Abstract
This special issue of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood presents a collection of perspectives on early childhood leadership as it is enacted in marketised contexts around the world, exemplified by the neo-liberal childcare markets found in the UK and Singapore (Lim, 2017; Lloyd and Penn, 2012).
While significant contributions on leadership and professionalism have appeared in this journal, this special issue uniquely attempts to put a spotlight on leadership perspectives and enactments within a range of culturally diverse early years provisions and political environments, based on the premise that leadership is primarily context-dependent. As editors, our challenge to potential contributors was to account for influences on leadership praxis from the neo-liberal childcare market operations now characterising a substantial proportion of early childhood systems globally.
The call for this issue defined leaders as early educators who have to take on a lead role in both supporting a group of other educators and being held accountable for the quality of experience offered to children and families (e.g. pedagogies, curriculum, home–school partnerships). Therefore, we sought articles that would elucidate the context-dependent nature of leadership enactment and illustrate the unpredictable twists and turns of leadership as praxis.
Praxis can be viewed from two vantage points – first, from an Aristotelian perspective of action that is ‘morally-committed, and oriented and informed by traditions in a field’ (Kemmis and Smith, 2008: 4) and, second, as a ‘history-making action’ that is neo-Marxian (Kemmis, 2010). This special issue posits that leadership in early years settings requires more than knowledge and technique, and so is a form of praxis (Male and Palaiologou, 2015). It is a kind of practice that emphasises the moral and value-laden dimensions of the act of leading others within professional relationships and also cares about the macro world and struggles to go beyond one’s centre-based circumstances to create revolutionary change within one’s cultural community, professional and political context, and society.
The contributions to this themed issue offer a variety of fascinating theoretical and practical perspectives, provoking us to consider three particular aspects of early years leadership practice and research:
Leaders lead, but are often led by the circumstances of their settings or the larger institutions and corporations they form part of, and so they must interact with forces beyond human relations that include the non-human and unseen macro-level influences that shape individual early years settings.
Leaders must negotiate policy and organisational contradictions that expect them to be cost-effective to make a profit or surplus while meeting families’ needs, innovating curriculum to engage young children and solving problems within communities.
Leaders as advocates cannot ignore the biases and assumptions that have resulted from the history of their field’s development and must wrestle with policy and sociocultural changes, keeping sight of short- and long-term changes and consequences in their early years settings.
This special issue opens with Mäntyjärvi and Puroila’s survey study examining how early childhood legislative changes that took effect in Finland in 2015 and 2016 were experienced by leaders, practitioners and parents in private early childhood centres. The authors use relational leadership theory as one of two theoretical approaches to explore how these changes affected the availability and affordability of provision, the economy of the centres, and parents’ and children’s opportunities to participate and influence services, as well as pedagogical approaches. In their study, the authors found that different contexts within which different types of private centres operate provided contrasting affordances for leadership enactment; the data also revealed a gap between leaders’ and parents’ evaluations of how services and practices were impacted by legislative change.
Palaiologou and Male’s conceptual article presents an argument about the external ontological antinomies (contradictions) and axiological antinomies that frame leadership decision-making and behaviour within English preschool settings forming part of a childcare market in which private provision operates alongside state-delivered services. Leadership needs within the sector have never been adequately addressed. Contextually important, early childhood education and care in England is historically shaped by an ambiguous ideology of play, its workforce is female-dominated, and the work involves emotional labour and the ethics of care. Hence, its leadership needs reframing, because of its different nature when compared to other areas of education. The authors thus propose a focus on leadership as pedagogical praxis.
Yang’s article reports from a qualitative study that utilised cultural-historical activity theory to examine how five kindergarten leaders in Shenzhen and Hong Kong (both affluent economies) guided curricular innovations within their centres in a fairly homogeneous curricular environment, due to the marketised context within which these kindergartens operated. This article illustrates how these Chinese leaders supported and learned with their teachers through a process of planning, experimentation and reflection to design school-based curriculum developments – a movement promoted by local early childhood education reforms. As part of this process, the leaders needed to negotiate the push and pull of western influences while generating their own ideas of a localised curriculum that relied on huicui (a process which stems from traditional Chinese thinking about the usefulness of eclecticism). In addition, all of the leaders created professional learning communities comprising teachers, parents and experts to support teacher learning as curriculum developers.
