Reconceptualizing dominant discourses in early childhood education: Exploring ‘readiness’ as an active-ethical-relation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper considers that the landscape of early childhood education in England is dominated by discourses of 'readiness-for-school' and 'readiness-for-learning’ that act to heavily stratify the educational spaces inhabited by young children. The 'ready-child' is constructed as a normative identity towards which the ‘unready’ child is expected to progress. The confinement of children within such predetermined subject positions is considered problematic, as inevitably not all children will achieve these normative ideals, resulting in their exclusion from positions of 'success', as defined by dominant educational narratives. In response to these concerns, this article seeks to disrupt dominant conceptualizations of 'readiness' in the context of early childhood education, attempting to produce a rupture in the educational landscape, expanding space for alternative ideas, theories and practices. In a deliberate move away from concepts that relate 'readiness' to predefined goals, outcomes and identities, this article explores the possibility of thinking with a complex logic in order to generate new ideas, understandings and practices. Approaching complexity from the ‘outside-in’, this paper draws in particular on the concept of 'becoming' (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), exploring 'readiness' as a complex process of emergence, always open to the unpredictable and the new. It is argued that ‘readiness’ is part of an open-ended ‘becoming’, rather than a pre-defined ‘state’. Drawing on the work of Deleuze (1983), Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Dewey (1899/2010; 1916), this reconceptualized idea of 'readiness' does not hark back to romantic notions that might consider all forms of development equally valid or desirable. This paper argues, instead, that it matters greatly what and how children ‘become’ and as such, ‘readiness’ for these emergent ‘becomings’ must be considered an ethical and political endeavor.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".