DRAFT FOR COMMENT presented at IPDA 2014

Listening to old wives tales: small stories as the

stuf of professional learning
Corresponding author: Alex Kendall, Birmingham City University
Alex.Kendall@bcu.ac.uk
Authors: Melanie Gibson, Clare Himsworth, Kirsty Palmer, Helen
Perkins
Abstract
In this paper we share the outcomes of an HEA funded project to
take up Nutbrowns challenge to push out from the safe(er)
boundaries of established methodologies (2011:241) in Early Years
research to explore the value of auto-ethnography and the telling of
small stories, what Lyotard calls petit rcit (Lyotard, 1979), to the
processes of doing and learning about research in the context of
professional learning in the Early Years. We offer a rationale for the
use of creative methods in professional learning and describe the
process of working with identity boxes and symbolic objects, to
produce a collection of auto-ethnographic narratives, the old wives
tales of the title, through which to explore practitioners experiences
of professional identity formation. We go on to consider the
opportunities these methods, which facilitate a dual identity of
researcher and participant, offer for reflexive learning about
practitioner positionality within the knowledge-making practices of
Early Years professional education. Towards a conclusion we reflect
upon and theorise about, the meanings that participant-researchers
make about their career trajectories and make the case for autoethnography and para-ethnography as useful pedagogic modalities
for dynamic and reflexive professional learning in the Early Years
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specifically and the professions more widely. We mobilise Patti

Lathers notion of methodological proliferation to re-think
professionalism as a wild profusion of possibilities.

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Introduction
This paper represents an attempt to re-think the work of
professional education and the becoming professional in ways that
seek to trouble discursive constructions of early years work and
early years workers and constitute friction in the molar machine
(Massumi: 1992:06) of conventional, policy dominated curricula,
what we might call after Deleuze striated spaces territorialised by
state apparatus. We discuss work undertaken for an HEA funded
project through which we sought to take up Nutbrowns challenge to
push out from the safe(er) boundaries of established
methodologies (2011:241) in Early Years research.
The project, which brought together colleagues from a higher
education institution and a further education institution in the
Midlands of England to work with students on a Foundation Degree
(FdA) programme, sought to achieve a number of concurrent and
entangled intentions: to enable undergraduate students studying in
an HE in FE setting to play with research approaches/methods that
move beyond the orthodox qualitative paradigms that tend to
characterise undergraduate research programmes in the social
sciences and push out instead towards (or as the Deleuze would
have it would have it plug in to the) post
ontologies/methodologies; to engage students simultaneously in a
piece of real collaborative research about becoming a degree level
Early Years Practitioner and in so doing to (re)position them newly in
relation to the epistemologies of their field of study, Early Years
Education (EYE).
Here we share the project and its context, a description of an
assemblage of empirical material (after St Pierre, 2013) about
becomings that we amassed (noticed, read, made, collected,
curated) and our readings and re-readings of our material through

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the competing lenses of established frames in the literature. How,

we wondered, did our material talk back to a literature within which
the voices of early years workers as participants are, as St Pierre
would have it (2013) often represented on a golden platter for
readers and largely absent from any interpretive frame. In addition
to resisting the traditional orthodoxies of voice that imply a centred
human(ist) subject we challenge what MaClure calls the panoptic
immunity of the researcher as liberal subject who is entitled to
interrogate and dissect the lives and business of others while
preserving the privacy, intactness and autonomy of his (or her) own
secret self (Miller 1988:162) (MaClure 2013:168). We go on to
argue that the discussions of the positionality of early years teacher
as embodied subjects inhabiting striated spaces of class, gender
and labour markets that dominate the literature serve to fix, contain
and bind our understanding through the kind of arborescent logic
that Deleuze and Guattari describe (2010). We make the case
instead for rhizomic narrativisations that take up the threads of little
stories, something like Lyotards petits ecrits perhaps, of becoming
an early years worker. In doing so we pay attention to the
entanglements of language, matter, words and things (Maclure
2013:171) and move towards altogether different ways of thinking
that open up new possibilities for professional education as a space
where epistemologies and ontologies are made rather than learned.
Towards a conclusion we make the case for professional education
as an assemblage, a process of making and unmaking (Jackson
and Mazzei 2013:3) within which the material as well as the
discursive are implicated. This demands, we suggest, new
pedagogies, pedagogies of profusion perhaps, akin to Lathers
methodological call, (2006) that enable disruption of legitimate, or
what Deleuze and Guattari might call molar, forms of professional
knowledge and facilitate instead the plugging in of alternative
theoretical perspectives to think through with theory (Jackson and
Mazzei, 2013) the dilemmas of the professional field. Towards

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concluding we argue that professional education must deny the

nowhere of the neophyte practitioner in relation to context and
facilitate recognition and exploration of an always already
entanglement with the professional field.
Project overview
The project that ignited this work was funded by the HEA Research
Methods in the Social Sciences funding call and brought together
teachers from social science disciplines at a modern university in
the Midlands and a large general further education college in the
West Midands to create a reflexive research methods curriculum
using innovative and creative research processes as a dynamic
medium for teaching research methods. The project team was keen
to recontextualise strategies that one team member had put to work
on postgraduate and professional doctorate (EdD) programmes to
stimulate thinking in the post-structuralist frame, on the basis that
undergraduate research in the soft social sciences tends to be
informed by more orthodox qualitative approaches that have their
origins in a humanist, structuralist position.
Designed specifically to support education practitioners (across the
phases) who are new to research the approach draws on autoethnographic, investigative approaches to pedagogy developed by
project team members (Bennett, Kendall & McDougall 2012). This
approach engages the student in a reflexive approach to data
production, including visual and sensory approaches after Pink
(2007, 2009), analysis and presentation activities to position
themselves epistemologically and ontologically in relation to their
field of study. This means that students learn through doing, rather
than simply learning about research methods as a set of abstracted
concepts. As such learning is embodied, experiential and entangled
and the often nearest to hand metaphors of the detached, objective

