"It's Like a Baby Jail!" Power & Early Childhood Education

Speaker 1 True light is dependent on the presence of other lights. Take the others away and darkness results. Yet, the reverse is not true. Take away darkness and there is only more darkness. Darkness can exist by itself. Light cannot.

Speaker 2 In stressful uncertain times, when cynical powers attempt to divide and isolate us, community and solidarity are acts of resistance. But there are no superheroes here and no simple answers to be found, only the quest for connection. In 2025, we are responding to the need for community and solidarity in uncertain times by turning Conference to Restore Humanity into a model for humanizing critical discourse and dialogue. Bringing together students and teachers, researchers and doers, thinkers and visionaries to explore complex topics in education and illuminate a path forward together. What if, instead of viewing the fringes as an educational afterthought, we treated them as a blueprint for what schools could become? In our opening flipped keynote, Doctor. Sarah Fine will explore what can be learned from spaces that are often seen as peripheral to the core purposes of school. Elective courses, career and technical education pathways, alternative education programs, and extracurricular activities. These space carry powerful lessons about how to design for authentic relationships and deeper learning. And, we are taking our flipped keynote model one step further by adding fireside chats, moderated panel discussions followed by audience q and a. Shanay Bond, Maria Munroe Shuster, Luckett Keesh, and Will Richardson will lead us in dialogue about the challenges facing education today and how we can collectively address them in 2025 and beyond. Audrey Waters, Shana V White, Vee Dow, and Charles Logan will help us answer, what, if anything, should be the relationship of AI and EdTech to education? We'll also be hosting a student panel of young people from Great Plains Action Society, an indigenous led grassroots organization advocating for indigenous rights, to speak to their experiences and perspectives as indigenous youth today. And instead of week long learning tracks as we've had in the past, we are including two hour daily workshops with expert practitioners. Nawal Karouni will help participants understand and connect family practices to curriculum to create deeper, more authentic caregiver collaborations. Doctor Emma McMain reimagines SEL as open dialogue, not a checklist, connecting social and emotional learning to culture and society. Angela Stockman invites participants to explore how pedagogical documentation can serve as an act of stewardship, honoring, preserving, nurturing rich narratives about learners and learning. And, we'll continue to use our Discord as a hub for camaraderie, community, and to keep the conversation going beyond the live events. Our Virtual Conference to Restore Humanity twenty twenty five runs July 21 through the twenty third. To make this year as accessible and sustainable as ever, we've cut the ticket price to just $50. You can learn more about Conference to Restore Humanity and register on our website at humanrestorationproject.org/conference. Thank you so much for joining us on our quest for connection as we continue the journey to restore humanity to education together. Hello and welcome to episode 168 of the Human Restoration Project podcast. My name is Nick Covington. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Dan Carney, Kevin Gannon, and Julia Valenti. Thank you all so much for your ongoing support. I'm joined today by doctor Chloe Keegan. Chloe Keegan is a lecturer of early childhood education in the I did not think to look up any of the pronunciation of these words. Fro bell?

Speaker 3 Fro bell. So close. So close. It's okay. That that's gonna be a barrier to my Irish visa, isn't it? The Not even. It's not even Irish. It's some people say Frauble, so it's German. Yeah. Okay. Would have said So don't worry. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's okay. Department of Primary and Early Education in, and I would have said Maynooth, but Maynooth? Yeah. Oh, Maynooth. Okay. I gotcha. University of Ireland. This is why this is rerecorded. I'm sweating. This is so busy. Doctor Geek is the early childhood expert with over a decade of experience as an educator, researcher, and policy advocate. Her work focuses on children's rights and power, play and participation, and influencing practice and policy in early education. She completed her doctoral thesis at Maynooth University, developing an innovative method using GoPro cameras that we'll talk about to involve children as co researchers in studying power dynamics. Her research also explores the impact of play bans on children's well-being, moral development, the influence of stereotypical media on children's use of sex, gender, and race, and participatory art based methods in children's research and video based reflective practices.

Speaker 3 Whoo. Thank you so much, doctor Keegan, for joining me today. No problem. Very happy to be here. Great intro. You really dug deep.

Speaker 2 Oh, I I was digging. Alright. Yeah. Let's

Speaker 3 let's dig. So Yeah. I mean, first of all, just congrats on completing your thesis. Was that just in February that you got that all finished up? It was submitted in February. The vival was in July. Graduation was last Wednesday. It's a very long, drawn out process, but, yeah, we got there. We got there. We got to wear the floppy hat. Oh, that's great. Well, congrats.

Speaker 2 And the thesis has a striking title. It's called it's like a baby jail, the impact of Regimented Daily Routines on Children's Participation in Early Childhood Education, and that was the motivation that brought us together for today's conversation. And this was obviously the culmination of years of experience and work that began for you when you were yourself an early childhood educator. Can you speak to your background and how that laid the foundation for the work that followed and led you to baby jail?

