The shape of things to come? Perspectives on assessment and evaluation of ECD/ECEC practices in (neo)-colonialist contexts

• In Event: Critical perspectives on ECE inequality

Proposal

H.G. Wells’ future history novel The Shape of Things to Come, published in 1933, envisages a world emerging from a long economic slump in Europe followed by war and devastation. A global benevolent dictatorship paves the way for world peace by enforcing the English language, promoting scientific learning and outlawing religion. The result: a race of super-talents, able to maintain a permanent utopia. The Shape of Things to Come was frighteningly accurate in predicting, among other things, the devastation of aerial bombardments in World War II. Fast forward one century, can Well’s plot be read as an eerie frame of reference for current global developments in early childhood development, education and care?

My contribution builds on previous work that critiques and interrogates current approaches to large-scale testing of young children in the context of standardisation, decontextualisation, and privatisation of early childhood development, education and care programmes (Carr, Mitchell, & Rameka, 2016; Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence, 2007; Moss et al., 2016; Moss & Urban, 2010, 2017, Forthcoming; Pence, 2017; Penn, 2011; Urban, 2016, 2017; Urban & Rubiano, 2015; Urban & Swadener, 2016). In this paper I take the argument further and propose that standardised testing, as exemplified by the OECD’s International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS) as well as the growing resistance against such strategies need to be understood in a wider context of the ongoing and unresolved struggle against neo-colonialist forces, agents and interests in education (Cannella & Viruru, 2004; Ritchie, 2016; Tuhiwai Smith, Tuck, & Yang, 2019). At a global macro level, the current context appears to be characterised by two distinct trends:

1. Increasingly, standardised approaches to both practice and assessment are employed as tools to justify and facilitate large-scale privatisation and commodification of early childhood development, education and care.
2. At the same time, there is a growing recognition of the inevitable embeddedness of early childhood development, education and care in complex cultural, political and economic contexts, and an emerging consensus that this requires carefully (and respectfully) designed systemic approaches to practice, policy and evaluation.

Both developments are often presented in the context of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, especially SDG4 (United Nations, 2017), and despite being played out at global level, both have immediate implications for the ‘lived experience’ (Van Manen, 1990) of children, families, communities and ECD/ECEC practitioners. My argument in this paper is that they are contradictory and mutually exclusive and, inconsequence, require an ethical and political stance, and critical positioning of all professional actors: educators, researchers, ECD advocates and policy makers (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005).

I approach my argument in three steps:
First, I briefly summarise the development of IELS to date, and the critique that has been voiced by early childhood scholars, professionals and advocates. I argue that despite best intentions of some individual proponents of IELS and other standardised assessments of young children, the collective consequence very much resembles Wells’ benevolent dictatorship. It imposes a narrow, utilitarian, and largely decontextualised understanding of educational practices on children, practitioners and communities, and dismisses the diversity of ways of being, knowing and doing in this world. In other words, it is a neo-colonialist project that calls for a collective de-colonialising response.

Second, I move to an aspect of IELS that has so far been absent from the discussion: the actual conduct of the test, using the two stylised child characters Tom and Mia. I provide a provisional reading of the Tom and Mia imaginary through the lens of post- and neo-colonial analysis. Applying the concept of colonisation as a frame of reference opens a space for introducing resistance and anti-colonial practices as productive forces to challenge the global hegemony.

Third, I frame IELS and other initiatives to standardise assessment and practice in the context of the two global macro trends mentioned above: large-scale privatisation and commodification on the one hand, contradicted by the increasing recognition that only whole-system approaches – ‘competent systems’ (Urban, Vandenbroeck, Van Laere, Lazzari, & Peeters, 2012) – can deliver sustainable outcomes. I illustrate the tensions between the trends with two examples: the Education Outcomes Fund for Africa and the Middle East (EOF) that promotes grant-backed returns to investors and service providers based on the achievement of outcomes, and the recently adopted Communiqué of the T20 global summit that underlines the need for governments and ECD/ECEC actors to pursue whole-systems approaches to enable effective public early childhood development, education and care programmes for all children.

In conclusion, I ask what lessons should be learned from the conflicting discourses and from ensuing policies and practices that often play out in locations in the global south before they reach the global north. I draw on Pedro Sotolongo’s (2013) concept of the power of marginal notions to argue that experiences made on the margins of society, both geographically and socially, offer very practical alternatives to reconceptualising early childhood education, and services for young children, families and communities.

Author

• Mathias Urban, Dublin City University