Abstract
WHAT HAPPENS TO CHILDREN'S free play when learning outcomes are required? What happens when safety is foregrounded over exploration? When does accountability become surveillance? When does visualising children as an investment opportunity make children ‘too precious’? Based on the analysis of oral history interviews with historic leaders of Aotearoa, New Zealand's early childhood sector, this paper examines some unintended consequences of the sector's professionalisation. It draws on contemporary, feminist and classical sociological theory (Bunkle, 1995; Foucault, 1970/2001; Merton, 1934; Moss, 2010) to support a discursive model that focuses on how ‘odd’ alliances can push the sector in unanticipated directions.
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