Historiography

Conventional approaches to the study of history, sometimes called historical method or traditional historiography, rely on using guidelines and techniques borrowed from archaeology to write histories of the past. These techniques include drawing on primary and secondary source material as well as employing ‘source criticism’ to determine the reliability of source material and acceptable oral traditions, often with a probabilistic approach to ‘drawing generalisations – inferring patterns – from individual studies to make more generalised claims about the world’ (Priem and Fendler, 2019, p 614). Combined, these techniques in writing history also provide the tools to ‘story’ history through accurate account-giving that builds up a reliable picture of the past events and their environments. Tamboukou (1999) warns, however, that historical methods of accounting for the past tend to operate within certain ontological and epistemological a prioris that include a naive Enlightenment view of past events that overestimates the rationality of history as ‘continuous development, progress and seriousness’ (p 208). In other words, historical methods can sometimes suffer from a strict teleological view of knowledge production as cumulative, linear, progressive and inevitably and unendingly striving for improvement and betterment of peoples: history moves through periods of time or stages of development (from ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilised’, for example) in which ‘new’ knowledge builds on ‘old’ knowledge to correct inaccuracies, to overcome error, to combat bad information or ignorance, or to rewrite false accounts. For radical revisionists of history, this acceptance of liberal progress is not only naive but serves ‘as a rationalisation for the inequitable status quo’ (Kincheloe, 1991, p 234).

As du Gay (2003) reminds us, historical methods may suffer from the ‘logic of overdramatic dichotomisation’ (p 664) in which past events (and their relation to the present or some imagined future) are presented chronologically and sequentially through an epochalist reading of social change as discrete moments in the singularity of place and time. It is important to acknowledge that social change can be the result of ruptures and shifts made possible by unique historical agents and environments, thus equating elements of social change to situated happenings.

Chapter 12 provides insight into the large amount of science learning that can occur through informal experiences. Informal experiences relate to those that happen outside formal educational settings, such as family settings, museums, zoos and natural locations. As learning in these environments is free choice, children tend to be more motivated and interested in learning than in formal educational settings. This chapter describes the importance of informal experiences in the learning of science, the funds of knowledge that families share with their children, the rich and diverse cultural and linguistic science experiences that children bring to their educational settings, and the importance of the EC professional acknowledging and using children’s and families’ funds of knowledge in developing science learning experiences.

Rationality

The concept of rationality is central to policy formulation and implementation. Rationality refers to the quality or expectation of being logical, reasonable or scientific, and therefore points to a set of universal definitions and appropriate standards against which the usefulness of policy decisions in achieving certain goals and outcomes can be judged to be internally consistent, valid, reliable, even replicable. This view of policy decisions or advice as rational presents an ideal representation of policy as evidence-driven, namely that the policy process is a scientific or apolitical practice structured around hypothesis testing that uses value-free knowledge to generate contextual or causal explanations for social change. Leaving aside the idea that policy is evidence-or fact-based, which is arguably false in some cases, there is the notion that the rationality of the policy process can be traced to its proclivity for and demonstration of science.

But science has a communicative context according to Andrews (2007) since scientific knowledge requires both consensus and authority in order to be considered legitimate. In other words, scientific knowledge claims never exist intrinsically and independent of human activity, but rather emerge through their relation to other sources of authority or processes of legitimation and consensus formation that determine their ‘politicisation’ and role in the policymaking process. Moreover, even assuming that the policy process is evidencebased and scientific in the Enlightenment sense of universal and value-free, it is important to separate out the rationality of the policy process (the means by which policy makers assimilate perfect information into policy decisions so that they are fair or accurate) and the rationality of the policy actor. This is because, as Dunleavy (1991) reminds us, some people may ‘operate through intransitive preference orderings’ (p 249) or exercise their decision-making through emotional attachments and ethical commitments not captured by a standard or comprehensive rationality that privileges forms of instrumental choice. Moreover, according to Bevir and Brentmann (2007), economistic models of rationality are inadequate for making sense of the ways in which diverse rationalities combine in unique ways to produce iterations of local reasoning and individual experience.

