EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION ISSUES AND TRENDS

Early Childhood Education Issues and Trends

Early Childhood Education Issues and Trends

Introduction

Today's newer research methodologies are the effects and the constructs of postmodernism, critical theory, feminisms, postcolonial theory, queer theory and cultural studies. Although these may contain vestiges of earlier research practices, certainties, fixed categories of analysis and statistical information, they are now challenging what counts as knowledge and who the knowers are. Applied to literacy practices and competencies, newer research methodologies are alternative perspectives and practices that shift research fields towards ethics rather than mere information, towards theories rather than mere findings, and towards reconceptualizing practices rather than merely analysing results or reporting.

In all of this the would-be feminist researcher is in a different positioning from the don't-want-to-be feminist researcher, and also from the men well read in feminist theory and/or wanting to work for gender equity. This is because feminism, and any other contemporary 'ism' such as multiculturalism, anti-racism, anti-ageism or postcolonialism, contains a set of unfixed political values, validities and desires for social justice. So for critically and thus politically oriented researchers, taking out your political and cultural standpoints is an impossibility. So is being able to say how much your feminist (or other) affinity is influencing your research practice and the ways that you decide to write it up.

Given word limits for this chapter, I will not write about who is currently publishing what regarding literacies in early childhood. There is not the space here to discuss the work of overtly feminist, sometimes feminist, pro-feminist and non-feminist research about literacy; and how these might intersect with research about gender. Nor is there space to say what sorts of feminisms and feminist complexities around cultures, sexualities and languages such researchers might be making use of, developing or reconstructing. However, I would point to other chapters in this volume (especially those by Radhika Viruru and by Elaine Millard), and suggest that these are read with an eye to how various feminisms inform their positionings regarding gender; and which feminisms (socialist, conservative right, radical or newer such as global, postmodern, poststructural) appear to be resisted, ignored or acted out agentically through these writers' choices of research methodologies, academic references, writing genres and discourses.

Feminisms

Having now made feminism problematic, I'll try to deal with it. As I see it, feminism as critical theory relates to other critical theories. And feminism as poststructural theory relates to other poststructural theories uncovering power and deconstructing categories, hierarchies and fixedness. Feminism as phenomenology is about interpretations of gendered meanings and hermeneutics. And feminism as positivism attracts social scientists wanting hard sciences, who try to explain and predict in terms of cause-and-effect relations, believing that such findings are not politically motivated, and that method is able to produce reliable findings. In this chapter I spell out some of the implications of this for research about literacy in early childhood.

Whilst not feminist unless its critique or its deconstructions or its interpretations or its statistics and graphs regard gender, or the positioning of women ...