How is social inequality potentially (re-)produced in ECEC? The construction of children’s social (in)competence in practices of discipline and surveillance

• In Event: Critical perspectives on ECE inequality

Proposal

Even before going to school, education and its promotion are paramount in children’s everyday lives (OECD Starting Strong 2017). This becomes especially prominent in Luxembourg, a small, but socio-culturally heterogeneous country (STATEC 2017) with a system of early childhood education and care featuring diverse structures, e.g. privately operating nurseries and stately preschool classes. Considering the individual use of these structures on the one hand and their daily enactment on the other, a diversity of childhoods (Bollig, Honig and Nienhaus 2016) becomes evident. Understanding diversity and inequality as linked (Solga, Berger and Powell 2009) this diversity of childhoods may lead to advantages or disadvantages of children pursuing certain educational pathways. In a large-scale view, such advantages or disadvantages might come into play with regard to having or not having access to quality care and education (Sylva et al. 2010). In Luxembourg, this becomes true, for example, when parents working in shifts cannot stick to the opening hours of state-funded nurseries and therefore have to rely on privately operating nurseries, which are often ascribed a poorer educational quality. Taking a micro-level stance, advantages or disadvantages of children might develop in language learning, social-behavioural and mealtime instruction at institutions of early childhood education and care (Nienhaus 2018).
Contributing to the sociology of education in early childhood, my discussion, based on parts of my PhD monograph published in September 2018, takes up the second perspective. Building on qualitative research on the (re-)production of social inequality (Siebholz et al. 2013), I focus arrangements of early childhood education and care (Bollig, Honig and Nienhaus 2016). In contrast to Anglophone studies on daily routines in early childhood education and care (Claessens and Chen 2013, Brennan 2007, Joesch, Maher and Durfee 2006), I understand these arrangements not as single settings children go to. Instead, I consider them to be a combination of different child care and education offers chosen by parents on the basis of socio-culturally coined orientations and decisions (Betz 2012) as well as their ever new creation by educators, teachers and children (Nelson and Schutz 2007, McCrory Calarco 2011) on a daily basis. Taking into account the respective positions of parents, educators, teachers and children in these arrangements, I discuss ethnographic field notes of an indoor group activity in a privately operating nursery and/or an outdoor group activity in a stately preschool class regarding the goal of teaching individual children how to behave “collectively”. Drawing on a study by Waksler (1991), I analyse practices of discipline and surveillance in these activities to show how advantages or disadvantages of 2-4-year-olds might built up. Assuming a shared interest in children’s education and care (Frindte, Pawlitzki and Ernst 2016) parents, educators and teachers either reassure children’s social competence or problematize children’s social incompetence. In this regard, my analysis shows “focal points” in the (re-)production of social inequality in early childhood education and care.

Author

• Sylvia Nienhaus, University of Freiburg, Germany