Jessamine Giese, (2025) Early Childhood Educators Producing Curriculum and Pedagogy: Discursive Possibilities of Team Decision-Making. PhD thesis, Queensland University of Technology.
Open access
Description
There is increasing political interest in Australia on early childhood education and care reforms requiring educators to collectively navigate, and translate, policies into practice. This thesis explores how teams of educators interpret policy for curriculum and pedagogy. Provocations and opportunities are presented to strengthen the implementation of reform, offering new insights into ways teams of educators work within the scope of contemporary policy intent. A theoretical lens inspired by Michel Foucault enabled a scrutiny of key policies alongside an analysis of how teams of educators interpret and enact these policies, offering productive ways of thinking and speaking about team decision-making.
Abstract
This study is an inquiry into how teams of educators produce curriculum and pedagogy in long day care. In Australia, early childhood policy reform has presented major shifts in qualification requirements, a national prescribed curriculum, and rising importance on the quality of curriculum and pedagogy as provided by teams of educators (ACECQA, 2024). As educators are expected to navigate these reforms collaboratively, teams in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector grapple with the changing regulatory landscape (Armstrong, 2023; Harrison et al., 2023; Phillips & Boyd, 2023) and challenges associated with attracting, retaining, and upskilling educators saturate the workforce (Commonwealth of Australia, 2024; Education Services Australia, 2021; Queensland Government, 2023). This study brings a new layer of insight to the Australian ECEC landscape, following the scrutiny of key policies alongside an analysis of documents and focus groups on how teams of educators interpret and enact these policies.
Michel Foucault’s (1972) set of ideas outlined in The Archaeology of Knowledge inspired both the theory and method elements of the research design for this qualitative study. A textual archive was created, consisting of data generated from policies and data collected from four long day care centres in Queensland, including centre documents and transcribed focus groups. The analytical tools applied in this study were informed by Foucault’s concepts of discourse (1972) and relations of power (1990; 1991), operationalised to look closely at the research question: How do teams of early childhood educators make curricular and pedagogical decisions in long day care?
A Foucault-informed theoretical lens enabled scepticism and critique (Gillies, 2013). Questioning the ‘rules’ which make possible the existence of policies and teams of educators enabled the taken for granted ways of doing curricular and pedagogical decision-making to be disrupted. As gaps and contradictions were located, “discovering new layers” (Foucault, 1981, p. 68) led to the identification of potential new paths for teams in ECEC. Drawing on Foucault’s work (1972), this study does not pose a singular and fixed response to the research question. Rather, use of Foucault’s concepts (1972; 1990; 1991) interrogated normalised discursive practices, and presented productive ways of thinking and speaking about team curricular and pedagogical decision-making.
Therefore, this study offers “possible paths of attack” (Foucault, 1996, p. 262) to encourage government policymakers and ECEC providers alongside their teams to “think otherwise” (Ball, 1998, p. 81) about the assumed ways teams of educators work to understand, and implement, policy. Overall, three key provocations are presented. First, this study makes visible disconnections between policies and the ways teams of educators enacted curricular and pedagogical decision-making, probing a revisit to the cluster of policies that govern educators’ work. Second, this study prompts policymakers to explore pathways to better harness the value of the degree-qualified teachers’ specialised curricular and pedagogical knowledge in teams. And third, this study presents opportunities to think differently about the position of the educational leader, a crucial role in leading quality curricular and pedagogical decision-making in Australia. Given the ongoing complexities of the ECEC workforce and the substantial political interest in the early years (both nationally and worldwide), this study opens up possibilities to strengthen the implementation of reform, through offering new insights into the ways teams of educators work within the scope of contemporary policy intent.
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