science’. However, as Thomas Kuhn, the originator of the term reminds us (Kuhn 1962), the status of ‘normal science’, in the life cycle of any academic discipline, carries within it the seed of its own disruption. Once broad agreement is reached on the questions that merit researching, and the appropriate methods for doing so, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to challenge the rules of the game from inside the establishment, thus preparing the ground for Kuhn's ‘scientific revolution’. Or, as Cuban philosopher Pedro Sotolongo puts it, the establishment, inevitably, creates the conditions for ‘marginal notions’ to grow into ‘idea forces’ that eventually undermine the ‘powerful edifices of empire’ (Sotolongo 2013).

The ‘marginal notions’ of early childhood scholarship thrive in pockets of reconceptualist scholarship that have resisted the ‘what works’ and ‘solutionist’ attitude of mainstream research for many years: the international Reconceptualising Early Childhood Education (RECE) network (www.receinternational.org) hosts its 31st annual conference in 2022. RECE has provided a safe and creative space for scholars that resist the dominant ‘what works’ attitude, the ‘research-as-problem-solving’ mode that routinely attributes the ‘problem’ to ‘the child’ and her or his family and community. Within this space, critical theory is being produced and debated, and new discourses (e.g. post-structuralist and post-humanist thought) are being introduced to the field. But, as I have argued elsewhere (Urban 2016a), it also carries the risk of becoming a largely inward-looking space: a safe haven for critical, marginalised thought, thriving in self-selected isolation from the mainstream? Other voices have entered the discursive space and added voice to the ‘marginal notions’ in recent years, most importantly from the Global South and from indigenous scholars.

The accelerating convergence of existential crises – climate, biodiversity, pandemic, democracy, peace–threaten both the human and ‘more-than-human’ world. They lend new urgency to the call, articulated by Peter Moss (2010) and others, that ‘we cannot continue as we are’. Early childhood education, Moss alerts us, must reinvent itself as ‘education for survival’. This may sound alarmist to those still positioned within the dominant paradigm of universality (of development), measurability (of predetermined outcomes), and governability and manageability (of quality). For indigenous scholars, however, ‘education for survival’ has been the foundation communities’ engagement with young children all along (Ng’asike and Swadener 2019).

As influential mainstream actors begin to acknowledge the crucial role of early childhood education in areas including social cohesion and crises resilience, new questions arise about the future direction of early childhood scholarship, and comparative studies in early childhood education more specifically. If, as the urgency of the task suggests, incremental change is no longer sufficient, what are the challenges – and possibilities – of a radical step towards a new paradigm? Can we bring about a Kuhnian ‘scientific revolution’ in our field? Some of the parameters of the paradigmatic shift are beginning to emerge. They include, at the very least, our systematic embracing of elements that ‘normal science’ has aspired – unsuccessfully – to rule out, control, or deny outright: multiplicity, diversity, ambiguity, and shared, situated co-creation of knowledge. These are key features of what I call, in reference to Basarab Nicolescu (2002, 2008) the possibility of a trans-discipline of early childhood.

What do I mean by trans-discipline? Not, to be clear, an attempt to replace the existing array of disciplines and their various universalist claims with yet another, perhaps even bigger grand récit, a kind of all-encompassing early childhood theory of everything. The challenge and possibility, I would argue, is for us to disrupt and transcend the certainties that underpin disciplinary approaches to understanding (researching, theorising) early childhood. Critical debate about the foundational propositions is taking place within academic disciplines (for instance Erica Burman's insider critique of developmental psychology, drawing on feminist theory [Burman 2008]). While important for (re)configuring the collective identities of the scholarly disciplines involved, early childhood cannot rely on internal critique alone. Needed, instead, is a trans-disciplinary critique and reconceptualisation that enables us to interrogate the propositions made by developmental psychology, economics, neuroscience, and other individual disciplines about young children, and to undertake such critical interrogation from vantage points within the field. Such a shift of paradigm would place at the centre of interest the ‘lived experience’ of children, their families and communities, of educators, of policy makers – all those who individually and collectively make up the systems of early childhood education in all their internal and external complexity. Making theorisation and research trans-disciplinary involves proactively seeking to engage in research with (instead of on) early childhood education in all its manifestations, in the process promoting it from an object of scholarly interest to an agency exerting subject that, in its own right, questions the ways of knowing, doing, and being imposed onto it by traditional disciplines.

