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Human beings as imperfect rational beings face continuous challenges, one of them has to do with the lack of recognizing and respecting our inner dignity in present times. In this collective paper, we address the overall theme—Philosophy of Education in a New Key (see Peters et al., 2020) from various perspectives related to dignity. We address in particular some of the constraints and possibilities with regard to this issue in various settings such as education and society at large. Klas Roth discusses, for example, that it is not uncommon that the value of human beings has to do with their price in, inter alia, their social, cultural, political and economic settings throughout the world. He argues that such a focus does not necessarily draw attention to the inner dignity of human beings, but that human beings ought to do so in education and society at large. Lia Mollvik discusses views of inner and outer dignity, and argues that there needs to be a balance in between them, and that the balance ought to be acknowledged in education. Rama Alshoufani discusses the classification of human beings in terms of various diagnoses related to the asserted dysfunction of the brain, and she argues that such classification does paradoxically not necessarily respect people with such diagnoses as ends in themselves. On the contrary, she argues that their inner dignity is not respected, but that it should be. Other such failures are due to the lack of inner dignity when it comes to Children’s rights as discussed by Rebecca Adami, and to the lack of recognition of human beings’ vulnerability as discussed by Katy Dineen. Fariba Majlesi criticizes a too strong emphasis on substantive notions of humanist education, which seem to hinder new ways of thinking; she argues that it is necessary to acknowledge the latter in and through education in order to preserve the dignity of human beings. Dignity, it is argued throughout the paper, has an inner moral worth, and is beyond price.

Sonja Arndt, Michael Peters, Marek Tesar Introspection is a key concept in epistemology, since introspective knowledge is often thought to be particularly secure, maybe even immune to skeptical dou...

This article asks the questions, what is “philosophy as a method?” how can it be conceptualized and what are its genealogies? and what role might it play in the liminal spaces of the intersections of philosophy, methodology, and education? It further aims to perform philosophy as a method through a rereading of the histories of the intersections of philosophy, education, and methodology. In doing so, it also utilizes philosophy as method as a means for undertaking a much-needed critique of the current turns to new ontologies, posthumanism, and new empiricism.

Perhaps it is our responsibility to protect the post-qualitative methodologies rather than trying to rush them or use them without any substantial reading or thinking; and as such exposing them and categorizing, and analyzing them. Perhaps there is a need for a radical renewal of methodological responsibility, of not wanting to discover and turn every stone, whether for curiosity or for academic credit. To do so, it is our responsibility to divest ourselves of our egotistical anthropocentrism, of our deep methodological habits of seeing ourselves as those who rule the paradigms and methodologies, and focus on openness and responsibility as we chart our methodological futures.

Michael Peters, Sonja Arndt & Marek TesarThis is a collective writing experiment of PESA members, including its Executive Committee, asking questions of the Philosophy of Education in a New Key. Co...

Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in securing the common good. The common good is never what individuals or particular groups want or desire, but always reaches beyond such particular desires towards that which societies as a whole should consider as desirable. This does, of course, put the common good in tension with the desires of individuals and groups. Neo-liberal modes of governance have, over the past decades, put this particular educational set up under pressure and have, according to some, eroded the very idea of the common good. This set of contributions reflects on this state of affairs, partly through an exploration of the idea of publicness itself – how it can be rearticulated and regained – and partly through reflections on the current state of education in the ‘north’ and the ‘south.’ Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In this article we consider historical and contemporary ideologies of childhood in China and critically examine notions of ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ in Chinese children’s literature. We analyse the themes and knowledge that relate to relevant historical and contemporary political events and policies, and how these contribute to the production of childhoods. We focus on three images of childhoods in China: the Confucian child, the Modern child and the Maoist child. Each of the images reflects a way of seeing, a perspective about what a child ought to be and become, and what their childhood should look like. Everyday media are reflected in the texts and stories examined and portray both ‘imagined’ and ‘real-life’ narratives of children and their childhoods. The stories, and the connected power relations, represent an important link between the politics of childhood and the pedagogy associated with these politics, including large-scale state investment in the production of desired, ideal and perfect childhoods. Through such an examination of contemporary and historical children’s literature and media in China we also explore the ways in which contemporary media revitalise particular notions of child agency.

