Against the self-regulated child: Early childhood pedagogies in neoliberal times
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the curriculum and pedagogies for ethical practice in a childcare centre in Vancouver, Canada. I draw on Smith’s new model of childhood to examine narratives and practices around the ‘responsible child’ in a context where child developmental theories continue to influence pedagogical decisions. I argue that the elevation of self-regulation strategies as a pedagogical approach narrows children’s sense of responsibility to a mere individual trait. In addition, it fails to cultivate children’s interdependence and multiple relationships with humans and more-than-human others. Self-regulation-centred pedagogies also reinforce neoliberal and colonial discourses of the child anchored in human exceptionality, choice, autonomy and rationality. This article proposes that pre-service and in-service early childhood education needs to support educators in doing the analytical, embodied and reflective work to shift from educational paradigms founded in neoliberal and colonial rationalities towards an ethic that acknowledges children and educators’ interdependence and that cultivates good relations with humans and more-than-human others.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".