Future directions for comparative studies in early childhood education: some possibilities

There is an obvious reservation about the call for a paradigm shift that would enable early childhood theory to transcend and critically interrogate the bodies of knowledge that have traditionally defined the field: that transdisciplinarity is the default characteristic of comparative work in early childhood education, as it could be said for comparative education in general. That comparing experiences beyond one's own context enables critical interrogation, and consequently potentially better understanding, has indeed been one of the main propositions of critical comparativists including Robin Alexander (Alexander 2000, 2012; Alexander, Broadfoot, and Phillips 1999). Similarly, Joe Tobin's ethnographical work (Tobin, Wu, and Davidson 1989, 2009; Tobin 2022) has opened an anthropological view into comparison in early childhood education without constructing comparability.

However, despite these openings it has proven problematic for early childhood that, in its mainstream, is regularly subjected to a type of comparison – a ‘grand epistemological strategy’ (Stake 2003, 148) – that requires comparability to be constructed according to whatever lens is available to, or preferred by, the external comparator. This is particularly problematic in studies that conflate comparison with other–potentially conflicting–purposes like judgement (e.g. of ‘quality’, ‘efficacy’) and ranking, as is regularly the case in International Large Scale Assessments (ILSAs) modelled on the OECD's PISA. These comparisons can only be made to work by reducing the complexity of what is actually going on to what is deemed to be comparable using a limited set of methodological tools. Not only will such processes risk losing sight of the inherent ‘messiness’ (Ackoff 1974) of the interactions, aspirations and values that define the complex systems that give form to what Bernfeld (1973) called the ‘the sum total of the social reaction to the fact of ontogenetic postnatal development’, they proactively seek to avoid it.

Undertaking comparative studies in early childhood education, we should instead embrace the complexities, likely puzzling findings, and contradictions of our field. We should seek to engage with the juiciness that anthropologists seek to capture through Geertz's ‘thick descriptions’ and place them at the centre of comparative research that aims at learning with each other's cases, be they preschools, countries, or policy contexts.

The implications for comparative scholarship are profound. To begin with, the questions John Bennett poses – ‘what does childhood mean in this society [place, context, case …]? How should young children be reared and educated? What are the purposes of early childhood institutions? What are the functions of early childhood staff?’ (OECD 2001, 63) – should be the starting point for our investigations, as they were in the OECD's original Starting Strong report (OECD 2001). Comparative scholarship, then, could become a meaningful investigation of the many and differing heres of early childhood education, extending to critical interrogation of epistemological heres of the academic disciplines that continue to shape understandings, practices and policies in the field: education, psychology, medicine, legal studies, economics, philosophy, political and cultural studies etc.

Such comparative scholarship, too, would investigate the geo-graphical and geo-political heres, the loci, of practice, policy, and lived experience. Such comparative work would interest itself not in countries or hemispheres but in the many and diverse Global Souths that early childhood occupies, regardless of their geographical location. It would.

It is important to remember that the OECD, a current proponent of simplified comparison and agent of unaccountable ‘soft power’ (Morris 2016; Sjøberg 2019) that stays safely on one side of Santos’ abyssal line, perpetuating the ‘myth’ about the causal relationship between a country's ranking in international league tables and its macro-economic achievement in ‘global competition’ (Alexander 2012; Morrison 2020) has once shown (OECD 2001, 2006) that other approaches to comparison are possible. Twenty years on, we, taking collective responsibility for how early childhood education is (re-)conceptualised and theorised, should not only question the limitations of comparison imposed on us by external agents and disciplines – we should radically extend its scope.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the reviewers for their thorough reading of my manuscript, and their constructive comments. I am particularly grateful to the guest editors of this special edition for their invaluable and thoughtful suggestions. They went to great lengths to help make this paper better.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mathias Urban

