I would like to clarify that my objective is not to take sides on developmentally appropriate practice or to encourage the creation of other dominant discourses. I am reminded by Foucault 1983 that “all discourses are dangerous, especially without continued examination.” (as cited in Canella, 2000, p.38). I think it would be easy to find myself stifled by other particular truths that would create other types of constraints. However, at the same time, we are so used to this way of doing things that it would be difficult to sit in a place that is uncomfortable, a place where knowledge is not prescribed and where we do not always have imposed outcomes and solutions to lean on. We might say we want to get away from a standardized system, governing rules, imposed curriculum but how would we feel if it’s all taken away from us? Would we know what to do?
Even though I have these questions and you might add others, I would like for us to think around the possibilities of expanding our horizons. I’ve come to a place where I feel the importance lies in being able to reflect on our practices, then taking it a step further, questioning and perhaps beginning to resist, even if it proves to feel troublesome. Canella (2000, p.36) who problematizes the discourse of education through the work of Foucault says “parents and educators have accepted and contributed to the discourses of ‘scientific childhood’ without question or critique, without recognition that younger human beings may not always benefit from the prederminism imposed by others.” Rather than becoming dormant and submissive to particular truths that have been assumed, ask yourself how it is working for you and the others you are relating to? And it begins making very good sense to me, not only are the children not benefiting form imposed practices but we too are not benefiting from this as well .
I begin to imagine the possibilities of being open to other meanings, not only for myself but for the children I work with. I’m not looking for answers, however I am in a place where I am questioning what I know, what I have been taught “to know” and I am beginning to take small steps in crossing the boundaries of my experiences. As I am beginning to do this, I realize that at times I have already visited another meaning, for example when I find myself deciding to stay with something even though it has no resolution at the time. Is this a way of stepping away from what I have always known. Through these small crossings, imposed limitations begin to reveal themselves, and what becomes obvious to me is that they are not few. Do we not have a responsibility to ourselves and our children to practice together in a reflective manner in order to create endless possibilities rather than endless limitations, and in order for all of us to be part of a world that we created together in unity?
I would like to leave you with a quote from Arendt (1968, p.196) which I hope enlightens us on our responsibility to our children, and on our responsibility of allowing them the opportunity to rejuvenate our world: “And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world”.
Canella, G. (2000). The scientific discourse of education: Predetermining others - Foucault, education, and children. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 1(1), 36-44. doi: 10.2304/ciec.2000.1.1.6
Arendt, H. (1968). Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought.
New York: Penguin.
Your thoughts and questions brings me back to Maxine Greene(1995)’s idea of ‘social responsibility’. According to Greene, she reminds us that “we should think of education as opening public spaces in which, speaking in their voices and acting on their own initiatives, [students] can identify themselves and choose themselves in relation to such principles as freedom, equality, justice and concern for others. We can hope to communicate the recognition that persons become more fully themselves and open to the world if they can be aware of themselves appearing before others, speaking in their own voices, and trying as they do so to bring into being a common world”(p. 72). Then she adds, “we want classrooms to be just and caring, full of various conceptions of the good. We want them to articulate, with dialogue involving as many persons as possible, opening to another, as we learn to be concerned for them. We want them to achieve friendships among one another, as each one moves to a heightened sense of craft and wide-awakeness, to a renewed consciousness of worth and possibility” (p. 72). Schools may become a technical site when developmentally appropriate practice becomes truth, and the only truth. Yet we can resist governance of dominant ‘truth’ and bring the world in the classroom by releasing our imaginations to what it can become. Pinar quotes Greene:
ReplyDelete‘My field of study is lived situations. My goal is to challenge that taken for granted, the frozen and the bound and the restricted.’ She envision a society that is thoughtful, socially democratic, pluralistic, and existentially free. She promotes an education that is not baed upon prescriptions of the ‘truth’, but rather is a stimulant for our collective thinking (p. 72).
Pinar, W. (1998). The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene 'I am...not yet.' Bristol: Falmer Press, p.72.