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researcher, Usher and Scotts (1996) Nave Postivist, operating

within a value-free social science problematised.
This approach facilitates easy access to primary data, or what we
might want to call in resistance to the scientific, empirical material
(after St Pierre, 2013), for novice researchers since the focus of
enquiry is their own entanglement, and that of their peers and
tutors, within the field of study. This then opens opportunities for
tutors and students to co-construct and experiment with meanings
around identities, purpose and processes. As such it has the
potential to explore concepts of self and others through
collaborative learning that enhances social and cultural
understanding. Research skills, such as writing development are
organically embedded in the process as the production of early
personal narratives liberates new researchers from impersonal,
academic forms of writing (Nash, 2004) enabling them to build
confidence as they, reflexively, explore conceptualisation of
academic voice. Through an on-going process of reflection and
refinement this approach helps students and tutors expand their
understanding of qualitative research, using visual and textual
methods in a way that is practical, accessible, creative and
innovative. At the same time through the on-going sharing of the
texts, artefacts and writings they produce students are
constructed/construct themselves as novice researchers through
their interaction with the complex processes and dynamics of peer
review in the social sciences.
Plugging-in
We worked with a group students in the final year, of an FdA in Early
Childhood Studies (ECS). Foundation Degrees are two year
vocationally orientated programmes introduced in the United
Kingdom in 2000. FdAs in ECS formed an important part of the
former New Labour governments strategy for workforce

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development and the responsiveness of higher education

institutions to the needs of early years employees and employers.
Though universities develop and deliver FdAs, often with further
education college partners, these qualifications are increasingly
subject to regulatory standards owned by and implemented through
a government funded quango, the Childrens Workforce
Development Council (CWDC).
Two of us, Alex and Helen, collaborated to develop a two-week
programme, mapped in to the Research Methods module students
were following on their FdA, designed to plug the group in to new
ways of thinking, doing and being with research. We introduced the
idea that learning about research would be experiential and
structured around a piece of collaborative research about becoming
an early years practitioner. We explored the idea of turning research
in on ourselves as students/subjects always already entangled in
practice and becoming and auto-ethnography as a strategy for the
production of empirical material.
A qualification of how we want auto-ethnography to mean in this
context is important here. We turn in on itself the criticism from
writers like Delamont (2007) that auto-ethnography is too
experiential, cannot fight familiarity, and that it focuses on the
wrong side of the power divide (2007: 3) and instead positively
embrace these characteristics as driving motivations for putting it to
work. Auto-ethnography here is mobilised as an act of subjective
story-telling through which the student constructs an
autobiographical personal narrative a petit rcit . This narrative is
not understood to be truthful in any totalising sense but is of
interest because it represents a temporary projection or moment of
textualised identity. Taking post-structuralist notions of self as a
starting point where self identity is bound up with a capacity to
keep a particular narrative going (Gauntlett, 1991: 54) these

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narratives articulate the expressed trajectories of individual

identities in relation to the possible textual field. What is important
here is not the realities or truth of experience or action but the
process, the selection and mobilisation of particular discursive
positions to do particular sorts of identity work.
Through our discussion of auto-ethnography we opened up and
expanded definitions of what might be counted as data and the
curatorial, productive role of the researcher as an agent of, rather
than conduit or receptacle for, meaning making and taking. We
would we suggested: make objects; tell stories; listen to stories;
discuss our object and story making; curate and share symbolic
objects; take pictures and audio recordings; and discuss our
thoughts and feelings uninhibited by research conventions,
interviews, structure or systematisation, along the way. We would
count all of this as empirical material offering ways in to grappling
with our own entanglement.
We read Nutbrowns (2012) A Box of Childhood: small stories at the
roots of a career and explored the work of a range of academics and
practitioners that plays self-consciously/reflexively with issues of
identity and representation: Kelly Clarke-Keefes on visual arts,
poetics and subjectivities (2008); David Gauntletts (2006) work on
the use of identity boxes; Bonnie Sorokes (2004) zipper
workshops; and Kendalls work (Bennett et al 2011) on the use of
artefacts in professional education.
We then held two workshop sessions. In the first the group produced
and shared identity boxes to explore their trajectory towards the
FdA programme and becoming an academic.

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This was followed by face-to-face discussion about conceptualising

and doing research and being researched which was followed up by
further discussion on the (pre-existing) group blog. In the second
workshop students chose symbolic objects around/through which to
assemble their own stories of/about becoming a practitioner.

Again this was followed by face-to-face reflection and discussion and

a consideration of how these methods could be put to work in the
project proposals they were producing for their module assessment
and the projects they would go on to do in the BA top up most
were going on to complete.