Speaker 3 Yeah. So, like, I would have started back in, like, 2014. So we're talking over ten years now. I'm aging as I go. But what initially started, which I didn't realize at the time was when I was working in practice, there were some practices that I was complying to, and I was doing it automatically. And I wasn't questioning it because that's what you do when you're starting off in education. But one scenario was my manager was asking me to get rid of all the superhero play figures and take them out of the classroom because they were the children were fighting or children were arguing, and she was stressed by it. The children weren't stressed. The children were loving it. So I complied, and now I definitely wouldn't have. But in in then, in retrospect, I I did. But what struck me was the next day. So I went in knowing that all these superhero figurines had been taken or put away and hidden from the children. The adults knew where they were, but the children didn't. And the children spent, I'm gonna say, the next two to three days just in question, like hunting. Like, some children couldn't focus on some activities because they were like, but I left him right here. Where could he have gone? And, you know, it's very heartbreaking to watch that, like, again, in hindsight, because I was part of that problem. I was part of that adult decision to go, we're gonna do this to make the adult world easier or the adult world more comfortable to the detriments of the children who were just playing. So the superhero team fell in then into my degree and my master's where I was looking at, okay, there's play bans on superheroes. I know there's a lot of research I refer to that happened in The US. And there was a lot of play bans going on just internationally, including Ireland. And I was just so interested in going, why? Is it we're uncomfortable with, like, gunplay, you know, fighting, all this kind of stuff. And that laid the foundation into my PhD. But overall, like the common theme is always what I've been working towards is just recognizing what are children actually saying? What do they want to do? And finding out that adults are really just over inserting themselves unnecessarily in play. So, you know, with power and things, that was the biggest thing that came out of the PhD was recognizing and putting a a space for seeing, look, guys, we as adults, we don't want to be doing this. We don't want to be hindering children. We don't want to be silencing them. But we're doing it every day, and we're doing it really subtly, and it's really bad.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I think it's just such an area that we just take for granted. Right? Like Yeah. Maybe preschool is preschool, early years are early years, and, you know, it's just not even given a second thought as to those structures and routines and, you know, the the habits and attitudes and the actions of adults in those contexts, you know. I have to know because it's the title of your thesis. And I think listeners wanna know too where that wonderful phrase, it's almost humorous if it weren't so depressing too, it's like a baby jail because it doesn't show up until way late in the thesis, which I thought was really interesting too, the context. Where does that come from? And of course, I have to know then, when you heard it, did you go, This is the one. Right? This this helps frame the whole thing, or did that moment not come until later?

Speaker 3 Yeah. So it's it comes later on in the thesis and in the work because that's how it happened in the process. So this happened very late in the fieldwork aspect, but it came from three year old Byron. And three year old Byron was talking about his experience in a focus group. And this was part of the design, which was really helpful was there was not only opportunity for children to record their daily experience using GoPros, but they also reviewed some video clips and then gave extra context to their view on it, having looked at it again because you're not gonna remember your whole day and all the detail. So Byron said to me in the focus group, I had asked the question, so what do you think about preschool? Very open ended, just general. Some children are talking about art. Some children are talking about their friends. Byron was the type, and he's it's Ben, I suppose, we'll talk about in the thesis because we want to just rejig our names and stuff. But Ben in the thesis was talking about how he felt like he was in a baby jail because his persona and his behavior in the in the preschool was very much based around he wants to go outside. He wants to go outside gates. He wants to be in the hallway. He doesn't wanna put on a coat. But, you know, nothing too, you know, radical in his request. But because it was constantly being told no when he needed or wanted to do things, That was his impression of, look, I feel like I'm in a baby jail. Now, of course, hearing a three year old say, baby jail, like, that is a term I wouldn't have thought of. I haven't read it in all the reading of ten years. So the fact that I was deliver facilitating that focus group and their educators were in the focus group too, the educators scoffed and laughed and said, Ben, what what do you mean it's a baby jail? Of course. The manager slash owner was mortified because she was thinking, well, what does this mean for the research? What does what does this mean about children's experiences? And I said, look, we go with it. Because there was no incentive to kind of go, okay, children think they're prisoners. That was never a lens. It was essentially looking at, well, what are children's experience of power? It was funny because this research was done in a service with degree led staff. You know, they're very high quality. I had previously worked in them years before and actually got all my training from them. So there wasn't an, you know, an assumption that there was gonna be malpractice or anything like that. And there wasn't, you know, but it was interesting that it was the stuff that they were compliant in or the things that the children felt oppressed by, you know, like the regimented daily routine. So yeah. So Ben brought together that statement of it's like a baby jail, and that very much came later on to cost everything. And I think that's how I always deliver my research. It's always driven by the voice of the children. So even in previous research I've done, it always seems to just mold it into where it's supposed to go. But that's why I love doing research with children because you don't know where it's gonna go.

Speaker 2 And that just shows from a three year old just a level of sophistication, not only showing an understanding of, like, that concept of jail and what happens to prisoners in a jail, but then to transfer that and make the analogy to their own childcare context is, like, that should have been an moment for everyone too. Like, the the kid is learning something from the context in which, right, he's, he's engaging in these activities. It might not be what we're teaching him, but by analogy, he's learning that, oh, I'm like a prisoner in this baby jail. Absolutely fascinating. Coming around to that issue of power, because it seems like, you know, your background in early child, education came from the practical experience in working with kids and that interest. And, I mean, maybe I have the timeline wrong, but the the situation within the lens of power perhaps comes a little bit later, and you have this fascinating exploration of those ideas, which I think in the context of early childhood education are not very often explored and and applied. So I found that fascinating. I'm so curious when you first began to dig into that literature, what interesting or surprising connections to early childhood education did you find that solidified it for you as an interesting or important area of study that hadn't been done before?

Speaker 3 That's a great question because you're exactly right. So my timeline started off with being an educator and just doing what I'm told. I'm studying at the same time. So I'm studying part time. So I I like, just finishing my PhD officially with graduation last week marks ten years of study done and constant in constant study part time and working full time. So we're happy with that. But I think that's what helped me merge the theory with the practice so strongly because not only are you seeing things happen every day, but you're connected to the theory that you're exposed to. Now, I'll be honest, in my degree, there was very little, if if any, you know, connection to power or in this direct sense of, you know, power dynamics with children and adults. And now being a lecturer, I intertwined that into my degrees students under their teaching because it's it's horrible to say that I've only actually got into the power theory in my PhD. And, like, that's really limiting to educators or students in general, you know, that don't go to that level. And, you know, it's quite an expensive level to be on. It's a big life sacrifice, you know, it can be quite intimidating. And I just feel like this knowledge needs to be more widely known. Like, it shouldn't take you even aside of that, shouldn't take you doing a degree to know this knowledge, you know, to understand, well, how my interactions are potentially silencing another person or another being. So it was very much a progress from my PhD, and I was doing deliberate modules on power and participation that opened it up. And literature wise, now Foucault was a prominent figure, never heard of Foucault. I mean, Foucault was not in my life five years ago. Who is Foucault? What what does he talk about? But Foucault was introduced to me in a in a structured module. And then through my supervisor who was very passionate about power and very knowledgeable, Carol Landers, I'll give him a shout out. He's a wonderful supervisor. He he would have been very knowledgeable about Foucault, but not necessarily about early childhood. So together, we blended that very nicely, which was great. But it's it's always something that I sit back on. I'm like, I wish I knew this ten years ago, because that could have changed my practice completely. Or the other side of it is, to be honest, Nick, I also wonder, would ignorance be bliss? As in, if I did know about this, would I be more frustrated with the sector early on? So it's kind of a a career