Mathias Urban, PhD, is Desmond Chair of Early Childhood Education, and Director of the Early Childhood Research Centre (ECRC) at Dublin City University, Ireland, Professor (II) of Pedagogy at the University of Stavanger, Norway, and Affiliate Professor and Fellow at EDPolicyFORWARD: The Center for Educational Policy at George Mason University, USA. He works on questions of integrated early childhood systems, diversity and equality, social justice, and professionalism in diverse socio-cultural contexts. Mathias has over 20 years' experience in designing and leading international collaborative research projects. He was awarded the ‘Marianne Bloch Distinguished Career Award' by the international Reconceptualising Early Childhood Education network in 2018, and the DCU President’s Research Impact Award 2020. Mathias is the lead author of the 2018 (Argentina), 2019 (Japan), 2020 (Saudi Arabia), 2021 (Italy) and 2022 (Indonesia) G20/T20 early childhood development, education and care policy briefs, and a member of the European Commission expert working group on Early Childhood Education and Care.

Notes

1 The Group of 20 (G20), an intergovernmental forum comprising 19 countries and the European Union, was initially established in 1999 but has come to global prominence in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. Its members represent ‘the world's major economies’ and account ‘for more than 80% of world GDP, 75% of global trade and 60% of the population of the planet’ (www.G20.org).

2 Dublin City University, Early Childhood Research Centre (lead), Ireland; CIPPEC, Centro de Implementación de Políticas Públicas para la Equidad y el Crecimiento, Argentina; CINDE, Fundación Centro Internacional de Educación y Desarrollo Humano, Colombia; Research and Information Systems for Developing Countries, India; RISE Institute, USA; Centro de Excelência e Inovação em Políticas Educacionais- CEIPE-FGV, Brazil; Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Grupo de Investigación Cognición y Lenguaje en la Infancia, Colombia; AfECN, African Early Childhood Network, Kenya; South East Asian Ministers of Education Organization / Regional Centre for Early Childhood Care, Education and Parenting (SEAMEO CECCEP), Indonesia.

3 Several terms are used to describe programmes aimed at the development, education and care of young children from birth. They include Early Childhood Development (ECD) and Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), or variations thereof (e.g. ECCE, ECCD etc.). These denominations are grounded in different disciplinary backgrounds and early childhood traditions. Some countries and bodies including the European Union (EU) (Council of the European Union 2011) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (OECD 2001, 2006, 2010) have adopted ECEC to refer to a successful shift towards the inseparability of care and education, but in doing so continue to exclude crucial aspects of holistic development from the picture: i.e. health, nutrition, well-being, children's rights. Recently, some scholars and international organisations have begun to promote ECD as an overarching term, intending to reflect the multidimensionality of needs in the lives of young children. It is important to note that none of these terms and acronyms are neutral. On the contrary, they are highly contested, subject to interpretation and often conflicting interests, and therefore inevitably political. I support the development of shared understandings but caution that the uncritical use of terminology carries the risk of epistemological, practical, and political hegemony: instead of the fulfilment of each child's potential in diversity, development might be understood as reference to much criticised developmentalism (a reference to Western-centric universalism imposed on majority world communities). Education, instead of societies’ purposeful engagement with young children to realise the right to fulfilment of their full potential in the here and now, might be narrowly interpreted as technology of instruction and preparation for predefined external needs and roles: school readiness, labour market, future skills, purposes of macro-economic achievement or political control. I use the terms early childhood development and early childhood education and care in various combinations in this paper, and even move into the space of proposing a new variation: an integrated early childhood development, education and care. We should be able to avoid its unwieldy acronym (ECDEC) by (re)claiming holistic, integrated, and multi-sectoral early childhood practices as education in the broadest sense. However, this, too, calls for critical debate and democratic engagement (Urban et al. 2020b).