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The final writing about stage of the project was voluntary and an
open invitation was issued to students and teachers to come
together to plug-in theory to the amassed empirical material. We
want our writing about to run counter to notions of writing up and
to be homologous with the theoretical milieu from which the project
was imagined, that is to say we hope it is exploratory rather than
representational. We contest the conventions of writing up, the
the static writing model criticised by Richardson 2001:924).
Richardson locates this model within a viridicular truth discourse;
given to science [in the 19th century] was the belief that its words
were objective, precise, unambiguous, noncontextual, and
nonmetaphoric (ibid. 924/5). Within this model writing is not only
conceived but practised in very particular ways I was taught,
however, as you were too, not to write until I knew what I wanted to
say, until my points were organised and outlined (ibid. 924). She
goes on to argue:
No surprise that this static writing model coheres with
mechanistic scientism and quantitative research. I will argue
that the static writing model is itself a socio-historical invention
that reifies the static world imagined by our 19th-century
foreparents. The model has serious problems: it ignores the
role of writing as a dynamic, creative process; it undermines
the confidence of beginning qualitative researchers because
their experience of research is inconsistent with this writing
model; and it contributes to the flotilla of qualitative writing
that is simply not interesting to read because adherence to the
model requires writers to silence their own voices and to view
themselves as contaminants. Social scientific writing, like all
other forms of writing, is a sociohistorical construction, and,
therefore, mutable(ibid. 924)
Rather a description is a gloss, a typification of the presumed

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10

meaning of such events (Stanley 1993:214). Such understandings

conceive a crisis of representation (Beach 2001) in which writing
about is necessarily and inevitably a complex, arbitrary, subjective,
and partial, practice that works not to describe the real but rather
to police, produce, and constitute a field (Lather 1999: 5) in these
terms we recognise that writing about research is not representing
the world but writing it (Usher, 1997:33) and researchers are, like
literary writers, world-makers (ibid. p35). We approach our writing
very much as othered to this account of scientific representational
writing, using our writing and thinking with writing as an opportunity
to find ways in to our empirical material that affect us. We write
instead like Richardson I write because I want to find out. I write in
order to learn something that I did not know before I wrote it (ibid.
924).
We borrow Jackson and Mazzeis (2012) reading of Deleuze and
Guattaris (2000) notion of plugging in to think through a selfconscious attention to working with/in theory. In A Thousand
Plateaus Delueze and Guattari (2000) write when one writes, the
only question is which other machine the literary machine can be
plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work (2000, 4).
Jackson and Mazzei mobilise this notion of plugging-in as a process
rather than a concept (2012: 1) a putting to work to produce
something new. Foucault urges us to use his ideas like
little tool boxes. If people want to open them, or to use this
sentence or that idea as a screwdriver or spanner to shortcircuit, discredit or smash systems of power, including
eventually those from which my books have emergedso
much the better (Foucault (1975) interview with Roger pol
Driot in M. Morris and P. Patton Michele Foucault: Power Truth
Strategy).

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11

Similarly Massumi recognises a similar invitation from Deleuze and

Guattari to lift a dynamism (Massumi, 1992:8) out of their work
and put their concepts to work as a tool box so as to pack a
potential in the way a crowbar in a willing hand envelops an energy
of prying (ibid). In what follows we plug in ideas from a number of
theorists in ways that have enabled us to grapple with our own
entanglement and to problematise and re-think the processes of
professional education. We seek not resolution in our promiscuous
play with theory but revolution (Massumi: 1992:8).
On pronouns the we and us and the we and the us
that write
The we and the us of this paper is multiple and various and we
each are bound and committed to its content in various and
perhaps competing ways. It is possible that it is not a truth or
truthful for any or all of us and we dont force it to become this,
instead it is something like a composite representation of our
conversation, something like a bricolage an assemblage perhaps?
We, purposely and self-consciously have not made distinctions
between the us of writing and the us of telling, producing, making
and resisting the bounded notion of five discrete authors as the
point of origin of this paper. Instead we write in/to the flow of our
we, us, them entanglement with the field of study.
the self that writes this is neither the constant rationalist
nor the presenter of a totalising narrative. (Rhedding-Jones,
1997: 197)
one must take responsibility for inventing or producing ones
own self (Foucault 1984: 39)
Who are we as a group of writers? There is self-consciously no I in

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12

this paper. Like Jackson we refuse a narrative I or the molar I

that is expected to give a full representation for the listener to easily
consume and comprehend; the narrative or molar I tricks readers
into thinking that they have the full picture. (Jackson, 2010:584).
We recognise Foucaults notion of the author functioning as an
ideological product: the functional principle by which in our culture
one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes
the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition,
decomposition, and recompositionIn fact, we are accustomed to
presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual sign of invention
(Foucault, 1991: 119). We are we in the multiple, plural and
duplicitous sense, each of us was several, there was already
quite a crowd (Deleuze and Guattari: 2000:3), perhaps what
Jackson calls a becoming-I (Jackson 2010). We keep our names as
Deleuze and Guattari do, out of habit, purely out of habit. To make
ourselves unrecog-nizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not
ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's
nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when
everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking (2000:3). We use
the academic convention of positioning ourselves alphabetically
knowingly/with intent/affectively and metaphorically to flatten out
our relations with production and to draw attention instead to our
conversation as a dynamic, productive place/space charged with our
collective grappling as we folded in and out. Folding (need to say
more here on folding and flattening from Jackson and Mazzei)
We are purposeful in our choice of folding and flattening to
describe our methodological practice that rejects the
intepretivist stance and that embraces the mutually
constitutive nature of which Barad writes. The intra-action
that characterized our process was made of re-considering the
mutual constitution of meaning as happening between
researcher/researched; data/theory; and inside/outside. The