Speaker 2 pushing question. It's hard to know. You've just expressed what so many educators the process that so many educators go through. Right? Initial experiences, just kind of understanding how you fit into educational context, and you could go, you know, the whole length of your career without ever examining power as, a salient force that's operating in any of these kinds of spaces. To exactly your point, I think I had a very similar journey, right, in saying, oh, this helps explain and describe and helps me be responsive to additional needs and responsive to the flow of power in the room and perhaps shape it differently, while at the same time, there are other groups of educators who don't ever put that lens on and in and instead, I think, get frustrated or burned out or spend their careers trying to fix kids, in a system that, you know, is meant to engender resistance and, hostility and things between figures of authority and actual literal children in the these power struggles. Right? It's in that name. Was there something again, like, if Foucault was a revelation, and I didn't encounter his work in college either, what was there like an idea that, was like a I I don't know, an epiphany for you that says, oh, this has so much explanatory power. It doesn't have to come from Foucault, but anywhere in that power literature.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So I I always choose to read the original text because, like, reading through another lens, would find, well, they're gonna put in their own bias or their own opinion. So I wanted to make sure, okay. If I'm gonna be informed and I wanna make an informed opinion, I need to go on by discipline and punishment, which is the name and of Foucault's work that I followed. But there was one topic that was just so mind blowing to me that I was like, this is what I see. This is what I'm looking at. So it was about how Foucault talks about the idea of the soul. So initially, he explains that power first was corporal punishment. So punishment was always about punishing the physical body. And then think of it in terms of children, you're talking about children being, you know, physically punished for, you know, not getting the right answer or just in general, especially in a historical lens, and how that shift in childhood changed to now, as he talks about, it's soul punishment. So it's the idea that you're not actually punishing the physical body anymore, which we don't, you know, corporal punishment, any form of physical abuse of any child is now regulated, thankfully. But what he is saying is the all these structures and all these frameworks, if you look at them more objectively, you look at how well, what are they actually enforcing? And they're enforcing compliance, which essentially is targeting the soul, targeting that inner world of children that you don't see. So if you're looking in a classroom, and they're all sitting down, you know, doing their work, and they're all being quiet, and there's no noise, but you're like, these are all two year olds, why is there no noise? That's essentially what Foucault would have talked about in terms of like that restriction of the soul and the idea that we have moved away from corporal physical punishment, but now we've turned it in a way that we're now punishing the soul and punishing the inner world of these beings. So that was a moment where I went, that's what I'm seeing, you know, and that's this was before fieldwork. So I had this knowledge in my own practice. Recognizing that you're doing things like documenting children, making them make art when they don't want to, forcing them inside or outside, forcing them what to wear, forcing them when they can eat, when they can't eat, all these basic things that I was like, if I was experiencing this as an employee, as an adult, there would be massive repercussions. So why are we normalizing it for our youngest? That's what was alarming to me. So Foucault really opened that world to be able to give me the language and to be able to highlight that breakdown of, well, how do you go from punishing the physical body to then punishing and making mass groups and mass crowds compliant. And it's through that conditioning of the soul.

Speaker 2 So that they will eventually not need to be policed in a sense, but that they will just police themselves, basically, and act in ways, that the authorities in the room or in the state or where wherever the target context is won't need to intervene because you've intervened in yourself. Right? And maybe you've even I'm getting a little bit ahead of things, but you you described too how some students will even intervene on behalf of the authorities to help them out too. But that's so fascinating. I will probably cut this next question only because I I just had it as you were talking about professors, and I recalled sharing this with the other HRP folks. But when the reason that I knew that this was gonna click you and I on this issue is in your acknowledgments, you thank professor Hurt Bista who I adore. I his work is so influential on me. And I just have to know, again, while I have you on here, like, what was it about his work that, that really resonated or connected with you, Chloe?

Speaker 3 Even with his work, it was just having him. He was a lecturer on my PhD. So he That's so crazy. Is he at your university? Yep. So he would right. He is. He is. And he would be he would have great networks with my supervisor, Callander. So it's kind of like him, his wife, Sharon Todd, and then Gurt Bista would be like this little tree way in Minute University, and they were just a force to be reckoned with with the amount of knowledge they give. So Gert Bista was a lecturer on my first year of modules. And I thanked him because, like, it he him, Carol Anders, and Sharon Todd were the people that really formed my thinking before I even knew what this was. I mean, my thesis started off about superhero play. I thought it was just gonna be an extension of my master's or my degree. No. They came in, and they really just opened my eyes to this idea of just power. Elevated. Elevated public education and what is education. And I know recently well, not too recently, but I had seen Gert, published an article about art, and, you know, about that schoolification of art. So, you know, I kind of knew that we were touching on similar basis in a in a indirect way. But, I mean, the underlying passion and value is always about that, well, public education and what's it for, why are we doing it. And then I apply it to early childhood. So that's where we that's where we get to hear.