This article suggests a theoretical lens of “mundane abjection” as a new conceptualization of liminality as a methodologically and humanistically transformative concept. Thinking with Julia Kristeva’s post-structural conception of the subject as “always in-process,” this article traverses the inherent and transformative element of abjection in relation to the perceived ontological challenges of methodological liminalities. It posits liminality as a potentiating conceptual space for new ontologies in relation to the human “I.” Throughout, the performance, that is the occurrence, of mundane abjection is illustrated as a critical, revelatory and necessary process within this ontological transformation of methodology and the human “I.”

In diverging from a follow-the-heard idealism that has scholars spinning in paradox, this article opens the possibility that neoliberal data can ground themselves in the reality of being in the world via a search for the immanent other, friend, concept, or practice. This article is not concerned with a search for ultimate (data) truth, but rather aporia and the intimate act of parrhesia, or truth-telling, as it is communicated in the context of life. We hover over whether data-as-friendship can be unplanned and unrehearsed as parrhesia, and not just part of the neoliberal networking scheme to gather more data, or follow regulations of “rigor” and “rightness.” We also ponder ways in which free and deregulated data (in all friendship forms) can enable complex, creative, and critical engagements with inquiry, participants, and our environments.

There is a complexity to the early years and childhoods in communist Czechoslovakia. On the surface, childhoods and early years education can be perceived as homogenous and monolithic. However, close examination reveals not only a multiplicity of childhoods, but also cracks in the ideological governance that positions these childhoods as happy and political, and in the early years centres as spaces of education, care and preparation of children for future ideological productivity to serve the system. In this sense, the ‘socialist child’ was a young citizen identified with the ideals of communism/socialism. This article focuses on the formation of childhoods and the production of child subjects in Czechoslovakia under communist governance. The analysis looks particularly at how early years1 institutions were perceived through the lens of children’s literature, and how through the archival documents and magazines distributed for and about children in kindergarten, a particular image of a ‘socialist ...

This collection examines why urban environments are key sites for reimagining and reconfiguring human-nature encounters in times and spaces of planetary crisis. Cities constitute powerful and troubling spaces for human-nature intersections. They typically represent the effects of human dominance over nature: humans in control, taming and managing the wildness of ‘nature’ by domesticating it. Children existing in these mostly adult designed and orchestrated creations are often ignored as city dwellers, along with animals who increasingly migrate into urban areas. Yet cities are also sites of innovation and ‘greening’, of critical democracy and renewal, with the most innovative cities including those where children co-create urban environments, and where animals and plants are valued as co-city dwellers. As this collection shows, troubling and reimagining these sites for diverse forms and ways of living, including of encounter with the other, and thus what can be learnt and taught through urban natu...

Despite the ubiquity of reflective practice in education, mandating reflective processes within sanctioned frameworks is inherently problematic, as it may lead to reproduction, standardization, and forced universalities, rather than the critical and innovative pedagogy they intend. This article engages with reflection through both the metaphor and method of diffraction, applying a diffractive analytical mode across three international contexts. By examining onto-epistemological openings afforded by a diffractive approach, we attend to what is being (re)produced through various mandates for preservice and in-service teacher practices of reflection and the various effects of those (re)productions, as well as posit different ways of approaching mandated reflection as a practice for educating and assessing teachers.

Considering the entanglement of materials and objects in children’s lives through a posthuman reading of curricula, this chapter follows on closely from Chap. 5 to investigate children’s relationships with materials and nonhuman objects. Its focus is on how children’s lives are shaped by regulatory documents, and as our first example, we examine Aotearoa New Zealand’s internationally acclaimed early childhood curriculum Te Whāriki. As a national curriculum this document moves away from a developmental approach to adopt a holistic, relational and bicultural focus, that is closely aligned with potential posthuman pedagogies. The chapter illustrates how the curriculum might be read through a posthuman lens, and how such a reading could support pedagogies built on insights into the critical relationships that children have with materials and objects. Two further case studies then illustrate how rules, regulations and policy can shape conceptions of childhood, to postulate what this might look like through a posthuman lens. Throughout, our focus is on children’s intra-relationships with the people, places and things in their lives.