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13

data and theory are folded into one another whereby this
process results in a new inside/outside (2012:11)
We introduce ourselves in a manner of speaking only and resist the
notion that our backstories provide a beginning or starting point for
our analysis (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012). Clare and Melanie were
students in the group but have dual roles in the college as a lecturer
and assessor respectively working on National Qualifications
Framework level 3 courses. Both also have experience in practicebased settings. Kirsty graduated from an ESC degree a year ago and
is a newly qualified teacher of the FdA. Helen is Head of Early Years
Education (EYE) at the college within which the work took place, is
studying towards a Doctorate in Education and has a background as
a practitioner. Alex is a university professor with a background in
teacher education and practice experience in further education. In
our diffused/varied ways we are all always already entangled with
the field of professional education, none of us more or less but
simply in difference, as St Pierre contends we are none of us
nowhere, there is no nowhere, you are always already somewhere
and your job is to figure out where to go. (St Pierre, 2013b). This
paper shares something of that figuring out toward St Pierres
challenge to forget and refuse to create new descriptions and
new concepts in our conversations (2013a).
Likewise its important to make clear that this piece may or may not
function as a resolved narrative for each or any of us.

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Poking Around
We make use of Jackson and Mazzeis (2012) notion of poking
around in the literature to resist grandiose, totalising and reductive
accounts of the work of the literature review as impartial and
systematic. In structuralist approaches to research training students
are encouraged to think about a variety of things: how to search
for literature; how to record and reflect upon findings; how to take a
critical approach to the work read; and how to ensure that sourced
work and ideas are referenced accurately and appropriately. What
they are generally not taught is how the discourse of the literature
review operates. That is to say the ways in which a literature review
is seen to authorise the arguments and ideas which it
contextualises and to which it plays host. The literature review is
used as a mechanism for imparting authority and validity and its
partiality is always unspoken and un-explored. Whilst it seeks to
stand in for/capture the real or truth of the field instead it
police[s], produce[s], and constitute[s] a field (Lather 1999: 5).
Here then we use poking around to draw attention to the always,
already partiality of reviewing the literature. Instead we engage
with literature as part of our assemblage of empirical material and
bring together a discussion of the hot spots (Maclure 2013: 172) in
our readings. That is to say moments of recognition, movement,
singularity, emergence (ibid 171) gut feelings [that] point to the
existence of embodied connections with other people, things and
thoughts. (ibid: 172).
Territorialisation of Early Years Work
In our previous work (Kendall et al 2012) we have talked back to
Osgoods (Osgood 2006:4) question about recent workforce reform
in the EYE sector What does 'professionalism for this occupational
group mean? Here our conversation takes a new turn. Here we

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15

want to think through these attempts to newly inscribe versions of

legitimate professional knowledge as examples of what Deleuze and
Guattari might call territorialisation of the field of EYE by a state
apparatus. By territorialisation we mean the capturing of territory
to form striated space and fixed, recognizable meaning (Jackson &
Mazzei: 2012: 12). We explore this in relation to making of
knowledge and making of subjects, that is to say the knowing about
of early years work and the being of early years workers.
Knowing About
In previous work (Kendall et al 2012) we have plugged in Bourdieus
ideas of reproduction and distinction to explore the dominant
discourses underpinning the recent history of professionalisation in
England. We described discourse characterised by a commitment to
skills, techniques, measurability, outcomes, standards and
certification through qualifications converging at the site of a
competent and rational humanist subject the (in most cases
female) early years worker. We were drawn to Urbans (2009)
recognition of this version of professionalism as a new paradigm
within which professionals must be re-known, re-shaped and
disciplined and through which 'a maze of regulation, accountability,
universality and technocratic measurability' are legitimated in the
name of 'quality'. We noted, both in our own work and that of
others, that similar arguments have been made about the
renegotiation of professional identities through the imposition of
cultures of instrumentalism (see for example Ball, 2003) in other
sectors of education (McDougall et al, 2006, Kendall & Herrington,
2009) or what Ball (2003) calls the 'terrors of performativity'. Citing
Apple (2004) Moss (2010) argues that this is an outcome of a new
hegemonic bloc of neo-liberals and neo-conservativesthe former
emphasising the relationship between education and the market,
the latter agreeing with theemphasis on the economy but seeking

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stronger control over knowledge, morals and values through

curricula, testing and other means (Moss 2010: 12).
For the purposes of our previous paper we emphasised a separation
of newly known professional forms of knowledge production,
distribution and application, through which the new professional
expert who embodies and reproduces (Moss, 2010: 15) scientific
knowledge to produce evidence-based or 'right' (good/best) practice
comes to be known (Urban, 2009) and distinguishable from the
profane yet to be professionalised practitioner and their (unlegitimised) everyday knowledge which might be re-cast as
unskilled, non-professional and in the domain of the vernacular.
In Distinction Bourdieu (1986) understands this process of
legitimising and delegitimising or othering particular forms of
knowledge as a process of consecration. For Bourdieu the systems
and practices of formal education and its institutions are
instrumental in this process as the educational system defines noncurricular culture (la culture libre), negatively at least, by
delimiting, within dominant culture, the area of what it puts into its
syllabuses and controls by its examinations, (Bourdieu 2002:23)
and through the technologies of curricula, Marx, for example, argues
of the examination that it is nothing but the bureaucratic baptism
of knowledge, the official recognition of the transubstantiation of
profane knowledge into sacred knowledge (Marx, K. cited in
Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 92). In the modern context of
professional education, and specifically the re-education of early
years professionals (it is important to note here that the generic
label early years professional has been appropriated to name the
new authorised status of Early Years Professional or EYP) , the
education system might be understood more broadly to encompass
the full range of agents acting on the domain of professional
learning such as sector skills councils (CWDC) and qualification