Speaker 2 You know, now that now that you mentioned it, yeah, like, that is the university context that I see on his papers. Right? I just had never in different contexts, it didn't even click with me. God, I'm I'm so jealous. That's that gives me another reason. We're just this podcast is just reasons Nick needs to move to Ireland to pursue education, but that's so that's so amazing. In the context of Ireland too, and I promise we'll get to to the study in more depth here, it's it's kind of remarkable how in the beginning after situating things in power, you really go to great lengths to describe how those values are also embedded into these policy documents, that were fascinating, as a you know, someone who doesn't live in Ireland or understand the context, but sees the impact of the language of markets and, you know, perhaps what some people call neoliberalism written into documents not related to college and career readiness for high schoolers or vocational ed or STEM or anything else as would be my experience as, like, an upper grades teacher, but actually targeted towards early childhood education, the language of investments and returns on yields and all these other things. Just for listeners, could you just explain that that context and how you connected that to the expressions and the experience that kids have and that you were seeing in schools?

Speaker 3 Yeah. So it actually started with I felt it was really important to analyze our national early childhood framework, Aster, because that underpins play, it underpins interactions. It's a big influence on how people interact and how children, you know, in terms of activities that they do on their daily on their daily basis. And to be honest, Nick, I just thought I was doing an overview. But it wasn't till I started to look into it. I looked at the history of Ashter because Ashter was blueprinted on Te Warki in New Zealand. And so I thought, right, well, I can't stop there. I have to figure out, well, where did the New Zealand Teowariki come from? And I was so, like, dumbfounded to know the discussions that were had around doing the first ever early childhood curriculum framework. It was for marketization. It was to spotlight New Zealand as the front runner. It was for competitiveness. It wasn't for children's rights. It wasn't for, you know, early childhood. The purpose was around money. So I explained that in my thesis, and it's something I want to draw on a little bit more, like, in future work because I think it's really important for people to figure out where are these frameworks coming from. And this is one of my issues. I find like the likes of, say, now has gone through review, and I haven't done an analysis of it yet. It just recently went, in a review. It's now been republished for 2024 and has taken on an awful lot of change. So just for context, the, I was analyzing roles from 2009. To be fair, a lot has changed between 2009 and when I was doing the analysis in 2021. But even still, to look at that history and kind of connect that, that blueprint was based on a marketization capitalizing on childhood, not for a child's rights, not based on play, and not based on the meaning of early childhood. It was used in terms of competing, in terms of let's be the first country to do this, but not for the children. It was for money. And, I mean, looking at Ashter, again, I thought I was gonna do when I get to Ashter, Ashter has this narrative of it's so child centered. And I thought, again, buying into this, which I honestly don't know, and we'll do a second analysis on the new one to see where we're at. But in the 2009 version of Astra, I was so taken aback by the language. You've said, it was very restrictive. It was very much relying on the adult. Children had to learn to depend on the adult to navigate their learning. And children had to abide by these aims and learning goals. And to me, that's very much like a schoolification. You know, you're making early childhood academic. And then the fact that that's trickling down to babies, toddlers, and young children. Now to be fair, in Aster's credit from what I have seen now in the in the update is they've taken out the aims and they've taken out the goals. So they're more kind of like ideas for practice, which is more supportive of that flexibility. But I can't say anything more on that because I haven't got informed on the new Astra. But what I am aware of is like you've said, departmental, you know, statements on these updates or initiatives. When I tailored them back, I didn't expect to find what I found, which was a lot of them are linked to, you know, infrastructure or investing in the future economy. It was all language to do with children are being marketed so that they can be used as a commodity for improving economy. And I was just, this is this is mind blowing. So that's where I fall between the view of in the thesis where are we valuing children as beings, which is, you know, as they are now respecting childhood as it is now, Or are we looking at childhood as becoming as in we're looking at, well, how can they benefit us later on in life when they grow up? I mean, it's so devaluing of childhood. So it was alarming to look at all of these political frameworks, the discussions being had, and all backed up by evidence. So, you know, it's it's hard to argue, and it's something that I I was very, very surprised at because I didn't think that's where I was gonna end up, and I did.

Speaker 2 I could not believe the connection. The New Zealand, Ireland, you know, hundreds of thousands of miles apart or whatever, just literally half a world away, and here they are borrowing. Again, not concepts about, I don't know, like indigenous education or ways of knowing and, you know, play and trust and, you know, all these things, but borrowing those commodification ideas. Not even letting these kids get their foot in the door. Right? I get maybe in as kids start to transition in earlier grade levels, hey. Gotta start thinking about the rest of your life out of school. Let's see how we can you know, how how do you fit into a a global economy or an Irish economy or an American economy. Economy. Right? And how can we start to, you know, tailor more of the experience to the things that you're interested in and the what what you see yourself doing for the rest of your life? But this is literally like after, you know, maternity leave ends and you drop kids off, and it's like, alright. We let's start commodifying. We gotta build that human capital for to improve our return on investment. It's just it's striking. And I think even with those changes, you think about the generations of kids who grew up under one context, who maybe now are teachers. Right? One thing we know about teachers is they teach in ways that align with their experience as students. And so it almost is insidious in the sense that, you know, raising a generation of learners also kind of unintentionally or or intentionally, I don't know, means you're training up another generation of teachers to teach in a similar way to uphold that same set of values even if the values change later on.