Genealogy

Originally developed by French social theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault, the concept of genealogy aims to trace ‘the details and accidents that accompany every beginning’ (Foucault, 1998, p 144). For Foucault (1998), genealogy recognises that every idea and thought system is conditioned by ‘its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and unpalatable defeats’ (pp 144– 145). Genealogy therefore ‘rejects the meta-historical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for origins’ (Foucault, 1998, p 140). Inspired by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who through his writing on morality and religion opposed metaphysics and the search for the origins or essences of things (in German ‘Ursprung’), Foucault described ideas and thought systems as the ‘exteriority of accidents’ (Foucault, 1998, p 146), meaning that what comes to stand in for, or represent, truth is only ever the ‘outcome of a process in which there is conflict, confrontation, struggle, resistance’ (Foucault, 2002, p 457).

Genealogy therefore concerns the mode of dissension by which some ideas and thought systems acquire the status of ‘truths’ – universal ideals, value systems or normative assumptions. Here, mode of dissension refers to that dynamic, generative, productive space in which ideas and thought systems are struggled over by cultures and interest groups through invasions, ploys, omissions and silences. In this sense, genealogy differs from traditional historical methods of inquiry where, typically, ideas and thought systems are studied chronologically or sequentially as the culmination and expression of a linear-rational search for truth. On this account, genealogy views ideas and thought systems as the contingent product of struggles over meaning, struggles that tend to be concealed or violently suppressed through appeals to ‘reason’, ‘rationality’ or ‘morality’. Genealogy therefore aims at denaturalising ideas or thought systems taken to be timeless and rooted in a fixed and unchanging reality, ‘making it so that what is taken for granted is no longer taken for granted’ (Foucault, 2002, p 456).

Activism

All research enables change; activist education policy research seeks explicitly and primarily to achieve specified changes to educational arrangements, practices, cultures or structures to alleviate the effects of disadvantage. Yeatman (1998) provides a useful definition of a policy activist as ‘anyone who champions in relatively consistent ways a value orientation and pragmatic conception of policy which opens it up to the appropriate participation of all those who are involved in the policy process, all the way from points of policy conception to delivery on the ground’ (p 10).

This definition, with its focus on values and participation, signifies a shift from how policy activism was first conceptualised by Heclo in the 1970s (in Smyth, 2012). Here, the policy activist ‘was a kind of knowledgeable policy technocrat who was prepared to carefully watch developments’ (Smyth, 2012, p 180). Intellectually, the activist disposition in policy research originated with the Frankfurt School in Germany, which advanced a critical approach to scholarship that ‘aim[ed] to go beyond simply understanding and critiquing social, political and economic relations, towards seeking to change the world’ (Savage et al, 2021, p 308). An important strand of critical education policy sociology continues this activist tradition (see, for example, Apple, 2013; Blackmore, 2014; Gorski and Zenkov, 2014). Whether it is called (socially) critical or activist, such policy research intends ‘taking aim at both the ideological and practical work of schooling [and/or higher education] and connecting it to the wider structural issues that dominate public education’ (Tilleczek, 2012, p 254).

Activism in policy research may be achieved in several ways, singly or together. One form of discursive achievement is through employing a methodology centred on co-construction where individuals or groups affected by a particular dimension of oppression contribute as partners in the research design and/or research process. For example, Tilleczek (2012) ‘committed to working with and for young people to collectively make fissures visible to those in policy and decision-making positions’ (p 254). Co-constructing or co-producing research can also be used as a sort of self-reflexive activism whereby power imbalances located in higher education might be problematised and disrupted to the wider benefit of communities and education (Duggan, 2021).

A key dilemma for writers, be they poets, philosophers or researchers, is how to give meaning to the world when there are so many interpretative repertoires to articulate and learn from. To speak or to write is to participate in a symbolic economy where meaning is negotiated and mobilised through the availability of scattered discursive resources. Writing, in essence, is that dynamic, productive site where meaning is continually made, normalised and contested. A related dilemma for writers therefore concerns the why of said meaning. Taking a postmodernist perspective to its logical conclusion, meaning is arbitrary in the metaphysical sense that it lacks any ontological fixity to speak of. It has no essence or origin, or at least its origin has no status beyond the ‘exteriority of accidents’ (Foucault, 1998, p 146). Meaning at best reflects the interplay between spontaneous action and reproduced habits of culture. Postmodern cynicism aside, meaning is not entirely free-floating or symbolic. It represents pragmatic, engaged attempts at sensemaking. In other words, meaning making can be characterised as essential epistemic work, a form of ‘anchoring’ that is vital to human cognition and abstract thinking (Eagleton, 2003, p 59). Consider the importance of meaning to human efforts at coping with complexity or making social reality amenable to capture by unique and historically contingent systems of signification and belonging.