This article argues that the denial of development can be a productive space and a liberating time for children in the current outcomes-driven times. The author offers an alternative reading of childhood, considering children’s development differently through various philosophical theorizations of events, which emerge through utilizing philosophy and theory as a method. This approach allows a merging of analyses of childhood, philosophical concepts of time and temporality, place, space and popular culture, in order to outline how the development of a child may be resisted through the notion of ‘time and temporality’. The idea of working with the temporality of ‘timing childhoods’ can mimic the notion of a ticking clock. Positioned against the background of the story of Peter Pan, this article challenges established ways of thinking of/about childhood and development, arguing that they perpetuate inequalities, homogenize children and essentialize childhoods. It thinks divergently with theories and philosophies about how childhoods are conceptualized and dissected, distinguished and ‘timed’. The denial of development could be a very power-disrupting, and therefore liberating and exhilarating, experience for children and their childhoods, as the different theoretical and philosophical frameworks analysed in this article point out, through time, temporality and space.

Early years education in Europe and elsewhere around the world is currently in the spotlight due to political and economical changes and subsequent promises of effective investment into its provision. In this article we analyse everyday preschool practices in Slovakia in terms of tensions between policies, the teachers workforce and the concept of professionalism. Through bureaucratic scientisation, teachers become subjects with bureaucratic subjectivities, and they are expected to devote increasing amounts of time to planning, reporting and administrative tasks. Teachers are decreasingly focused on the actual work on the ground with the children, and are concerned instead with notions of accountability and reporting, which supposedly raises their professional status. Slovakia’s experience of the bureaucratic subjectivities of early years teachers has complex ramifications for European and overseas countries as it problematises and unmasks the global issues of complex tensions between the teachers and policy documents.

This mixed-method study looked at perceptions of induction and mentoring among New Zealand early childhood educators. Specifically, 213 respondents drawn from five regions representing urban, rural and differing socioeconomic levels, school organizations, and professional roles completed a 19-item psychometrically sound survey. There were significant differences in responses for leaders/mentors in contrast to mentees or teaching staff. Based on quantitative outcomes, two focus groups of school leaders/mentors and mentees were convened. Qualitative analysis of the transcripts revealed several important themes that served to amplify or extended the survey results. Implications of the quantitative and qualitative results are overviewed.

Fairy tales play a substantial role in the shaping of childhoods. Developed into stories and played out in picture books, films and tales, they are powerful instruments that influence conceptions and treatments of the child and childhoods. This article argues that traditional fairy tales and contemporary stories derived from them use complex means to mould the ways that children live and experience their childhoods. This argument is illustrated through representations of childhoods and children in a selection of stories and an analysis of the ways they act on and produce the child subjects and childhoods they convey. The selected stories are examined through different philosophical lenses, utilizing Foucault, Lyotard and Rousseau. By problematizing these selected stories, the article analyses what lies beneath the surface of the obvious meanings of the text and enticing pictures in stories, as published or performed. Finally, this article argues for a careful recognition of the complexities of stories used in early childhood settings and their powerful and multifaceted influences on children and childhoods.

This special DPJ issue aims to bring together those who had first-hand experiences with or conduct educational and/or historical research with children and schooling in socialist and post-socialist societies. Socialist and post-socialist childhood and schooling in socialist and post-socialist education systems are usually assumed to be monolithic and authoritarian, far from dialogic. However, by reflecting on our own or others’ experiences, narratives and observations regarding the socialist and post-socialist childhood, we realized that our memories, experiences and observations might offer unique and enriching soil for understanding, exploring, reflecting, and critiquing dialogic pedagogical theories. Through this special issue, we hope to expand the scholarship of this community to the territory of a space and time that were not previously examined (sufficiently) for dialogic pedagogy by creating interests and forums for dialogues.

There was not one, singular childhood in socialist Czechoslovakia, but many and diverse, plural, childhoods. Spanning over 40 years (1948–1989), the Czechoslovak communist governance produced diverse conceptualisations of childhoods that remain often invisible, unexplored, and the current analyses are at best sketchy and refer mostly to pedagogical nuances of strong ideological pedagogical struggles. One way to explore such an abundance of historical data in a short journal article is to utilise a somewhat personal narrative of a child. This dialogic approach allows the strong presence of the voice of a child, re-told from an adult’s perspective, and it methodologically justifies an approach to thinking and theorising of socialist childhoods through Vaclav Havel’s (1985; 1989; 1990) theoretical thinking that has been utilised in philosophy of education previously (see Tesar, 2015e). There are also other examples of complex and thorough analyses of socialist childhoods in other countries (see for example Aydarova et al, 2016), and theoretical thinking about the socialist child as a foreigner to its own land, can be done through Kristeva’s lens (Arndt, 2015).

