Approaching the complex spatialities of early childhood education and care systems from the position of the child

Abstract

Abstract This paper proposes a way to understand what early care and education systems look like from the vantage point of the child. In other words, it aims to fuse a system perspective and a child perspective of early childhood education and care (ECEC) in a way that acknowledges children as active co-producers of ECEC landscapes. In developing this approach, I emphasize that children’s individual education and care arrangements which combine certain ECEC settings and the family are to be understood as networks of relations. As such, these child, family and ECEC relations create particular spatialities and temporalities which in turn position children very differently within the field of early education and care. To conceptualize how this takes place in children’s everyday activities, I refer to Schatzki’s and Massey’s relational thinking about practices, spaces, time and multiple identities with special emphasis on the spatial relations that are ‘beyond’ certain localities and (re)produced in the ‘events of place’. How this helps to understand the ways in which ECEC systems look from the position of the child will get exemplified in regard to Luxembourg’s complex ‘double split system’ of ECEC and its complex language terrain.