The dilemma here, then, concerns the symbolic and material consequences that result from deploying certain discursive resources (words, imagery, tropes, arguments) over and against others in our productions and representations of the world. If we accept the view that there is no such thing as neutral writing, and that writing only makes sense through the provision of shared meaning, it is incumbent on writers to take responsibility for the habits and choices that shape their constructions of reality. This includes recognising what is at stake when we write. After all, writing is about taking positions. Why do we write? For whom do we write? What is to be gained or lost from writing in a particular way? What kinds of disagreements must be struggled over, negotiated, held apart or brought together to achieve particular kinds of writing? As Bacchi (1999) reminds us, problems and solutions are not arrived at indiscriminately through the identification of some pre-existent, transcendental nature.

Chapter 15 highlights the role of an intentional, purposeful EC professional. It provides ideas and examples of how they can plan for and teach children through their individual and collective learning experiences. The chapter highlights the important place of verbal scaffolding and lesson planning. The components of a lesson plan are described and illustrated.

Borrowing

The term borrowing has for a long time been a central focus of research in the field of comparative and international education. Due to this disciplinary anchoring, the topic of borrowing has typically been studied in a cross-border manner with a focus on how countries and their governments borrow from the tried-and-tested policy arrangements of other countries. There are two strands of borrowing research worth mentioning here. There is, on the one hand, the normative and applied strand of borrowing research that focuses on studying evidence of ‘best practice’ and the effective transfer and implementation of those practices to other contexts perceived to be in need of reform or improvement. Steiner-Khamsi (2014) argues that the goal of applied research is to provide solutions to identified problems, namely the optimal class size or the optimal frequency for prescribing student tests that enhance the quality of education. On the other hand, there is the analytical strand of borrowing research that situates borrowing as a phenomenon in-and-of-itself worthy of critical attention. Here the focus shifts towards studies that concern how and why borrowing occurs within and across particular spaces and times (Steiner-Khamsi, 2014). The focus of this entry concerns the latter strand of borrowing research.

Different generations of borrowing researchers have focused on distinct topics, from early research that investigated the choice of reference societies in national policy reforms, to more recent studies that analyse, among other things, harmonisation processes facilitated by international organisations such as the European Union. In these studies, the term borrowing is typically accompanied by another term, namely lending, used here to refer to the policy influencer rather than its opposite, the policy recipient. Such binary distinctions may be considered too simplistic to capture the complex realities of borrowing, however, including the actions of those who facilitate or impede such processes. Educational borrowing can also be used to denote a specific mechanism of deliberate and often linear education (policy) transfer (Perry and Tor, 2008) (see entry on ‘Transfer’). Additional terms can be used to represent or stand in for such processes, including the terms reception and translation (Steiner-Khamsi, 2014).

Chapter 5 links practice to theory with a discussion of the range of formal and informal teaching approaches that can be used with young children to enhance their science learning. It outlines the importance of such strategies as scaffolding and targeted explorations. Using illustrative case studies, attention is paid to process skills, guided discovery, the interactive approach, inquiry learning, problem-based learning and project-based learning. Whether through the processes of science, such as the development of observation, or through the skilful questioning of the EC professional, the approach used should enhance children’s science learning. The chapter includes a discussion on the importance of children’s prior knowledge in terms of the teaching and learning of science.

Chapter 6 introduces scientific inquiry in the early years. This chapter describes the inquiry-based approach to learning science, where children are actively involved in finding the answers to questions. The scientific inquiry process of identifying and posing questions; planning, conducting and reflecting on activities and investigations; processing, modelling and analysing data; evauluating evidence, and communicating findings is presented. The following science inquiry activities that can be used with young children are described: observation, observation and measurement over time, classification, skills activities, research activities, conducting a survey, exploration activities and fair test investigation. Various case studies demonstrate these activities.

