{"title":"New Zealand early childhood curriculum: The politics of collaboration","authors":"S. Farquhar","doi":"10.1515/jped-2015-0013","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The New Zealand early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education [MoE],1996), is frequently hailed as a community inspired curriculum, praised nationally and internationally for its collaborative development, emancipatory spirit and bicultural approach. In its best form community can be collaborative, consultative, democratic, responsive and inclusive. But community and collaboration can also be about exclusion, alienation and loss. This paper engages with Te Whāriki as a contestable political document. It explores this much acclaimed early childhood curriculum within a politics of community, collaboration and control. Driving the direction of the paper is a call for a revitalised understanding of curriculum as practices of freedom, raising issues of how to work with difference and complexity in a democratic and ethical manner. The paper concludes that although official curriculum is unavoidably about control, there is a world of difference in the ways such control might be exercised. The real curriculum exists where teachers are working with children - it is in the everyday micro-practices that impacts are felt and freedoms played out.","PeriodicalId":38002,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pedagogy","volume":"82 1","pages":"57 - 70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2015-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"7","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Pedagogy","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jped-2015-0013","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"Social Sciences","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 7
Abstract
Abstract The New Zealand early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education [MoE],1996), is frequently hailed as a community inspired curriculum, praised nationally and internationally for its collaborative development, emancipatory spirit and bicultural approach. In its best form community can be collaborative, consultative, democratic, responsive and inclusive. But community and collaboration can also be about exclusion, alienation and loss. This paper engages with Te Whāriki as a contestable political document. It explores this much acclaimed early childhood curriculum within a politics of community, collaboration and control. Driving the direction of the paper is a call for a revitalised understanding of curriculum as practices of freedom, raising issues of how to work with difference and complexity in a democratic and ethical manner. The paper concludes that although official curriculum is unavoidably about control, there is a world of difference in the ways such control might be exercised. The real curriculum exists where teachers are working with children - it is in the everyday micro-practices that impacts are felt and freedoms played out.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Pedagogy (JoP) publishes outstanding educational research from a wide range of conceptual, theoretical, and empirical traditions. Diverse perspectives, critiques, and theories related to pedagogy – broadly conceptualized as intentional and political teaching and learning across many spaces, disciplines, and discourses – are welcome, from authors seeking a critical, international audience for their work. All manuscripts of sufficient complexity and rigor will be given full review. In particular, JoP seeks to publish scholarship that is critical of oppressive systems and the ways in which traditional and/or “commonsensical” pedagogical practices function to reproduce oppressive conditions and outcomes. Scholarship focused on macro, micro and meso level educational phenomena are welcome. JoP encourages authors to analyse and create alternative spaces within which such phenomena impact on and influence pedagogical practice in many different ways, from classrooms to forms of public pedagogy, and the myriad spaces in between. Manuscripts should be written for a broad, diverse, international audience of either researchers and/or practitioners. Accepted manuscripts will be available free to the public through JoP’s open-access policies, as well as featured in Elsevier''s Scopus indexing service, ERIC, and others.