Special issue (Part 1): Regulating childhoods: Disrupting discourses of control

Abstract

Going to and/or attending (pre)school has become an expected contemporary childhood experience for many children around the world. Discussions and debates concerning the ways in which early childhood education and care should be organized and planned to ensure quality for the hope of a better future are transcending political and sociocultural boundaries. Since the turn of the 21st century, there are multiple international examples of reform policies in the field of early childhood education and care. In particular, several cases of different national curriculum frameworks have emerged from different sociocultural contexts and have come together to (re)configure a new “truth” concerning what may constitute desirable approaches relating to what teaching and learning ought to be in (pre)schools. To highlight a few, these examples may include the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) in Australia, the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) in the United Kingdom, the Guide to Pre-primary Curriculum in Hong Kong, the Guideline for Kindergarten Education in China, the Nuri Curriculum in Korea, the Aistear in Ireland, and many other early childhood curriculum frameworks from different countries. However, despite being articulated in different languages from multiple cultural contexts, these cases of national curriculum guidelines and/or frameworks share a similar system of reasoning to prescribe normative ways of being and becoming for all children in that, among contemporary changes and constructions of desirable childhoods, raising standards while promoting learning outcomes to ensure the quality and accountability of early childhood education and care has become a shared concern in global education reforms. Thus, a dominant and normative discourse about appropriate approaches and desirable pedagogical practices in the early years is at work producing a universal grand narrative across cultural, political, and social boundaries to (re)define restricted ways of be(come)ing for all children. Drawing from critical and poststructural theoretical frameworks, (pre)schools can be conceptualized as sites of power struggles. The authors in this Special Issue aim to unpack the dangers of the dominant discourses to reconceptualize as well as to disrupt the various discourses of control to (re)define desirable ways of be(come)ing in (pre)schools. Reflecting the theme of this special issue, Moss offers the case of early childhood education in England to illustrate the production of both fears and hopes through critical analysis of the dominant discourses at work. Critiquing how