Speaker 3 And that's where the neoliberalism came in. I'll be honest. Neoliberalism, not on my tongue before the PhD. I mean, if you came at me even anything to do with politics, I'd like, no. I'm opting out on that. I don't have no. No. But with the neoliberalism, like, also with Foucault, like, me talks about governmentality and that idea of, like, how you're conditioning mass crowds and how you do it in ways that's quite silent or quite invisible so that you're getting people to comply at a mass level. So that neoliberalism aspect was really interesting for me to come in, but quite uncomfortable because, I mean, my conditioning as a as an educator was always like, this is the best sector to ever be in, and I still stand by that. But what I worry about is we are now marketing early childhood, and we're focusing so much on money. We're focusing so much on now while I will say in Ireland, we're looking for more funding for the sector. And I mean, how much more you need so much more funding, especially to invest in your youngest. I mean, that's so important. But what I'm always seeing is we're losing that value of early childhood. We're missing out on that. Well, what makes us special? What makes us different to primary school or secondary school? It's the fact that we value play so heavily in everything that we do, but we're losing sight of play. And we're looking more now at at early years sector. And I just see it as a business. And I don't see how and even with my research, I don't see how you could not see it that way anymore. And it's it's quite disheartening because the at the end of the day, the consumer is the parent, the business is the service, the child's the product. The child is the thing that needs to produce something for these adult groups. And again, this didn't come to me in any way, shape or form until I actually explored the research with the children. Now, obviously, they're not having words like neoliberalism, but what they are showing is I don't want to do art, but they're being conditioned to do art. Why? To give home, to show the parents you've done art. Why are you taking my picture to show mommy and daddy what you do in school? It was always about documenting or proving to parents, well, what are you getting for your money? And it was just a moment of, yes, I can understand the educator side. We are in a space where we need to advocate so much for our value, but we need to stop academic making our our sector. We need to stop schoolification of our sector to kind of prove we're professionals. We're professionals of play. You know? Yes, we don't do tests. We shouldn't do tests like primary school or secondary school. Children that need to focus on socializing, you know, communication, regulation, things that aren't going to be very clearly tested in such a standardized way. You know, it's very individual. And that's what we're losing. I think it's just that commodity approach of, well, the country needs to invest in children so that when they grow up, they can make us money, and it's an investment and a return. And it's just, what? Really? That's that's where the value is now? It's no longer about play and, you know, having, you know, emotionally regulated people and people who are interested in climate action or values that are important or people who can voice themselves in a meaningful way. It's now focused on do what you're told, comply, listen to what authority says, and then continue that when you're an adult. I it's just I'm lost for words nearly. Well, where do we end up with that? And the notion that we need to explicitly,

Speaker 2 you know, build skills and start tracking, assessing, evaluating, documenting those from the earliest ages when it might not even make sense to start teaching some of those things because, you know, kids in some early childhood context don't have a child development they're not of the right age where that makes sense. And here they are just pushing that stuff into lower and lower grades. I'm burning to ask a follow-up about this because it it comes up at the end, and I was I was so interested in reading it. How much of what you're talking about there also has to do with what you describe as the let's see here. Docile bodies of administration and the role of female educators. How much of what you're talking about here has something to do with early childhood education in particular being a a female dominated sector of of education compared to administration or government jobs and things being largely male dominated? What what did you find, or how did you parse out that part of the analysis? You know? Yes. So that was a big key in understanding

Speaker 3 the data because you have to put into context, it's a female dominated sector. So not only was I tracing back, you know, where the the the practice and the play and the policies come from, but I also had to track back, well, why is it a female dominated sector? So initially, in Ireland, it's the best I can speak to is in Ireland, you're looking at essentially, you know, childhood care took took place in the home. So it was very much based on within the family, you know, the the the typical role of the the man is out for work and the mother stays at home. And that was very much the trend to, like, the the mid nineteen eighties. So it is very prominent still in that culture of, you know, you're you're a woman, you you stay at home, you mind the kids. And it's it's not so prominent in society, which is great to say, but it's very prominent in early childhood, that idea that, well, you need to stay and mind the babies or mind the children and that idea that, you know, you just mind them, you don't there's no educating them, you know, the idea of, how do they learn? Do they learn anything at all? It's very devalued in, you know, what's actually going on in early childhood. So in terms of the female dominated sector part, I was most interested in the fact that, okay, well, the female dominated workforce for the early childhood sector came about because it was the idea of, well, if you're going to do a job like mind children or care for children at the home, Let's take it out of the home, and let's monetize it. That's you know? Now to be fair, you can also say it it was a great move because not only is it monetizing, but it's putting in regulation. You know, you're making sure that the children are getting quality care. You're You're gonna make sure that they're getting quality standards, which you can't, you know, regulate in the home environment without any, you know, visibility. So I was interested in the fact that, yes, it was an improvement for the quality of care and quality of education, but that the fundamental aspect was again around the idea of bringing women back to the workforce. So if that is an as is the case, you're then looking at women now being in a position as educators and still being devalued as women that just babysit or they just mind younger children. And while it doesn't come out very strongly in the thesis to a certain extent, it's looking at how women in professional roles are still being devalued. And women, no matter what level of education they have, are still not looked at as having that knowledge and not recognized as understanding, you know, the value in the role. So I found that very frustrating. And I also found that, okay, we're looking at a big system thing here. I'm not just looking at adults telling children what to do. I'm looking at professionals in a professionalized sector, being told what to do and being penalized if they don't produce the production that, you know, government levels expect. And I think that was the most worrying thing was the idea that you'll have children and women now. So kind of looking at the earlier sectors like a marginalized sector, which is so beyond how I would have seen it before. But when you're looking at actually the the research and you're looking at particularly the research that the children collected, it's hard to argue again because I understand the educators. I understand their stress. They want to do a good job. They are constantly feeling guilty if they don't produce what is expected of them. They're in this rush of feeling like they have to document everything they do for proving to who? To prove to another group of adults above them that, yeah, I'm doing my job properly. So it's constantly trickling down this administration. You know? Well, we want to make sure that children know their numbers. Okay. Me as the adult, I'll make sure children know their numbers. Okay. Now me as the inspector, I need to make sure the educator is teaching the numbers in a supportive or, you know, child child's right space. But, like, at the end of the day, if you're going to have a system that's rooted in outcomes or rooted in standardizing learning, which is where we're going towards with early childhood, you're gonna have that trickling down of admin. And the issue is you're losing not only the child, but you're losing that professionalized woman. Because in Ireland, there's a great push for professionalizing educators to degree level. And me as a lecturer in that those degree programs, it's so inspiring because those people that come every day to study and work, they've so much insight, and they've so much experience. But what is very disheartening, and I can't fault them is they leave after they get the degree. Because like I said to you earlier, Nick, is getting more knowledge on this actually a hindrance because then you realize what you're in. And then you're thinking, why am I putting up with this stuff? I need to leave and I need to do something else. So there's a massive high staff turnover. And I really think it's directly linked to the fact that there's no value in a female dominated workforce. They're not funding it in the way that it should be funded. There's no recognition for the people that are putting in the work to get qualified. And it's just an absolute mess. I can't describe it in any way, shape, or form. And I would argue, if this was a male dominated sector, would it be treated this way? I don't know. Now I can't say would or wouldn't it, but what I can say is we have a female dominated sector that's getting completely devalued. And it's just what do we do from there?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Inspinsert answer here. We'll we'll come up with that. I'll edit I'll edit in the answer in post is what we'll do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, at the end of the day, the female educators are kind of sandwiched in this in the trickle down system of administration. As you had said, it's like standards and procedures and protocols and policies up here trickle down to, you know, some site administrators, probably men, down to a largely female staff, then ultimately, like, pile onto kids too in an attempt to try to hit a fast forward button on these three year olds to make them, you know, acquire skills faster, which which is impossible. So in a lot of ways, it seems like, again, these qualified, trained educators are, like, set up for success in a system that's not designed either for them or for the kids that they're trying to serve. You know? So kids are frustrated. The the adults are frustrated.

