The emergence of the analytical method in early childhood education – the scientific effort to produce the learning child for the nation in a global era

Abstract

Through an analysis of a recent Danish administrative educational reform in the area of early childhood education, this article raises a discussion about the way pedagogical objects and subjects are generated in the knowledge acquisition of administrative educational reforms promoting accountability, visibility and documentation. It is argued that pedagogy is generated as a sequential and unit-specified way of working on the production of ‘the learning child’, forming a time- and material-optimising approach. Hereby, the nursery teacher, as a daily scientific researcher, comes to serve the nation by an ongoing observational intervention, producing the learning foundation for the entrepreneurial citizen, and thus the nation as a knowledge society in a globalised world. This is what this article terms the emergence of the analytical method.

Keywords:

• administration
• governmentality
• early childhood education
• accountability
• documentation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank professor Thomas Popkewitz and professor Bernadette Baker for comments on this article.

Notes

1. The documents have different authors (government, ministry, university college, consultant firm) and are of different genres (law, handbook, evaluation), but they are all part of the official documents sent out to day-care institutions or to be acquired from the official website of the reform.

2. The eight nursery teachers come from three different day-cares: one placed in the capital, one in a smaller town and one in the countryside. By choosing day-cares from different localities, I tried to open the scope for different ways in which the rules of reasons embedded in the reform came into operation. These differences were, however, not very prominent, and are not taken up in this article.

3. The questions I have asked have been of concrete nature, and in relation to specific situations or processes. My point has been to make nursery teachers reason their daily life in relation to the reform, rather than establishing the possibility of expressing general opinions or ways of interpreting concepts, etc.

4. All translations are made by me.

5. More widely, the spread of neoliberal government carries this change in the construction of the citizen as one who fulfils the obligation to society by personal entrepreneurship (Davies and Bansel 2007).

6. All interviews were conducted in confidentiality, and the names of interviewees are thus replaced by numbers.