Exploring Neocolonial Temporalities in the Globalized Era of Early Care and Education

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Global Implications and Lived Experiences of Neoliberal and Neocolonial-Based Euro-Western Early Childhood Policies and Practice (Table 1)

Abstract

Early childhood education in the Euro-Western world is increasingly dictated by neoliberal imperatives of productivity, standardization, and measurement (Ball, 2003: Bradbury & Robert-Holmes, 2016). Globalization has seen these imperatives spread beyond their origins in capitalistic Euro-Western countries to early childhood classrooms across the globe where local, contextual, and Indigenous pedagogical practices are often discouraged and devalued as ‘too slow’ and lacking in productive capacity (Chung, 2023; Payne & Wattchow, 2009; Riley, 2023). Recent reconceptualist work (Author 1, forthcoming; Berger et al., 2021; Clark, 2022; Riley, 2023) has leveraged feminist, Indigenous, and reconceptualist theoretical frameworks to challenge this devaluation of slowness, and to offer alternative temporal possibilities for early care and education. The current qualitative project extends this work to a cross-cultural analysis of early childhood teachers’ experiences of neoliberal temporal regimes in a variety of Majority and Minority world contexts. Critical qualitative analysis (Souto-Manning, 2014) is leveraged alongside feminist and Indigenous epistemological theoretical frameworks to analyze data drawn from individual and focus group interviews. Findings will explore and deconstruct the discursive role of time in these early childhood classrooms and how these teachers align with and/or contest neoliberal temporal regimes. These offer the field of early care and education a more substantial portrait of teachers’ experiences of the discursive and pedagogical imperatives of neoliberal temporalities and explores possibilities for the (re)valuation of ‘timefullness,’ (Bjornerud, 2019) in ECE.

Author

• Cassie Sorrells, University of Tennessee