Dr Mandy Pierlejewski

This article explores the impact of a recent report by Ofsted into the teaching of children in Reception. The report suggests that teachers should include more direct teaching. I argue that children of this age need to learn predominantly through play.

In my presentation, I explore the influence of child as method on my work exploring datafication in early childhood education.

This five-volume encyclopedia will cover a wide range of themes and topics, including: • Childhood and the Family • Child Development • Childhood Research Methods • History of Childhood • Rights of the Child • Social ...

This five-volume encyclopedia will cover a wide range of themes and topics, including: • Childhood and the Family • Child Development • Childhood Research Methods • History of Childhood • Rights of the Child • Social ...

This five-volume encyclopedia will cover a wide range of themes and topics, including: • Childhood and the Family • Child Development • Childhood Research Methods • History of Childhood • Rights of the Child • Social ...

In this paper, I use the notion of the data-doppelganger (Williamson, 2014) as a theoretical lens through which to view the datafication of education. The data-doppelganger is the version of the self which exists in the significant quantities of data collected about both children and teachers. A psychoanalytic analysis of the literary genre of the doppelganger identifies the role of the double as a second self, which completes the ego, expresses the repressed desires of the id and regulates the subject as the superego (Dolar, 1991). Using this psychoanalytic understanding of the double, I explore the role of data in the policy document Bold Beginnings (Ofsted, 2018). I find that data holds a mirror up to the child, repositioning it as a normalised pupil; play can be understood as a dangerous, chaotic practice which must be suppressed and data functions as a regulatory device to objectify and control both teachers and children.

In this paper, an evaluation of the English early childhood education context reveals children constructed as data. The complex, chaotic and unpredictable nature of the child is reconstituted in numerical form; a form which can be measured, compared and manipulated. Children are reconceptualised as data-doppelgängers (Williamson, 2014), ghostly apparitions which emulate the actual embodied child. The focus of early childhood education and care thus moves from child-centred to data-centred education. I specifically focus on the impact of this aspect of the performative regime on children who have English as an additional language, an under-researched area in the field. Foucault’s work on governmentality is used as a theoretical lens through which to understand the process of datafication. I use a composite child, generated from a number of children from my experience as a teacher as a starting point for discussion. This reveals children as disadvantaged, as their home languages are no longer used to assess communication skills. Their data-doppelgängers are not useful to the teacher as they are unable to demonstrate a “good level of development”: a key measure of school readiness in English policy. I argue that in post Brexit vote Britain, subtle changes to early childhood education increase disadvantage, promoting white, British culture and thus marginalising those from other cultures.

In this short presentation, a conceptual analysis of research literature surrounding the assessment practices in the English early years context reveals children reconstituted as data. The complex, chaotic and unpredictable nature of the child is reconstructed in numerical form; a form which can be measured, compared and manipulated. I suggest that this process creates data doppelgängers which have become more important than the actual embodied child. This has resulted in a move from child-centred to doppelgänger- centred education, a system which disadvantages children.

This five-volume encyclopedia will cover a wide range of themes and topics, including: • Childhood and the Family • Child Development • Childhood Research Methods • History of Childhood • Rights of the Child • Social ...

In this paper, I use a debate between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson about the nature of time as a heuristic tool to understand the nature of teacher subjectivity. This debate outlines notions of time as measurable and time as duration or flow. These two interpretations of reality, one from a physicist and one from a philosopher, are used to examine the bi-Discoursal nature of the teacher identity An ethnographic participatory action research project in a preschool class in England finds that teachers operate as both physicist and philosopher, sometimes simultaneously. At times, the teacher is a physicist, measuring the geometry of child development and comparing it to a fixed point of normative expectations. At other times, the teacher is a philosopher, existing in the moment with children and focusing on the lived experience of being. The simultaneous existence of these two identities is a cause of anguish, forming a conflicted and contested self. This, however, is necessary to function in the current educational context and forms an aspect of the care of the self.

Despite the Roma (sometimes called ‘Gypsies’) people being the largest ethnic minority group in Europe, they still experience significant discrimination and disadvantage. Since the enlargement of the European Union in 2004, large numbers of Eastern European Roma have moved to the UK and are now being educated in schools across the country. Research into the education of Roma children is dominated by a deficit model which focuses on attempts to normalize them through interventions. Roma childhood is viewed almost exclusively through the lens of mainstream European culture and there are very few studies which give a Romani viewpoint. We attempt to address this by presenting a Romani analysis of child education and development. Field notes from a participatory action research project at a school in a northern English city are analysed by a ‘Rom’ (Roma man) and reflected upon by a ‘gadji’ (non-Roma woman). The resulting study reveals the cultural divide between mainstream English educational culture and the ‘Pachiv’ or Romani moral code. The need for intercultural understanding is identified as essential to facilitate effective preschool education for Roma children. This intercultural understanding will only be possible when Roma culture, intelligence and communication are valued.

In this paper, a Foucauldian discourse analysis of a recent report by the UK government’s inspectorate, Ofsted, reveals a world in which children are utilised as instruments for the measurement of schools. The child is decontextualized and dehumanised; a passive recipient of knowledge, whose function is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the teacher. Teaching becomes delivering the curriculum and the test at the end of ECE the main driver of pedagogy. We contend that statutory summative assessment acts like a black hole; hidden in plain sight but visible through its capacity to distort all around it.