Speaker 3 What a mess. It's important that you've highlighted on gender as well that I did highlight the gender divide even with the children. So being in a female dominated sector, there was such a difference in how the male children versus the female children were treated. So for example, you know, children that were female, if they ran around the classroom, you know, they were told more gently, no, no, you know, we don't run. You know, the expectation was, well, you understand. You know what we do. Whereas when the the boys ran, it escalated quite quickly from shouting to stopping them physically, maybe grabbing an arm or getting in front of them and stopping them. Or what I found as well was the punishment punishment for running around was always to do with the boys, which was to make them sit at a table and do a jigsaw or do pegs or do something that was very much a controlled activity, and then made sit do that until they were told by the adults, okay, you can go now. So I didn't see in any of my research now, to be fair, it's been done over the course of four weeks, so not a lot. But a lot of the the routine is, you know, it's repetitious. So what you're seeing at the start, you very much still see at the very end. And at no point in my field work did I see a a girl, a female child be forced to sit in a sedentary position to do an activity told by the adult. It was always boys. So I think more research and more looking into that, I mean, I think it's I think it's a detrimental space to be in as a little boy in a female dominated sector being told what to do by an adult woman in school, potentially going home, being told by an adult woman at the home what to do. And I'm very interested in male rights and also the view of, well, how can you be a man in this society if you're being treated very early on to almost be sedentary, you know, and to not work with your your feeling of I need more physical exercise or I need to more physical outlet to compare to maybe female girls who maybe get more of a satisfaction through art or satisfaction through, you know, being in the kitchen or baking or whatever it is. Now it's not to say that, you know, male or female children can't swap and, you know, they have different needs and different interests. But in my study, it was very clearly evident. You know, it was very clearly evident that the female children were more coaxed into the stereotypical female roles of sit, play, you know, draw, be in the kitchen. And they were more like you're a good girl being praised for being quite, compliant, quiet. But the boys were more likely to be shouted at or penalized, punished for, as I would have seen, just needing that more physical release to run or to be more active in their physical body. It was it was kind of hard to watch as well, Nick, because there was a scene where a boy was told stop running, but you could see in his physical body, he needed more of that physical energy to be expressed. So his it's like his body was cut in half. So he was standing, and his bottom half was not moving, but his upper half was just in constant motion, constant motion because that wasn't being told, okay. You can't do that. You can't move your arms or you can't be swinging your arms. So it was almost like those little boys were being divided physically. Okay. To follow the rule of no running, you're doing that, you're complying, but to the detriment of themselves that they were like, I need to run. I need more physical activity, and I'm very much confined in this indoor environment that's not meeting my needs. So essentially, I found even through that in the female dominated sector, the the male children were more penalized than the females.

Speaker 2 Yeah. That's it's remarkable. And so frustrating, I think, too, those gendered expectations because whether it's just kind of implicit or or explicit, they end up harming children of different genders who then express non gender conforming behaviors too. Because then if you have girls who wanna, you know, go play rough with the boys, you might have teachers intervene and say, like, no. You can't do that or whatever. Or likewise, boys who want to engage actively, right, not necessarily passively or being forced to, as like a coercive behavior, but, right, actively with traditionally girl play, you know, with dolls or other kinds of things, they might be pushed in the other direction too. So it is. Yeah. It's just it's just so interesting how those expressions of gender really, like, are throughout at every level. Let's talk because I teased it at the at the top in the in the introduction about the methods that you use to investigate these children, which I thought were really interesting and and maybe even pioneering in the sense that you have this huge section about your pilot and the trials and tribulations of trying to get these kids to wear GoPros to document their day. Did you have any basis to go off for this, or were you just flying, you know, by the seat of your pants like, hey. I wanna engage in this methodology, but there's nothing really to pull from. Let's let's try and make this work?