This article explores quality in early childhood education by de-elevating the importance of the human subject and experience, and heightening instead a focus on and tensions with the post-human. The argument traces the intricate web of ‘qualities’ woven throughout entanglements of subjects, objects and things that constitute what is referred to as ‘the early years sector’. The strike through the social in this post-human condition exposes critical concerns about the ‘problem’ of quality, and foregrounds the urgency of rupturing the status quo. Dislodged from the perceived comfort and safety of human control and determination, quality in the speculative state of the more-than-social movement can expect no conclusion. Instead, the (re)configuration of the early years sector as a more-than-social movement compels a rethinking of the dominance of human-centric philosophies. By repositioning Kristeva’s semiotic subject-in-process and Havel’s subject positionings within automatisms, this analysis inserts ‘non-human-being’ and ‘multiple beings-times’ into the ‘problem with quality’. In the early childhood sector, these ruptures create generative possibilities of quality entanglements with and beyond the human.

This article examines the effects of edu-capitalism and neoliberal education policies across Australia, New Zealand and United States to disrupt hegemonic policy logic based on neutral human capital. Current frameworks, standards and assessment tools govern and control how early childhood educators see and assess children and in turn develop and implement pedagogy. Issues of gender, class and ethnicity are invisible with the assumption that all children who are offered high-quality early childhood programmes have equal opportunities to be productive and therefore successful citizens. Success can be understood through universal outcomes for children and markers of what quality teaching looks like for educators. This epistemological shutter renders race-, class- and gender-based privilege as invisible or non-existent. In doing so, dominant White Western understandings of the world drive what and who is marked as ‘success(ful)’, while non-Western knowledge continues to be seen as primitive, insignificant and in need of intervention. Through analysing policy text supported by the work of post-thinkers, the rethinking, re/imagining, and remapping of early childhood that this article performs do not offer consensus but make room for both problematizations of and possibilities within the contemporary concerns of different theoretical and geographical perspectives from Australia, New Zealand and United States.

Childhoods in contemporary Kenya are entangled with discourses of care in a post-colonial landscape. Such imaginaries of childhoods through discourses of ‘care’ and ‘charity’ are well established through Western lenses. Another lens that is often enacted is the lens of de-commercialised, un-spoilt, pure and innocent childhoods in the Kenyan landscape. In this study, the authors utilize Nel Nodding’s concept of an ethics of care, and a feminist lens, to explore this binary of Western views through real experiences of childhoods. This paper provides an analysis of childhoods as lived experiences in Kenya, and challenges constructions of children/childhoods as vulnerable, based upon observations and interviews conducted in Kenya in the remote area of Kwale County.

Peer review is central to academic publishing. Yet for many it is a mysterious and contentious practice, which can cause distress for both reviewers, and those whose work is reviewed. This paper, produced by the Editors’ Collective, examines the past and future of peer review in academic publishing. The first sections consider how peer review has been defined and practised in changing academic contexts, and its educational significance in the development of scholarship. The paper then explores major historical and contemporary issues around identity, diversity, anonymity, and the review process, and the related power of editors versus reviewers in academic publishing. Finally, the paper discusses the case of new scholars as reviewers engaging in neoliberal labour, before concluding with some brief recommendations based on our analysis.

Examining our own pasts, and particularly childhoods, is not an easy task. For academics, to conduct a substantial reflection and analysis of the ideologies and complexities of their own childhoods, should perhaps come more easily because of our training and the nature of our profession—to think, speak, read, and write. However, perhaps this is not true at all—perhaps it is much harder to bare ourselves in front of our academic colleagues and friends, in a competitive, and sometimes very judgmental, environment. Writing ourselves is a brave step that leaves an articulated part of ourselves on paper, on a screen, in a certain sense and form, ‘forever.’ We cannot reclaim our private narrative once it has been published. It does not belong just to us anymore. Rereading in print what we once wrote about our own childhoods is a very bold, very courageous exercise, one that can leave a mark on our minds and bodies, perhaps in the same way as these narratives from bygone times once did, as our very own ‘lived experiences.’

