Outline

This project is structured around two main objectives: to understand the discourses and extra-discursive forces that shape the politics of childhood and education and to trace how the discursive formation(s) of childhood in the global, neoliberal context of human rights discourses are reflected in UNESCO and OECD education reform documents.

Sahlberg (2016) argues that the education reform movement is globalized and entrenched in a network of international organizations such as the United Nations Education and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), among others. Further, international human rights documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Convention on the Rights of the Child (Mundy, Green, Lingard, & Verger, 2016) have become entangled in these global reforms particularly in terms of how “child” and “childhood” are conceptualized and enacted in educational and political spheres.

Within these contexts, the “good” childhood and the “good” child emerge as a symbolic space of ideological contestation. Education law and policy are at the centre of a discourse that centres the child as a future productive citizen while erasing the material lives and present interests of children. Thus my research question: How are neoliberal discourses shaping notions of “the good child/childhood” in historical and contemporary education reform discourses?

Theoretical Framework

Wall’s model of human rights (2019) is shaped by an approach he names childism, which he parallels with feminism, decolonialism, environmentalism, and other rights struggles. Childism as described by Wall needs to be distinguished from the use of childism in the work of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (2013), who uses childism to describe discrimination against children, paralleled with racism, sexism, and other oppressive structures. Wall (2019) describes childism as emergent from childhood studies but as having a broader effect on other disciplines as a critical lens through which we can view children as subjectivities and challenge normative assumptions, shaping a new aspect of social theory .

Childism is important in this work as both an analytic and ethical framework. As a form of critical theory, childism enables an analysis of the power structures of adulthood and childhood. It builds upon childhood studies’s understanding of the critical nature of child-adult relations and seeks to transform normative assumptions that describe society overall (Wall, 2019). A childist lens enables a critique not only of children’s rights but of our normative assumptions about rights as a whole; while this study focuses on childhood and education politics, it also offers a space to interrogate the ethical foundations of rights discourses.

Ethically, a childist approach overcomes concerns about emancipatory discourses of childhood as erasing the particular care needs of children. Rather than empowerment for children being understood as primarily about their social independence, Wall’s approach (2019) calls us to think about empowerment through social interdependence. Within this ethical lens, childhood retains its difference; the challenge is to the structures that render childhood marginal, rather than to make children small adults. I am mindful of past harms that have come to children as a result of theoretical approaches that erased the distinct nature of childhood. Instead, childism is about bringing children from the margins to the centre.

Using a genealogically informed critical discourse analysis, I will examine how children’s rights discourses, in particular in relation to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, emerge in education policy reform texts produced by UNESCO and the OECD. The lens of childism is both a way of conceptualizing social theory and a research approach (Wall, 2019); childism offers a research orientation through which to shape a critical discourse analysis. In education policy research, critical discourse analysis sits within the broader realm of critical policy analysis (Diem et al., 2014), enabling an interrogation of how structures of power shape policy constructions. Policy as discourse has multiple meanings that may be in contention with one another (Bacchi, 2000), particularly in the friction between literary approaches that see policy as text and social approaches that are interested in the processes of creating texts. However, critical discourse analysis as set out by Fairclough includes analysis of three dimensions: text (description), processing (interpretation), and social (explanation) through a three-step process (Janks, 2006). Within critical discourse analysis, the friction identified by Bacchi (2000) is largely addressed by considering both text and social context. Critical discourse analysis within critical policy studies is still primarily interested in discourse, although discourses may be operationalized through dialectical processes (Fairclough, 2013). Still, it enables the examination of relationships between both semiotic and extrasemiotic elements in the production and contestation of hegemonies (Fairclough, 2013). The use of genealogy as methodology in the social sciences is fuzzy; while the epistemological and theoretical aspects are clearly set out by Foucault (1978), the process is absent, leaving researchers to fill in the gaps (Anaïs, 2013). However, Anaïs (2013) offers several strategies through which to introduce genealogy into critical discourse analysis. First, in contrast with critical discourse analysis’s establishment of a limited archive of texts from the start, a genealogical approach allows for a living archive to be created throughout the genealogical process . This makes the process significantly more complex but allows for the researcher to gather texts as the genealogy evolves and new patterns emerge. Additionally, genealogy and critical discourse analysis complement one another in their approach to reading for silence. In this way, genealogy can supplement critical discourse analysis by bringing in a lens through which to understand the origins of power, as well as the way that power operates within a particular text.

My research brings a novel theoretical and methodological approach to questions of child-adult relations in education policy. This research will further understanding of the flows between international human rights and education documents. For policy practitioners, this work makes transparent the ways in which assumptions about childhood and children shape policymaking. The adoption of GBA+ and antiracist policy analysis has substantially shifted policy approaches; however, while vital, these lenses have failed to consider childhood as an intersectional factor in policy approaches. Thinking about children themselves – not simply in their relationship to their adult caregivers but as distinct persons – adds a missing dimension to making policy that is inclusive of all. Finally, by being grounded in childism as critical theory this work opens room to imagine a new rights discourse beyond its application to children’s rights and offers a way of thinking about rights as the liberal world order is destabilized; I hope to suggest a path to think about a world after liberalism and even humanism shaped by relationality with human and more-than-human kin.

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