In this presentation, a conceptual analysis of relevant research literature surrounding assessment practices in the English early years’ context reveals children reconstructed as data. The complex, chaotic and unpredictable nature of the child is reconstituted in numerical form; a form which can be measured, compared and manipulated.  Here therefore, as part of an emerging doctoral thesis and building on the work of Williamson, children are reconceptualised as data-doppelgangers, ghostly apparitions which replace the actual embodied child. The impact of this process on new arrivals is explored, as they are recreated in relation to English expectations and norms.

The three linked papers in this symposium analyse English early years education’s ‘School Readiness’ agenda as a neoliberal ‘reform’ that is constantly reimagining and reducing early years to primary school human capital preparation (Moss, 2013). Using Foucault’s concept of governmentality and Deleuze’s ‘societies of control’, the linked papers critically analyse school readiness as a policy assemblage that includes Free Nursery Places (FNP) for 2-year-olds policy, the Revised Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP, 2019) and the proposed Reception Baseline Assessment (BA2).

The last decade has been characterised by the increasing influence of computer science and more particularly the amalgamation of big data with behavioural economics to produce a new paradigm of digital governance. Given the central role that family intervention has played over the centuries as a mechanism of state control it is unsurprising that child-parent relations are at the forefront of new attempts to ‘predict and prevent’ through mass digital surveillance. In the UK detailed personal data is now routinely collected and pooled, providing ‘real time’ observation of family life and a platform for experimental designs in AI and behavioural based interventions. This paper attempts to scope out changing policy landscapes and to explore how parents and their family relations are being quantified and translated into data points as part of a technological refashioning of behaviourist logics and objectives.

This thesis documents my story as a teacher. It begins with an account of the end of my teaching career, narrating the story of my suspension from practice, based on an accusation of falsifying data. This constitutes the start of a fascination with datafication, which continues throughout the thesis. The exploration of datafication begins with the conceptualisation of datafication as a doppelganger or second self. The use of the doppelganger as a thinking-tool enables me to experiment with fighting against datafication in the form of the data-doppelganger. Following on from this critique of the existing system through the conceptualisation of the data-doppelganger, I return to the field in an attempt to resist the dominant discourse of datafication. An ethnographic participatory action research project provides me with an opportunity to move to a more active phase of the research, where I attempt to work with others to develop new ways of assessing children in early years. As my thinking develops following the research project, I produce myself not as a coherent subject but as a divided self, a new subjectivity which to me, makes sense of the conflicted world in which I find myself. This acceptance of the divided subject constitutes a resolution to the conflict I encounter within myself and enables me to engage in active resistance to datafication. My final paper, which provides an analysis of a Roma child’s development from a Roma perspective, embodies this resistance. In it, I link thought and action in praxis to produce an alternative child subject, a subject not seen through the lens of datafication, but viewed through a Romani lens. In this way, the thesis tells the story of my experience of datafication, a journey from encounters with the doppelganger to a final act of praxis.

This paper explores an emerging methodological approach called doppelganger as method. This method uses the idea of a doppelganger or double to explore the social world. It is specifically used to examine datafication, or the increase in the production and use of data and its impact on education. Doppelganger as method begins by locating doubles, finding that doubles of the child and teacher are created through the focus on data production in early childhood education. It then asks how this doubling operates as an instrument of power, using understandings of the literary genre of the doppelganger along with its psychoanalytic interpretations to formulate novel interpretations. Doppelganger as method has been used as a tool to reconceptualize datafication, the increase in the volume and use of data in educational contexts. Using interpretations of Freud's work on the uncanny, a psychoanalytic understanding of the doppelganger is established. This is then applied in an educational context to interpret the function of various doppelgangers. Findings from this method include an ambivalent relationship with data, the marginalization of bilingual children and changes to both teacher and child subjectivity.

In the context of a global teacher recruitment crisis, the English department for Education has responded by implementing a new, highly prescriptive curriculum for initial teacher education called the Initial Teacher Training Core Content Framework. Using a combination of content analysis and an original approach entitled “doppelganger as method”, we examine where a doubling has occurred, asking how this doubling functions. Our analysis of the Core Content Framework focuses on the construction of both learners and learning, teachers and teaching. We find that the complex, relationship-based, messy act of educating pre-service teachers is reduced to a simple view of teaching in which fidelity to the authorised curriculum content and pedagogy define quality. This doubling of teacher education into its doppelganger, teacher training is essentially dehumanising as it denies the personhood of the people involved and the complex, relational aspect of the process.

Recent government accreditation of initial teacher education provision in England has resulted in a deep sense of unrest within the sector. Along with an intensely regulated accreditation process embodied in the Initial Teacher Training (ITT) Market Review, a revised framework, known as the Core Content Framework (CCF) has been introduced. This paper provides an analysis of the CCF, bringing together Foucauldian discourse analysis and a new emerging methodology, doppelganger as method. This approach explores situations of conflict, asking where a double or doppelganger emerges and how it functions as a technology of power. It finds that the conflicting demands of the CCF and the quality benchmarks that regulate university provision produce a dual curriculum. An authorised curriculum is established by the CCF, while a shadow curriculum emerges from the aspects of curriculum which are rendered invisible in the framework. I find that the CCF represents an attack on teacher educator professionalism as it removes the autonomy of the educator to choose their own content, pedagogy and key texts. Resistance to this regulation, however, emerges from more holistic ideologies and can be found hidden within classroom interactions and practices.

This book offers research-based evidence and advice on supporting educational transitions across all educational stages from ages 3-19.