Fairchild’s article approaches the issues from an emerging theoretical perspective. It sheds light on the possibility of a posthuman early years leadership concept – a perspective that embraces a more-than-human relationality – and its empirical applications in four ethnographic case studies of early years practitioners, illustrating how this is reflected in their leadership practice. The article expertly highlights the relevance of Deleuze’s theory regarding ‘societies of control’ to the neo-liberal context of early childhood leadership. It also draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of assemblage to explore leadership in England as part of a wider set of connections and interactions between non-human and human bodies, including all matter, materials and the natural world. The notion of assemblages moves us away from thinking within fixed and stable systems made up of a dichotomy of subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, towards a more connected matrix or cluster of bodies. In this way, the article contributes to a theorisation of posthuman leadership development.
Next, this issue offers a critical autoethnography by Aubrey, a first such methodological attempt by the author. She writes against the backdrop of the scientific and cultural change she has experienced since she started her career in the 1980s, from positivist research paradigms and modernist hierarchical conceptions of leadership to postmodernist models. Aubrey organises her article around the five turning-point moments that she has identified as being significant in linking her personal social circumstances as a social scientist to her own continuity and change in conceptions of leadership and management within the English early childhood sector. She argues that while there is a role for theory to guide and interrogate leadership practice, early years leaders must have greater access to professional development if they are to become better, more aware, reflective and informed by contrasting and competing theories to join the leadership-in-practice movement.
Vijayadevar, Thornton and Cherrington’s article takes us to Singapore, where this qualitative study examined how two small groups of early childhood leaders who participated in professional learning communities over a 10-month period developed collaborative leadership practices. The setting for the study is in a competitive, market-driven early childhood education context where most providers are private and hence there has been little sharing of practices or learning across different centres. When the leaders first joined the professional learning communities, they were mostly reticent in the initial stages, even though they had all experienced professional isolation and had little opportunity to learn and develop their leadership capabilities. Over time, the findings showed the leaders becoming more trusting within the groups, moving away from traditionally hierarchical ways of leading and being able to experience growth in their own practices. The authors caution that the implementation of professional learning communities needs to be culturally sensitive and focused on trust-building before collaboration can take place.
Robson and Martin present an analysis from their qualitative study of how early childhood leaders addressed ethical dilemmas as they implemented a specific government policy aimed at preventing the radicalisation of young children within a marketised early childhood context in England. The study utilised Shapiro and Stefkovich’s (2016) framework for defining moral dilemmas to analyse the ways in which principals dealt with tensions arising from aiming for practice inspired by social justice when faced with the statutory duty to implement the ‘fundamental British values’ programme within the centre’s nationally prescribed curriculum. The authors present a vignette to illustrate how one principal faced ethical dilemmas and relied on her moral conscience, knowledge of the childcare market and leadership know-how to make decisions. These included decisions about how to maintain centre sustainability, whom her centre should serve, and how it should serve new immigrant families with cultural backgrounds that may espouse different values from the British values that the centre was supposed to promote. The authors apply multiple ethical paradigms to illustrate the ways in which early childhood leaders may address such moral dilemmas.
Finally, the special issue concludes with Penn’s provocative colloquium, a critical reflection on how the English early years sector has evolved from a service-oriented sector to a competitive, business-focused childcare market over the last three decades. Consequently, the role and function of early childhood leadership has changed, in many cases leaving leaders with little power to effect change at the local or any other level. These developments mirror those in other countries where marketisation and corporatisation have proceeded apace, as illustrated in the article about recent developments in Finland by Mäntyjärvi and Puroila. Penn argues that a service ethos shared by leaders cannot be assumed. She argues that, over time, with the growth of a free-for-all market and the intermediary governance level of local authorities having been virtually removed in England, it is open to question whether private for-profit – in particular, corporate – enterprises are accountable at all to any authority.
Each of the articles in this special issue reveals slightly different considerations for contextualised early years leadership practice and research. As the articles come together in this issue, we realise that there is a lot more to be examined and debated if the field is to continue to thrive and not simply survive, for we live in challenging times and within a web of complex political uncertainties generated by globalisation, highly influenced by neo-liberal sensibilities, and shaped by rapid and extensive technological advances. How can educational endeavours ground our youngest citizens in humanity and humility, and lead them with the desire and ability always to imagine better alternatives for this world? This depends on the tenacity, knowledge and wisdom of those professionals who have dedicated their lives to young children’s learning and development.
There is room for more early childhood educators and researchers (new and experienced) to examine leadership practices further, in all possible forms, particularly within marketised early years contexts, and to do so in ways that support the work of early childhood leaders in their struggle to improve early childhood provision for the greater good, employing Freire’s (1986: 36) definition of the framework of leadership as praxis as ‘reflection and action upon the world to transform it’.