Young Children Becoming Curriculum: Deleuze, Te Whāriki and Curricular Understandings by Marg Sellers.
In Young Children Becoming Curriculum, a book published within an international series on “contesting early childhood” author Marg Sellers makes her debut as an educational philosopher.
She has taken thinking and writing on children, childhood, and curriculum to a new level. She has dared to contest the usual dichotomisation of children and curriculum, by proposing and developing the notion of re(con)ceiving children in curriculum.
And this is done magnificently using New Zealand’s national early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki, as both an object of analysis and a framework for the study based in a kindergarten setting.
Two papers submitted to the NZ Research in Early Childhood Education journal by Dr Sellers gave us an early introduction to rhizomes and how the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari may be used to generate ways for thinking differently about children’s play and interrelationships with curriculum.
Now in Young Children Becoming Curriculum, discussion of these ideas is extended and we are shown deep appreciation for the child and the child’s choices. Readers will feel drawn into the accounts of children’s play provided and be challenged to understand how children’s interactions, behaviours and choices can be read in different ways. Included are several pages of full-colour photographs of children’s play in interaction and commentary.
Te Whāriki is affirmed and accepted and at the same time it is also part of the discussion and analysis. For example, the chapter on “Becoming-child(ren), Becoming-power-full” looks at the notion of empowerment in Te Whāriki. Common assumptions of empowerment in Te Whāriki are argued to sustain inequitable power relations through reference to observations of children play, Deleuzian and Foucauldian views on power relations and the Māori version of Te Whāriki that uses the notion whakamana which is subtly different from the English notion of empowerment
This book will interest scholars along with all educationalists who have undertaken academic study at graduate level and have strong foundation knowledge of children’s learning.
The author and other writers could consider developing further publications or formats for making this material more accessible to early childhood practitioners so they too can engage with the ideas and see possibilities in practice for both reconceiving and receiving children’s understandings within adult conceptions of how curriculum works for young children.
Paper Back ISBN: 978-0-415-53611-0
Publication date: June 2013
Publisher: Routledge
To order go to: www.routledge.com/9780415536110