Found in Translation: Connecting Reconceptualist Thinking with Early Childhood Education Practices highlights the relationships between reconceptualist theory and classroom practice. Each chapter in this edited collection considers a contemporary issue and explores its potential to disrupt the status quo and be meaningful in the lives of young children. The book pairs reconceptualist academics and practitioners to discuss how theories can be relevant in everyday educational contexts, working with children who are from a wide range of cultural, ethnic, gender, language, and social orientations to enable previously unimagined ways of being, thinking, and doing in contemporary times.

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This article reconceptualises the postmodern Child through the lens of Havel's work on ideology, power and subject formations. Set in an any ideologically charged early childhood setting, it analyses Havel's claim that all citizens, including children, are instrumental in maintaining the ideology of the establishment, and that they are both active creators as well as suffering victims of the system. Through this theoretical lens the author argues how childhood subjectivities are produced under the ideological umbrellas of government rationalities. The article analyses this through the example of tensions between dominant and resistant discourses in early childhood settings, and the formation of childhood subjectivities of victims, supporters and rebels.

Government ideologies seek to produce ideal childhoods within their political and ideological frameworks. Using the analysis of a children's magazine in kindergartens in socialist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s, this paper argues that children's literature produces political and ideologically charged childhood subjectivities. Tensions between the private and public spheres of the production of childhoods, and the complex, non-linear power relations are explored through a philosophical lens that incorporates the thinking of Vaclav Havel. Politics and ideology were a major directional focus in storylines and in tales and texts in socialist children's literature. It is suggested that the Czechoslovak case can serve as a springboard to understand how childhoods in different ideologies are produced through early childhood children's literature.

This chapter explores shifts in constructions of childhoods in the contemporary urban setting of the city of Auckland in Aotearoa New Zealand. The study is grounded in children’s private and public daily experiences, perceptions, and relationships, analysed through images and visions that they portray of their own twenty first century urban childhoods. The analyses capture and illustrate the changing local and globalised natures of urban Auckland childhoods, and changing notions of sustainability for the youngest, under 5 year old, children. This chapter arises out of a project that aims to influence orientations towards childhoods, and to inform policy and practices by which urban childhoods are governed and lived, in urban Auckland. Through the lens of new materialism, which involves a vast range of diverse approaches, and an intricate, distinctive and nuanced web of disciplines, thinking and being, that are political, ethical-epistemological, and ontological in nature, urban childhoods are at the heart of these notions, where through their mundane acts, children perform and re-imagine sustainability in relation with their environment.

This is the second text in the series collectively written by members of the Editors’ Collective, which comprises a series of individual and collaborative reflections upon the experience of contributing to the previous and first text written by the Editors’ Collective: ‘Towards a Philosophy of Academic Publishing.’ In the article, contributors reflect upon their experience of collective writing and summarize the main themes and challenges. They show that the act of collective writing disturbs the existing systems of academic knowledge creation, and link these disturbances to the age of the digital reason. They conclude that the collaborative and collective action is a thing of learning-by- doing, and that collective writing seems to offer a possible way forward from the co-opting of academic activities by economics. Through detaching knowledge creation from economy, collaborative and collective writing address the problem of forming new collective intelligences.

Childhoods are curious and inaccessible to adults. This chapter problematises children’s relationships with borders by exploring childhood under-grounds as subversive spaces that respond to borderlands and border crossings in children’s lives. It is centred on a tale of two childhoods, through which we examine the significance of children’s private border crossing practices embedded within the social and political contexts of their everyday realities. These childhoods are different from each other; however, they connect through the children’s experiences of the anxieties and excitements evoked in response to the borders in their lives. They tell a story of the complexity of navigating borders and living in borderlands, and experiencing both real physical borders and imaginary ones. One of the childhoods investigated is the story of a boy growing up in communist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s, and his relationship to the borderlands separating his country from neighbouring Austria. This physical border could not be crossed: the land on which the boy looked out every day was a forbidden space, blocked by barbed wire and guarded by soldiers. The boy and other children around him developed a childhood underground, in which they discovered their own ways to cross the borders to this forbidden land: through their private stories and secret games. The other childhood borders that we analyse are of a girl born into a German community in Australia, and her culturally mediated border crossings.

In this paper I focus on the tension between ‘public’ and ‘subversive’ university spaces, by examining the notions of ethics and creativity. I build my argument as a set of notions that may on the surface seem completely unrelated: the underground university in post-totalitarian Czechoslovakia, and current neoliberal academia.