Speaker 3 This it it took a whole notebook, Nick, to get to the GoPro idea because I knew what I was looking to research. I knew I wanted to understand what are the daily power interactions between adults and children. I I looked at, you know, drawing interviews, focus groups, all these different types of methodologies that I had experience in, but I was like, I don't think this is gonna capture the children's voice. Because what I was worried was if children said did a drawing of, okay, I feel like I'm in a baby jail, say, for example, you could have an educator easily come over and reinterpret it differently. No, no, no. They don't mean that. They mean this, you know, so I didn't want the findings to be questioned, because I wanted to be able to say, well, this is what the child said, and here is the evidence to back it up. It's recorded. It's a visual. You know? So but this was also really important because I knew that it was gonna be a kind of research where there was potential, even though I didn't expect to, but where there was potential where children would argue or question the authority of educators. So in those situations where I would be platforming it as children are not having their needs or wants met here, I was then also through the fieldwork being able to sit down with educators and say, look, This clip has come up. And I just want to show it to you. There was one scenario where there was an educator who kept, to be honest, berating a child to say sorry, and he just didn't want to say sorry. The context was he took a ball, and he wanted to use the ball. Very straightforward situation in a preschool. But this one educator very much pestered him and kept following him and was very in his face. And you could see on the video, it was very intimidating to the point that the child just said it just to be done with it and then walked away, and it very much was it was hard to watch. But this was, again, a clip that I could show the educator and the manager owner in during the field work just to be aware of, look. This is what's being captured. Now the great thing about them is being such a high quality service. They were able to recognize the reflective aspect of it and go, okay. You know, we need to remind staff, especially staff that may be at a lower education level that, you know, you don't need to force children to say sorry. They need to understand their actions, and they need to understand empathy. You know? Not making them say a piece a a word just to prove a point. You know? So the that's the the angle that I was going with. I was aware that there may be practices that might be in conflict with either the educators view over themselves, you know, what the children were saying, and I didn't want it to dismantle, you know, the high quality that this service was promoting. I was very much looking to go, I know this is a systematic issue, and I need to be able to look at the system overall. How am I gonna do that? So I looked at I looked at, is there a way of having, CCTV? And straight away, that was a no. Like, a CCTV because yeah. Because now there's no CCTV in the service, but it was I was trying to think of, well, what different ways can I record or capture the day to day field without being in it? Because if I go in it, I am going to be influencing those power dynamics. I need to be out of it, but I needed to see it. And I can't very much stand outside the window peering through. So you know? And that's why the likes of, like, thinking of CCTV or maybe a a camera on a tripod, but then how is that gonna work if they go inside to outside? So all of these conversations being had All the transitions. Everything. All the transitions and the fact that I wanted it to come from the children. I also had Foucault in my ear going surveillance. You know, he talks an awful lot about, well, if you're surveilling behavior, you're gonna make it change the way you want it to change. So I was very much thinking, how am I gonna do research that involves a surveillance method that actually refutes surveillance?

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 3 So so I just it was just me just thinking of different ways in terms of video because I knew video was gonna help me and help the children validate their voices without it being questioned. And if it was, I could go back and say, look. This is actually what did happen. I came across then GoPros just through researching and googling, and I thought, why not? The great thing was, though, then I was able to go down a rabbit hole of research. And there is a few select studies that have done GoPro cameras in terms of capturing, you know, daily experiences, not in the way that I've done it, which is, you know, great to be able to say. But I was able to utilize that research and apply it to childhood and say, look, yes, the benefits of GoPro is it's more mobile. If you get an extra fitting, you can have very enhanced microphone sound. You know, it's very versatile in rain, which is also what I was conscious of. You know, what happens if it gets wet? You know, things that you'll have to think of, it's not just gonna be indoors. You also have to think of, well, children are gonna be running, and they run fast. I mean, I don't know. Working in preschools, they have speed on those runners. They're going. You'll get you'll get knocked out through that. So the GoPro camera came through all of those considerations. A lot of consideration went into it. So it wasn't my first point of protocol. And to be honest, I had no experience. I had no experience in video methods. So I had to make sure that when I was, you know, testing out that I was designing a pilot to kind of go, right. Me and the children are just gonna figure this out.

Speaker 2 That's what I I just found it so interesting because not only there's, like, this conversation about power and early childhood education, all of this, and it's like, oh, by the way, there's a whole discourse here about video methodologies and how I did it and how it worked in early childhood education that is like a contribution in its own right to the to to the field of qualitative research. So you're you're you're hitting a lot of, hitting a lot of points in there too. I just I love that. Gosh. I feel like I could talk with you for the next three hours. So if the three year old in the study described it as baby jail, I wonder what did you find or what do you think? What aspects of the daily routine do you believe contribute the most significantly to that perception, and what radical rethinking of those routines do you think might be necessary to create better environments to honor agency and well-being for kids?

