Outline

The COVID-19 pandemic posed particular policy problems for the organization of schools, requiring education to look to public health literature to determine how and if schools could be re-opened safely. However, political decision makers and health authorities frequently looked to research on COVID-19 in young children to determine school safety, although students in primary and secondary schooling generally range in age from early childhood through adolescence and young adulthood. This policy approach conflated developmental childhood with social and legal childhood, creating policy challenges and underscoring the linguistic and social slippages around the definition of “who is a child” in constructions of childhood within a Eurowestern cultural framework.

In Alberta, during planning for school re-entry in the autumn of 2020, parallels were frequently drawn with European school health protocols, in particular those of Denmark and the Netherlands, to make the case for re-opening schools. However, significant differences between countries' approaches to school safety were largely missing from political discourses, in particular practices around class sizes, accompanying community protocols, and most notably, differentiated plans for younger and older students.

Research Question

How did the slippage of developmental and social/legal definitions of childhood affect education and public health policy in Alberta schools, and how were comparisons with European countries' policies used to reinforce this conflation?

Theoretical Framework

As compared to the individual child, sociologies of childhood have begun to understand childhood not simply as a temporal or developmental state of the individual child, but rather as a type of structure. Qvortrup (2009, 645) notes that, contrary to the individual child, “…childhood as a structural form is defined in terms of economic, social, political, technological, cultural, and other parameters at the social level.”

Feminist scholars of childhood have highlighted this understanding of childhood as a structure, rather than a life stage, allows us to view childhood as socially produced, with childhood constructed as the other against which adulthood can be understood (Castaneda, 2001; Burman & Stacey, 2010). Rosenbury (2015, 10) notes that “Childhood is not simply a social construction; it is the construction that makes the category of adult possible.”

Kjorholt (2013, 249) notes that childhood is increasingly constituted as a symbolic, targeted space in which values are reproduced: “The symbolic value makes children vulnerable to being targets for policies and initiatives that support certain ideological values that are seen as important, more so than contributing to real empowerment and change of children’s conditions of life.”

This structural interpretation of childhood sits at odds with developmental models of childhood. Castaneda (2002) notes that the developmental model of childhood that emerged in the 19^th century was based in physiological understandings of the body; while this model has expanded to include psychological and social development, developmentalism’s roots in physiology enable medical discourses of child health to shape policymaking for the lives of children and schools.

Using critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2002), I will examine how childhood is mobilized through discursive frames (Benford & Snow, 2000) in Alberta COVID-19 education policy and how comparisons with European education policy around the pandemic were mobilized by political and health system leaders. Data to be analysed include Alberta provincial ministerial and public health announcements (as stored on the Government of Alberta’s YouTube channel), public health policy documents as related to school safety and re-entry, Alberta Education COVID-19 documents, and school division re-entry plan documents, as well as WHO, Health Canada, and Sick Kids reports on COVID-19 practices in schools. I will compare these documents to parallel documents from Denmark and the Netherlands on COVID-19 practices in schools and examine how misinterpretations of those countries' protocols were used to reinforce political arguments for Alberta's school re-entry plan.

The slippages in policy and political discourses around COVID-19 and school re-openings illustrate the unstable nature of “who is a child” and how this shapes the structure of Canadian childhood and child policy in Canadian education. This research also illustrated how international "best practices" can be taken up by political leaders as rationale for substantially dissimilar policy decisions. While childhood is often seen as belonging to the private sphere of the family, it is also a powerful political signifier that holds substantial structural power over the lives of children. The structural nature of childhood is a significant shaping force in education law and policy in Canada; through understanding how unstable and contested meanings of childhood shaped one specific area of education policy making in the overlap between medicalized, developmentalist interpretations of childhood and the social and legal definition of childhood, we can see how these competing narratives can challenge and at times undermine effective education policymaking.

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