Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Languages of Evaluation

by Gunilla Dahlberg

Taking a broad approach, this second edition of Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care relates issues of early childhood to the sociology of childhood, philosophy, ethics, political science and other fields and to an analysis of the world we live in today. It places these issues in a global context and draws on work from Canada, Sweden and Italy, including the world famous nurseries in Reggio Emilia. Working with postmodern ideas, this book questions the search to define and measure quality in the early childhood field and its tendency to reduce philosophical issues of value to purely technical and managerial issues of expert knowledge and measurement. The authors argue that there are other ways than the 'discourse of quality' for understanding and evaluating early childhood pedagogical work and relate these to alternative ways of understanding early childhood itself and the purposes of early childhood institutions.

Genres: Nonfiction

232 pages, Paperback

First published March 18, 1999

Reviews

[Stuart Macalpine · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly thought-provoking and insightful evaluation of what it means for an education system to be considered 'good'. Its basic idea is that given that all human cultures and discourses see the world slightly differently it is impossible to have one best practice for what any kind of education should look like. It also argues that notions of childhood are highly defined by culture. For this reason it proposes a version of education that closely resembles Reggio, where there is rich dialogue and negotiated definitions of excellence, rather than an external standard. It thoroughly destroys notions of 'appropriate practice' in early childhood.

The text delves deeply into postmodernism and specific theories, which are extremely abstract. You get the feeling all they really need is the cynefin framework to explain their thinking - i.e. Humans are complex and a bit unpredictable. So let people make their own meaning and 'probe, sense, respond' rather than go in heavy with policy. It is more complex than that, but that seems the salient point.

The thoughts that really are too troubling to resolve are those around what education is.