"Dewey found that democracy is an ideal in the sense that it is always reaching towards some end that can never finally be achieved. Like community itself it has to be always in the making" (Greene, 1995, p. 66).
Please take a moment to read the quote above again, substituting the word democracy for the word quality.
As I was thinking about the idea of quality today, I started wondering if the assurance of being able to reach quality could be stopping us from venturing beyond quality. In other words, if, for example, on the ECERS (see first post) we checked off every item, we would feel confident that we in fact have a quality program. But do we really? Maxine Greene once said, “If ever I’e arrived, I’m dead” (Ayers, 1998, p. 9). Thinking with Maxine Greene and Dewey, the reaching of a goal, for instance quality, can be dangerous. We’re resting on our assumption that we have a quality program. If we hold on to the term quality (which I don’t necessarily recommend, see the second post) then I believe it should be seen as something that is always just out of reach, thus making it generative and alive.
I would like to share my recent work with my coworkers in my attempt to reach for something bigger than quality. As part of a school assignment I decided to start a book club with my coworkers where we discuss our readings of Releasing the Imagination by Maxine Greene (1995). At this point we are about 7 weeks into our meetings and already I can see how powerful our conversations are. The idea of discussing bigger issues relating to education are more important than ever being able to reach quality. Quality is in the making with every conversation we have.
Thinking back to my time in the 1st and 2nd year or the Basic Program in ECCE, I recall our classes and text books. Most of them would help me implement a program (hopefully adhering to quality guidelines) and answered the question how? How to guide children, how to set up the room, and how to make resources? How to talk to families? This is what I would like to refer to as application. Simply follow these steps and you have a quality program. Reading texts such as Releasing the Imagination in our book club is moving beyond these conventional Early Childhood texts. With Maxine Greene we have started thinking about what all these things mean? Why does that matter? It is a shift toward implication. I believe that both application and implication are important and that there is a place for both of them. I am using this idea of application and implication as a reminder for myself to pause for a moment and to ask why I'm doing what I'm doing.
Let us assume that quality really is something just out of reach, never to be grasped. Based on this assumption I believe that following a sequence of steps (application) allows us to reach quality, while continuously thinking, "What could this mean?" (implication) never quite allows us to reach quality.
In this video William Ayers speaks about imagining how our lives could be otherwise. It reminds me to continue to question (e.g. quality) rather than reaching and end goal.
References
Let us assume that quality really is something just out of reach, never to be grasped. Based on this assumption I believe that following a sequence of steps (application) allows us to reach quality, while continuously thinking, "What could this mean?" (implication) never quite allows us to reach quality.
In this video William Ayers speaks about imagining how our lives could be otherwise. It reminds me to continue to question (e.g. quality) rather than reaching and end goal.
References
Ayers, W. (1998). Doing Philosophy: Maxine Greene and the Pedagogy of Possibility. In Ayers, W., & Miller, J. L. (Eds.), A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and the unfinished conversation (pp. 3-10). New York: Teachers College Press.
Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
When I read your point on quality assurance, it brings me back to a chapter in Kidworld that looks at whether a system of childcare accreditation is a way of assuring quality or whether it is a technique of normalization. It’s an insightful article that highlights many different aspects of the measures that are taken to ensure that a standard idea of quality is met, and it looks at the means that are taken to get there. I can recall when it refers to educators doing what they have to do in order to meet the requirements of a checklist that means ‘quality’. They ‘play the game’ so that it looks like they’re working at a quality level but in reality they are overwhelmed, and the requirements are unattainable (Cannella & Kincheloe, 2002, p.177). Then, I think about your question on quality assurance and does it stop us from going beyond quality. I wonder how many times we compromise what we really want to do in order to meet prescribed criteria. What opportunities become lost when we are rushing through a checklist that we are not fully engaged with?
ReplyDeleteI too remember my first couple of years in the field and how there was not much questioning around the knowledge I had obtained around what quality was and how it was measured. What has become apparent to me over time is that each one of us sits with an idea in a particular way. This also can change over time depending on our decisions to question and resist what is familiar and known to us at that time. We may even struggle with fulfilling the standards of quality without realizing that it makes us uncomfortable. MacNaughton (2005, p.32) gives us the example of Miriam who for the first five years as an early childhood educator blamed herself for failing at what Foucault describes as a regime of truth. “She could not do and think what was officially sanctioned in the field” (32) and so she worked harder at ‘getting it right’. How often do we push ourselves at doing what we’ve been told is the right thing even though it does not sit well with us? We are questioning what we know, however we might still be at that point where we think somehow it’s our fault and we have to try harder.
Then there are those of us who begin to see the sanctioned truths as something different. We begin to question them, resist them and we try and find ways to bring these questions and resistances into our classrooms, workplaces while at the same time trying to respect the ideas and beliefs of others. Your book club is a prime example of this. In my case, I have been trying to provide opportunities for dialogue and conversations to take place; an open space where different ideas are shared and where there does not have to be common understandings, agreements, and resolutions of issues.
Cannella, G. S., & Kincheloe, J. L. (2002). Kidworld: Childhood studies, global
perspectives, and education. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
MacNaughton, G. (2005). Doing Foucalt in early childhood studies:
Applying poststructural ideas. New York: Routledge.
It is amazing the power that the word ‘quality’ has. The world has such weight to it that whatever it is attached to seems to become a truth. Quality childcare, quality program, quality chocolate, quality healthcare. Even as I write these things, I can imagine, or think that I can imagine, what each of these things look like.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing that video. I find it interesting that it all seems to boil down to the importance of reflecting. He talks about the importance of thinking about who you are in the world. This feels like the idea of starting to reflect upon the discourses that you sit in. It is understanding the things that become so ingrained in everything that you think and do, so much so that they become truths. When we begin to reflect on our discourses, we begin to become more reflective practitioners. We also become more ethical as things that were purely done on a subconscious level, becomes conscious and questioned.
“Let us assume that quality really is something just out of reach, never to be grasped. Based on this assumption I believe that following a sequence of steps (application) allows us to reach quality, while continuously thinking, "What could this mean?" (implication) never quite allows us to reach quality”
I think that it is important to view quality as something out of reach, because we can always do better. If we decide that we have a quality system, then what is the point in improving it? The implication is that we are done, and it is already the best that it will ever be. If it is just out of reach, we will forever be working harder, trying new things in order to maintain that ‘quality’ ideal.