From balance to blasphemy : shifting metaphors for researching early childhood education

Abstract

This paper seeks to make trouble for the metaphor of 'balance' in early childhood education research, drawing on the arguments of Gore (1993, 1997), Haraway (1991), and McWilliam (1999), and a study (McArdle, 2001) that was designed to focus not only on teacher practice, but also to inquire into ways of speaking teacher practice. Our rationale for trouble-making is to ask questions about the way that the imperative to 'balance' disallows the investigation of pedagogy as a more complex field of practice, one that is inevitably riddled with unresolved and unresolvable contradictions and tensions. To understand how it is possible to think structure as freedom, we are forced to refuse any neat distinction between what enables and what constrains (McWilliam, 1999). For Haraway (1991), inquiry is 'blasphemous' when it refuses to 'see' practices in terms of the possibility of resolution, focusing instead on the irony of their unresolvability.