Narrative policy analysis

Narrative analysis in policy and the social sciences more generally has as its main focus the ways in which human subjects mobilise storytelling and the narrative form as a medium for producing meaning about the world and relations to the self. Politicians and policy makers, for example, deploy narratives through speeches and policy documents to achieve particular ends that include persuading the electorate of their vision, commitment or sentiment. Similarly, citizens assembled in a government council meeting addressing local councillors about a particular issue that is affecting them may draw on storytelling as an effective tool for communicating their preferences or grievances and discontents. In both cases, the narrative form of communication can be ‘best understood as the personal enactment of communal methods of self-accounting, vocabularies of motive [and] culturally recognizable emotional performances’ (Wetherell and Edley, 1999, p 338).

Policy as text or discourse can also be approached as narratives (‘policy narratives’) in the sense they reflect technologies, practices or rationalities of government (Bansel, 2015a). According to Chase (2017), narrative is the achievement of ‘[m] eaning making through the shaping or ordering of experience, a way of understanding one's own or others’ actions, of organising events and objects into a meaningful whole, of connecting and seeing the consequences of actions and events over time’ (p 421). A narrative approach to policy studies therefore closely observes how different, seemingly contradictory and competing discourses are brought together through the medium of narratives to communicate and represent definitions and practices of policy as well as policy problems and their solutions. Understood from this perspective, policies as artefacts do not reflect actually existing realities but rather reflect the political work of governments or other actors who actively seek to prefigure and contain realities to complement and realise particular ends. This includes mobilising policy as narratives in order to imagine and manage the possibilities for acting on and governing citizens as bearers of rights, obligations and duties (Wilkins, 2018) (see entry on ‘Governmentality’). The narrative approach therefore concerns questions of power and refusal, namely how policy narratives function as modes for curating governing, on the one hand, and modes for inciting resistance, on the other hand.

Mediation

In policy studies, mediation refers to two distinct processes. Lúcio and Neves (2010) describe the first as being where two or more parties with unaligned positions engage with one another through a further, dispassionate and neutral participant (a mediator) in order to reach a mutually agreeable policy position. This position cannot be one that is predetermined by the mediator. For this aim to be realised, the mediator must be acceptable to the other parties and must typically not occupy a position of authority in relation to the negotiators or wield power within the mediation process. This process must be confidential and based on open-minded negotiation rather than on confrontation, as well as aim to anticipate future potential conflicts. Importantly, decisions are reached by the negotiators rather than the mediator, whose role is to facilitate their communication. The impetus to align diverging interests or goals may come from within or beyond the grouping (not including the mediator), but participation in all cases must be voluntary. This sense of mediation has applications beyond policy formation, and may be used to reconcile relationships between, for instance, institutions, nations, corporations or factions; between individuals within them, or between any of those former and their communities (Lúcio and Neves, 2010).

While mediation's earliest and best-studied examples are located in conflict studies, particularly regarding labour disputes, Lúcio and Neves (2010) identify strong possibilities for mediation ‘as social and educational work’ (p 486). Their justification lies in increasingly robust evidence that mediation may function as ‘a communicative action’ (Lúcio and Neves, 2010, p 486) whose deployment may strengthen and develop, rather than repair, relationships between subjects who may be conceived as proactive agents of social transformation. In this way, Lúcio and Neves (2010) argue that mediation as social and educational work aims to problematise and complexify, and through that to construct new social relations in a spirit of dialogue and sharing.

Mediation may be employed more or less formally and at different points in the policy process. Exemplifying the more formal end of the spectrum, the US has statutes that determine the use of specific conventions for public policy mediation for the creation and revision of regulations (Laws and Forester, 2007).

Chapter 13 focuses on a growing interest in the value of children learning science in the natural environment. Considering a range of nature-based settings, this chapter highlights the benefits of the natural environment for children’s development and science learning. It presents ways in which young children can be provided with meaningful experiences that enhance their science and environmental understandings. Affordances for science learning through play that embrace ‘bush’ or ‘beach’ kindergarten time are described. This chapter also discusses how EC professionals can enhance children’s affinity with the natural setting through varied pedagogical approaches.