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regulators such as FdF. Thus through Bourdieus lens we might

interpret recent policy-making in relation to early years professional
education as key movements in the consecration of new
knowledge regimes within this knowledge field.
Urban (2009) argues that the system of professionalisation is
constructed to create an order of scarce resources, knowledge and
skill that is presented as being general but which is the
manifestation of a particular and specific discourse. Drawing on
Foucault's notion of discourse as systematically constructing the
forms and objects of which it speaks, Urban understands this
strategy as a way of asserting control over individual behaviour
towards making distinctions between forms of knowledge, those
who speak and those who are talked about, as well as where this
talk happens and the forms it takes. Thus knowledge construction
belongs to the domain of course designers, regulators and awarding
bodies (for example those listed above) and is transferred to those
who must put it into practice (a skilled workforce) through
programmes of vocational education. In the UK a range of structural
technologies serve to enforce and reinforce such understandings
such as FdF programme endorsements, Office for Standards in
Education (Ofsted) quality gradings and workforce data returns at
both local and national levels.
We suggested that logically extended this argument would imply
that the new subjects/professionals would be doubly bound
(internal and external regulation) to index their professional identity
to new knowledge relations, the prevailing habitus of Early
Childhood Education (Urban, 2008:135) and in so doing re-know, be
re-known and re-value (and de-value?) their pre-existing
understandings of their own practice and in turn their sense of their
professional worth, status and identities.

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Being an early years worker

Our recent readings of the literature suggest that the subjects of
early years practice, Early Years Students and Teachers (EYTs),
represent a site of significant contestation around which ideas about
class, gender and agency are played out through competing notions
of the Early Years subject - particular kinds of subjects doing
particular kinds of activities.
Colley et al recognise this attunement to the prevailing habitus
discussed above as vocational habitus (2003:489) by which they
mean an active and agentive process of orientation towards the
dominant identities of the workplace. They describe by way of
example a habitus of loving care to which students EYTs must
orientate themselves in both idealised and realised ways, without
aspiring to the idealized habitus, students might become too harsh
and the student may become unsuitable. Without the tempering
effects of the realized habitus, students might be overwhelmed by
the emotional demands of the work. (2003: 489). Rejection of or
resistance to the vocational habitus is likely, they suggest, to result
in exclusion. Vocational habitus, they continue, does encourage a
reflexive project of the self butthis project is often tightly
bounded, both in relation to ones existing habitus and in
accordance with a disciplinary discourse about the self one has to
become. The process of learning as becoming is one that is actively
constructed by students, but the possibilities are not boundless for
most young people in VET [vocational education and training]
(2003: 492). Elsewhere Colley contends that vocational habitus in
the early years is infused with a commitment to motherly love
arguing that in such conditions the education of early years workers
is an act of symbolic violencelikely to continue as long as
capitalist edubusiness has an interest in making profits by offering
motherly love for sale in the nursery(2006:6). Skeggs has argued

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that the institutional organisation of the caring curriculum provides

frameworks, hierarchies and subject positions which bear specific
ideological and cultural meanings associated with femininity and
household structures (Skeggs, 1988:132) and that as a
consequence take up of courses leading to caring occupations such
as early years work, is most likely to be by women. In her own work
Skeggs observed that many women had previous experience of
caring, either through their own families, similar courses at school or
through paid caring such as babysitting...[and]...therefore feel
caring is something they are capable of (Skeggs 1988:138).
Osgood (2005) suggests that a combination of this sort of notion of
work-of-the-home with a National Childcare strategy designed to
enable women to re-enter the labour market works to position
childcare as not real work but a mechanism to enable others to
participate in careers that are afforded status, prestige and relative
wealth (ibid, 290). This dimension to childcare work is, she argues,
largely absent from public debates.
However Osgood refuses to accede to the oppression of
structuration, the regulatory gaze, and draws on Francis (2001,
cited in Osgood 2006) notion of new agency, which incorporates
both deterministic structural arguments and human agency (ibid,
10) and contends that we are not only positioned within structures
that are beyond our control but also simultaneously positioning
ourselves and others. This complex dialectic, Osgood suggests,
opens up space for alternative ways of understanding identity
construction within the context of an increasingly highly-regularised
working context. Drawing on Judith Butlers (1990) notion of identity
and performance to describe a more active, agentive
professionalism that is performatively constructed. This reading
allows her to recognize a mobile, strategic ambitious and confident
EYT who mobilises EY work advantageously to achieve particular
personal, social, economic and cultural functions. She notices the

November 27th 2013

20

self-assured and wise ECEC professional who challenges the status

quocan muddy the water and offer the chance of a reconfigured
professional identity and counter-discourse (2006:12). Osgoods
analysis opens up the opportunity to imagine the subversive worker
able to confront and resist prevailing and dominant understandings
of professionalism (2006:14) towards a transformative agency
(ibid) that might imagine new possibilities for the being and doing of
early years work.
What emerged for us from our reading is the significance of the
dialectic of structure and agency to interpretations of early years
workers experience, the constant push and pull against which
childcare becomes both a site of agency and a site of boundaries
for workers (Vincent and Braun 2010). What was obscured for us
was the entanglement of the writers in the being and doing of their
work. Whilst we glimpsed momentary surfacings of researchers
secret selves
I related to the students in the classroom as a teacher, and in
the nightclubs, pubs, sports centres and homes, eventually as
a friend. Sometimes I participated, often I observed. Many
interviews, individual and group, open and closed were used.
More often than not general conversations raised interesting
points. (Skeggs DATE: 133)
These material Is that wrote, interacted, saw, felt and noticed,
were rapidly obfuscated by the illusory yet seductive appeal of the
systematic and scientific: indefinite triangulation fixed the
meaning tight and the authority of the study replaced the fluidity
of I.
In this respect empirical analysis provided the means for
firstly, capturing the structural and cultural phenomena at the

