The Book Club

“The increasing technologising of preschool policy and practice brings with it an increasing weight of paper... - policy documents, research reports, curricula, standards, guidance on best practice, and so on. This growing mountain of official or expert paper becomes a prime means of governing preschool practitioners, laying down norms to which they must conform and contributing to a dominant discourse that smothers contestability and advances conformity. At the same time it crowds out other types of reading which might provide other perspectives. Reading thus becomes a means of closure and regulation rather than opening up to new possibilities and emancipation.” (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005, p. 169)

In one of my earlier blogs I introduced you to the Book Club that I have started at my work. We read Maxine Greene’s Releasing the Imagination. The quote above helps me think about the importance of reading together in the Club. Dahlberg and Moss talk about the reading of official documents that regulate our practice as ECEs. Releasing the Imagination is a different kind of text. It is a narrative and Maxine Greene created many openings for us to think about who were are as teachers and what we believe the goal of education to be. The Book Club offered the space for us where we were able to consider other perspectives, and with Maxine Greene we started to disrupt our thinking around our policies and curriculum for example. Our readings of Releasing the Imagination affect how we read other texts. 

One example I wish to share with you is our discussions in the Book Club around a policy we used to implement. The policy allowed us to turn families away if they repeatedly arrived after 10:00 am at the daycare (without informing us). It is policies such as this one that I have struggled with over the years. In our conversation my coworkers and I had many questions and considered various perspectives. Why was the family late? Who defines ‘late’? Does it actually matter if they arrive after 10:00am? Will the parent lose their job, because they now have to miss work? And it is through these discussions that we engaged in democratic conversations. Rather than being governed by our policy (we haven’t implemented it in years), we opened it for debate.

Monthly staff meetings aside, prior to the Book Club these kinds of discussions were rare as there was no structure in place to support us to co-construct meaning. Glenda Mac Naughton (2005) emphasizes how “the everyday conditions of professional learning in much of the early childhood field starve early childhood educators of the nutrients that support them to proactively, enthusiastically and knowingly draw on leading edge theories to push the possibilities for democracy” (p. 190). It is through the Book Club (or the space it opens) that we were able to read texts in a way that open up new possibilities for us. 

References

Dahlberg, G., & Moss, P. (2005). Ethics and Politics in Early Childhood Education. New York: RoutledgeFalmer

Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the Imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Mac Naughton, G. (2005). Doing Foucault in Early Childhood Studies: Applying poststructural ideas. New York: Routledge.