November 27th 2013

21

level of everydayness (Apple, 1982); secondly, by researching

the students within a college, the study was able to analyse
the structure and dynamics of the institutional parameters of
FE; (Skeggs Date: 133)
Resisting coding feeling for hotspots in our material
Our empirical material yielded easily, passively even, to the
dominant codes that emerged through our reading. Over a lovely
dinner at our writing retreat we were able to count examples of, to
us by now familiar (Kendall et al 2012), narratives of mothers and
grandmothers re-tracing the patterns drawn by Skeggs of moving
tentatively from private, un-paid caring responsibilities in to the
casualised but more formal context of third sector voluntary work
and finally in to the public sphere of care as paid work. We were
able to interpret the role of different actors, agents and networks,
personal, social and educational, that played in to our journeys of
becoming, in Colleys (2003), sense professional. And we
recognised the familiar contours of the structural barriers that
seemed to frustrate or play against aspiration, commitment and
ambition metaphors of physical barriers, walls, staircases and
caves standing in for institutions, classed and gendered positionings
and the intricacies and contingencies of everyday life, relationships
and experience.

November 27th 2013

22

We were cheered by ladders, ropes and parachutes that we

interpreted as expressions of determination, movement and mobility
facilitating moves between, beyond and through, and forcing new
perspectives on and new relations with people and points of
departure. We suggested at subjects and identities in transition, on
the move, in flux and told stories of progression, transformation and
realisation of goals, a playing out of the kind of dialectics discussed
above; we were both positioned and positioning at the site of early
years work.
Maclure warns us however to be suspicious of coding. Coding, she
reminds us (2013:167) can offend on a number of accounts
it positions the analyst at arms lengthencouraging illusions
of interpretive dominion over an enclosed field, and making
167
researchers code; others get coded 168
coding assumes and imposes, an arborescent or tree-like
logic of hierarchical, fixed relations among discrete entities
even it if it is not displayed in the form of a tree diagram it
creates a grammar that always pre-exists the phenomena
under investigation 167
She urges us instead to resist the disciplinary rage for meaning
(ibid 170), to be more open-ended and tentative in our sensemaking and to heighten our sensitivities towards hot-spots in our
data. In place of the cerebral comforts of ideas and concepts, or as
well as these, we could acknowledge those uncomfortable affects
that swarm among our supposedly rational arguments, moments of
nausea, complacency, disgust, embarrassment, guilt, fear and
fascination and threaten to undo our certainty and self-certainty by,
again, allowing bodily intensities to surge up into thought and
decision making (172). These gut feelings she goes on point to
November 27th 2013

23

the existence of embodied connections with other people, things

and thoughts, that are far more complex than the static connections
of coding. (ibid)
Here we want to describe and draw on two hot-spots in our
material and how they startled our thinking about professional
education for EYTs.
The first was acknowledgement of our very visceral response to our
own entanglement in research processes. We no longer saw
research as a surface activity and described new sensitivities
towards the researched, expressed by one of us as honour and
respect, that prompted a new disquiet about our own positionality
within the reading wed done . We were in the words of one of our
colleagues humbled by listening to the sometimes very intimate
stories of others and interested in the differences as well as
similarities in the stories we told. We shared phases of emotions in
our stories, visualised shades of light, dark and colour in our own
stories and noticed them in the stories of others. We were part
perplexed part stimulated by how making and doing enabled
stories to be shared without just words. We paused at length to
consider the differences in telling stories cold through identity
boxes, wed come to this activity without advance warning other
than bring a box to the session, and what we perceived as the
more measured, considered, rehearsed stories we told through the
objects wed selected and charged as we made them with our
projected meanings and those pressed and infused by others. We
wondered about the different kinds of performances we were giving
and the different reactions and responses (annoyance v honouring,
respect v mistrust) we had to them. For us, the physical, embodied,
material experience of telling our stories and listening to our stories
opened up an important hot-spot, a point of wonder in our material.

November 27th 2013

24

The second hot spot in our material was the description by one of us
of what it felt like to read Nutbrowns A Box of Childhood. Shed
read, enjoyed and felt shed got it but had begun to mistrust its
worth and value because of its perceived accessibility if you read
something hard you feel youre reading something academicthis
felt less academic because it was easier to read. It seemed like a
number of ideas were at play here about relationality, positionality
but also about the grappling nature of becoming (again in Colleys
2003 sense).
These hotspots marked points of departure in our conversation
points at which we wondered not what does academic professional
education mean but what does it do. How does it work with a sense
of the rational/irrational and how does it make us know and feel?
What kind of human subject (Briadotti REF) does it make of us? We
began to wonder how do contemporary discussions about EYTs the
what they do, what they know, how they mean, that we have
noticed in the literature help work, paradoxically in our view, the
insulation in Bernsteins (REF) sense, or perhaps the refrain after
Deleuze (REF), of reductive forms of professional education that
position EYTs as subjects caught up in a binary dialectic, exercising
power or not. What, we asked, if instead professional education
stopped listening to conversations and instead was constituted and
constituting of conversation? A conversation that we might imagine
moving us beyond the dialectic of structure and agency towards
something more nebulous, entangled, flatter, in the Deluezian sense
(REF XXX), and provisional?
This conversation feels, at least for us, like nascent and difficult
terrain that is at times difficult to speak, at once formed and present
but also elusive and difficult to hold in our minds-EYS, the itch we
cant quite scratch, something like Lathers stammering knowing
(1997:288) perhaps?

November 27th 2013

25

Lathers discussion of religious and de-colonising methodologies

catches our eye. Citing Hardt and Negri (2000:128 in Lather
2006:44) She reminds us that the colonial world never really
conformed to the simple two-part division of a dialectical structure
reality always presents proliferating multiplicitiesreality is not
dialectical, colonialism is. She goes on to discuss the god-centric
epistemology of Daaiyah Saleem which she reads as standing in
for the very tensions of (non-containtment) of the discontinuous
other, producing knowledge within and against academic
intelligibilities (2006:41) and Linda Tuhiwai Smiths cautionary
talestold from an indigenous Maori perspectivethrough the eyes
of the colonized (2006:44) against Western ways of knowing
(ibid) and suggests that such efforts provide a different kind of
academic voice (2006:44). We began to wonder whether we might
read a similar sort of methodological colonialisation into the
representations of EYTs wed encountered in our poking around in
the literature, in this case a colonialising representation of classed
cultures. If so, how might the counter-task of methodological decolonialisation that Lather outlines be re-contextualised as a
pedagogical mandate for EYT professional education?
The task is to listen for the sense people make of their lives in
order to attend to how thinking gets organized into patterns,
how discourses construct and constitute with a sensitivity to
issues of appropriation that does not revert to romantic too
easy ideas about authenticity in negotiating the tensions
between both honoring the voices of research participants
and the demand for interpretive work on the part of the
inquirer (2006:50)
The key she continues is to locate the researcher within the context
of the research in a way that disrupts subjective/objective binaries

November 27th 2013

26

and accounts for the conditions of its own production (2006:51).

She urges a radical proliferation in research training that works
against polar oppositions towards recognition of something like
Deluezes thousand tiny sexes (2000). Such nomadic
conjunctions she suggests produce fluid subjects, ambivalent and
polyvalent, open to change, continually being made, unmade and
remade (2006). A pedagogy framed in this way, we argue, offers a
very different way of understanding becoming, a becoming that is
always already in motion, fluid and in flux and quite different from
Colleys, perhaps not linear but certainly rationally projected move
from novice to professional. So what might/could we imagine a
pedagogy of movement and proliferation be like?
New departures for professional education?
We return to the old wives stories to begin to sketch out what we
might call a paralogical pedagogy that is investigative, dynamic,
generative, self-consciously and reflexively interpretive and seeks
out unintelligibility. A pedagogy of wonder perhaps, after Maclures
analytic practice that recognises itself as just an experiment with
order and disorder, in which provisional and partial taxonomies are
formed but are always subject to change and metamorphosis as
new connections spark among words, bodies, objects and ideas
(2013:181).
- reflexivity about positionality
We start with an invitation to be reflexive about positionality and
appropriate from Literacy Studies the impulse of Gees Bill of Rights
for minority and poor children (2000:67). Gees Bill seeks to
facilitate for students and teachers alike the development of
provisional models that help them to describe, observe and analyse
different literacies rather than just learning and teaching one

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27

literacy as given. (Street, 1997:54). Gee proposes reflexive and

meta-awareness, critical framing and the right to transform and
produce knowledge as necessary strategies for socially just forms of
literacy education and we recognise here a productive schema for
forms of professional education that work against the grain of the
molar machine. For EY professional education this might mean
describing and exploring both the Big D (Gee 2011) stories, the
combination of language, actions, interactions, ways of thinking,
believing and valuing and using various symbols, tools and objects
to enact a particular sort of socially recognizable identity
(2011:201), that pattern the becomings of EY workers and their
little d figured worlds, their socially and culturally constructed
ways of recognising particular characters and actors and actions
and assigning them significance and value (Gee 2011). We might
want to call this a pedagogy of entanglement through which a
commitment to the always already of our somewhere-ness (see St
Pierre above) nudges de-territorialisation of the arborescent logic of
professional orthodoxies towards a rhizo-curriculum that acts as a
release point for thinking in new and imaginative ways (Riddle
2013:12). We offer up the story making and sharing we have
engaged in throughout this project, as practitioners, researchers and
writers as a such a release point.
- Rhizo-curriculum, little stories of professional learning
We can begin to see that a pedagogy founded on this set of ideas
might look quite different to the practices and processes weve been
used to. In contrast to the old binaries of legitimate and illegitimate
knowledge a rhizo-curriculum would commit to having lost its
innocence and its faith in victory narratives and recognise instead
that its truths are always partial and provisional, and that it can
never fully know or rescue the other. (Maclure 2010:1). The rhizocurriculum would be process orientated, not focused on the study of

November 27th 2013

28

authorised or legitimate texts as they contribute to the arborescent

orthodoxies of the professional discipline but exploration and
analysis of everyday entanglements with/in the field, a restless
mapping and re-mapping as Stewart explains
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) assert that the rhizome is a map
and not a tracing (p. 12, emphasis in original). Tracings and
reproductions, they argue, are a part of all arborescent logic,
and lead to codified complexes with closed or fixed structures,
whereas maps are open and connectable to other dimensions.
Maps, for Deleuze and Guattari, are oriented toward
experimentation in contact with the real (p. 12). Maps are
part of a rhizome as they enable connections between fields,
yet at the same time allow for revision: it is detachable,
reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn,
reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an
individual, group or social formation (p. 12). The map of
Deleuze and Guattaris rhizome encourages thinking and
thought that is networked, relational and transversal
(Colman, 2005, p. 231). For Deleuze and Guattari the very
fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, and and and
(p.25) (Stewart: 27)
We begin to see that the work of the teacher in this version of
professional education is not to teach about but to problematise,
grapple, de-familiarise, unsettle and undo - to enable students to
work with/in the ruins towards new possibilities.
We want to propose the kind of auto-ethnographic story-telling
weve engaged in through this project as a useful strategy towards
this undone kind of curriculum. In this dynamic the work of the
teacher is to facilitate and scaffold learners auto-ethnographic storytelling, and to accept and embrace the uncharted, as yet

November 27th 2013

29

unknowable learning spaces that emerge; learning spaces that, we

assert, are charged with productive possibility. Of course the idea of
the teacher as facilitator is not a new one. See for example the
influential work of Knowles on androgogy (1975). What is new in
the rhizomatic turn is the objective of facilitation. Rather than
describable, learning in this dynamic becomes unpredictable,
paralogical in Lyotards terms, a collection of petits ecrits, little
narratives, that resist closure and totality (Zembylas, 2000: 160).
These little narratives are contrastingly less ambitious than the
grand old narratives of professional disciplines, but stress the
particularity of events in our lives particularity [that] makes
impossible the existence of an authority who can speak from a
universal perspective without invoking his or her ideology (2000:
161).
Zembylass account of a paralogical science education offers a
useful reference
point for imagining the conditions of the rhizo-curriculum. He argues
that
in science childrens natural curiosity is subordinated to logical
forms (Zembylas,
2000: 161), and suggests that children can teach us in their
invitation to free
ourselves to speculate about the foundations of the universe as an
infinite series of
alternate versions of experiences which never cease to amaze us
(2000: 160).
Rather than something naturalistic, what we understand Zembylas
to be
acknowledging is the plurality of story-telling as it deviates from
the conventions
of a Habermasian consensus. What this means for science education
is a rejection

November 27th 2013

30

of what he calls a persistent faith in the force of the better

argument (2000:
166), in other words a rejection of the logocentrism of scientific
knowledge
which is always marked by the effects of status, power and
influence (2000: 166). The alternative, paralogical science
classroom might, in contrast, question the very context of
argumentation, which is always marked by the effects of status,
power, and influence, and ask Who has the power in a classroom?
Who is seen as the legitimator of knowledge? What is the role of
other ways of knowing such as intuition, imagination and emotion?
and how does the the very nature of science knowledge as taught
through our textbooks as well as the evolution of modem
knowledge that calls for more specialisation exclude the subjective
aspects of teachers and childrens knowing (2000: 165)?
The account of a paralogical science education we see here calls for
both an undoing, of the normative mythologies that construct what
we might call subject
science and an invitation to invent new possibilities that are not:
pre-sented in our current discourses. Legend, myth, history,
science, intuition, and emotion share common boundaries. Their
domains oscillate into one another so that the idea of ever
distinguishing between them becomes more and more chimerical
(Zembylas, 2000: 166).
Zembylass ideas here resonate with Maclures sketch of the
baroque, an
approach to qualitative enquiry which seems pertinent to the kinds
of ethnographic,
paralogical pedagogy we are outlining here, which resists the
mastery discourses
that tend to characterise classroom-based paradigms of educational

November 27th 2013

31

research.
Maclures baroque methodology favours a fragmented, dislocated
undoing
characterised by movement over composure, estrangement of the
familiar,
disorientation and loss of mastery (Maclure, 2006a: 8) towards a
frivolity (2006b)
that undoes and is undone. And it occurs to us that this type of
approach might
usefully form the basis of a very different kind of professional
learning that
seeks to reinscribe teacher/student relations and the subject/object
of study
towards a seriously frivolous or baroque pedagogy, posturing
new imaginaries
for the relation of the researcher to the object, the becoming
professional to the professional field. We can imagine with Maclure a
peepshow that:
brings the viewer into an intimate relation with the object, one
into which desire, wonder and otherness are folded, and out of
which something might issue that would never be seen by
shining a bright light upon the object in the empty space of
reason and looking at it as hard as possible. But the peepshow
also calls attention to the compromised, voyeuristic nature of
the researcher gaze and the unavoidable absurdity of the
research posture. To view the delights of the peepshow you
have to bend down, present your backside to public view, put
yourself at risk. (Maclure, 2006a: 18)
Towards concluding lines of flight
Towards a conclusion we want to open up rather than close down

November 27th 2013

32

our narrative, to keep in our minds eye the possibility of lines of

flight or path[s] of mutation brought about by the production of
connections between entities that previously were implied; the
result is a release of new powers in the capacities of those bodies
to act and respond (Stewart 2012: 30). And so we depart with
questions that might be posed by a revaluation of professional
education towards new forms of pedagogical practice and an
engagement with the event.
How did you come to be in this professional space?
What are the markers or hot spots in your narrative?
How does your narrative compare to the narrative/s of others? What
are the points of difference? Consensus?
What does it mean to be a professional in your context? What is the
difference between a professional and a non-professional? Who
decides?
How would you describe your experience in your professional
context? What does it look and sound and feel like? How does this
compare with what you read about?
What different kinds of spaces, places and opportunities are there
for making and taking meanings about what it means to be
professional in your area?
What does it mean to be a producer or consumer of meanings in
these spaces and places?
What different kinds of associations and affiliations do you make?
With whom?

November 27th 2013

33

For what purposes?

What does it mean to be a rule-maker or rule-breaker in your
professional context/s?
Who or what does professional education serve in your context?
What different identities do you take up in different spaces and
places? What role/s do these perform? How are they similar?
Competing?

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