Speaker 3 So I've talked about this before, and I think it's really important whether you're an educator or a parent or just an adult in general with children in your lives is you're always gonna have to balance what's excessive and what's necessary. So in terms of a daily routine, it's really important in early childhood to know your your regulations, to know your guidance, to know your best practice, and what does it say. Now in Ireland, there's no specific, you know, outline or way to do a routine, but it is the idea that there's activities that children can engage in. So some preschools may not have a structured at nine, we do circle time. At half nine, we go outside. Other people might take a bit more of a free flow approach. So it's very flexible. Other services may take a more direct approach for planning, potentially for the needs of children who need to know about future activities to know, settle and emotionally regulate. But what I find is regardless of your purpose of setting up a daily routine, say in a more structured manner, say from nine to ten, maybe you have to do with, like, sharing spaces with other classrooms, whatever your reason, I always say you need to look at what is excessive. And what I found in my research, what was excessive was those daily interactions of if you're forcing children to put on a coat, is that battle necessary? I would say no. Bring all your coats outside. If the child wants to run around in the rain, that's fine. Because my worry is, especially I was previously an outdoor nature specialist, my worry is from this research, we're encouraging children to depend on adults when they're regulating their body. So me and you, Nick, right, we sit in a room, we know we're getting sweaty, or we're getting too warm, or I'm freezing cold. Right. I can change it. I can affect my environment. If children at a young age are waiting for an adult to tell them, no. No. Keep your coat on and they're pink from running around. They are clearly overheating, but they're being told no. Keep that on. Well, physically, they're completely disconnecting from their body, their internal processes, and they're not gonna be in tune with their body as a being. So it's it's to look at those very small battles and recognize they have massive implications for children ability to actually regulate and make sense of their day. So stop telling children to wear a coat. But the other part of the routine that was really, really spotlight an awful lot was art. So this idea that early childhood is based on as it should, you know, using a lot of art and children use art to express themselves and engage and make sense of their world. But if you have a daily routine where art is done at 10:00, and we do the family tree, and that's it. As I show here, there's children that don't want to do it at ten. They don't want to do a family tree. And from an objective lens, I'm sure a lot of people would agree. Well, that's fine. But the issue is it's not just that small interaction. I know the fear of the educator is, oh, but, you know, then that child looks like they haven't done anything or I've nothing to give the parents and how does that look? And, you know, I have this checklist that I have to complete. I would just say stop. You know, art to do those structured activities is not part of regulation. There's no legislation to make children do family trees. Yes, they should explore art, but not to the point that they're regimentedly being told paint brown here, put green here. So I would take for any listeners that are educators or just parents, people engaging with art and children, take a step back and go, are you regulating children's art, Or are you encouraging it? So if you're doing little things like, well, why don't you do that there? Make this green. No, no trees aren't purple. I'd say stop. A big influence of me is Sir Ken Robinson. He does great work on, you know, creativity. And I think he would be turning in his grave to be able to see this idea of children being enforced to to make artwork in a space that doesn't need it. So the underlying thing is, to be honest, Nick, with your daily routine is you need to just step back and go what's necessary and what's excessive. What do you have like, even even lunch. Lunch does not have to be at a designated time. What we do see now in Ireland is some people do a rolling lunch. So children can get their snack where they when they want and if they want. Some children, though, the issue is that they forget to eat. But the other side of it is that they're learning. They're learning to become in tune with their internal process of hunger. So again, you the issue is, are you going to have children forced to sit down, make them eat until they finish all their lunch to show mommy and daddy, yes, they ate everything? Or are you gonna have an a conversation with a parent going, they were so invested in their work for the last hour and a half. They forgot to eat, so maybe just give them a banana in the car going home. Just so much more natural, more humanistic, and I'm trying to apply to adult worlds. Like, if my boss told me, Chloe, you have to eat at ten, I'd be like, I'm not even awake. You know, I'm not even there. So why are we doing it till our youngest?

Speaker 2 Yeah. It all all to fit that production metaphor. Right? It's what it sounds like. You have to produce art in a particular way. You have to eat at a certain time, not because the the activity itself is valuable or you need to, but because that's what the clock says you have to do at this certain time and that's what we're gonna do it. I wonder then thinking of, like, those would be sort of site based interventions, you know, something that staff could talk about or sites could talk about, hey. How can we structure things in a more humanistic way? Is there in imagining how some of those changes could potentially put them at odds or intention with bigger state policies, is there any, remedy then at the policy level that you'd like to see since you've analyzed it at both of those, in both contexts? How do we match the site based humanistic

Speaker 3 changes with the policy? Or it's a chicken egg problem, I guess. I don't know where to start with it. Well, see, the great thing is, and I'll I'll have to advocate for our sector, is when I've looked at, say, regulation or inspection criteria, it's so fair. It's so flexible. It's so open. It's not restrictive. What I'm finding is it's the educators that are putting extra admin and work on themselves or potentially their manager or owner who are trying to say this needs to be proven. So, like, in terms of inspection criteria, there's nothing to say that you have to do monthly observations. They say you document children's learning just to show that you're interested seeing where they're going. You know? Maybe that you need to plan for more resources to show and and enhance that interest. But it's not in a restrictive way of you have to do a monthly observation every month. And this is what I'm finding really difficult is there's actually a disconnect on the ground. So the the regulation is quite open, and it's very fair. In terms of ASTER, of course, that was very regimented and very restrict. But, again, that was from 2009, so you would expect it was a very different context. And I'm I'm quite confident, to be honest, in in the new ASHA review, but I'm quite hesitant because I I'm not informed on it at all, so I won't have an opinion on it until I do analyze it more deeply. But from what I've seen in terms of other policy or anything else more recently because also to be aware, Nick, in the last five years, let alone the last ten years, the policy in early childhood Ireland has absolutely boomed. You know, there's lots of discussion about children's rights. There's lots of push for children's participation, and I can't fault all those movements objectively. It's the conversations I'm having on the ground where educators are feeling like, oh, well, I have to do these documents, or I I have to do art every day, or I have to I have to follow the seasons. You know, it's settling in, and I have to do the family tree. And at the end, we have to do graduation. I don't know where that's coming from because I know it's not coming from quality practice, and it's not coming from regulation. So what I'm trying to find follow-up. Yes. Where does that come from? Where does it come from? And Yeah. To be honest, I I think a lot of it is fear. Fear on the educator, fear on the sector to prove that they're professional enough to be valued. I think there's a lot of that stigma around you're still babysitters. Well, why aren't you in primary school? You're not good enough to be in primary school. There's always this kind of competing, you know, narrative that's, you know, primary schools, primary teachers, and people working in primary in Ireland get lots of great pay scales, benefits, annual leave, whereas that's not translated in the earlier sector. So there's not a lot of investment in terms of, like, the quality of employment, which is also affecting the high staff turnover. And I think a lot of the documentation is kind of coming from our own initial conditioning, having gone through primary and secondary. You know? Yes. I can do planning. Yes. I can do documents. I can do checklists. I can prove that these children are gonna do everything here in the next nine months. And I, again, will say it doesn't need to be done. We need to come back to remembering what's great about our sector and it's play, it's socializing, it's interactions, it's being a child in childhood that isn't being schoolified to be this marketed product. You know, we need to come back to, well, what does early childhood mean? And I think we're losing that a little bit.

Speaker 2 And I'll just hit stop on the recording right there because that that last blurb is so perfect. You know, if if only there were an old French guy who could give us a lens to understand how we police ourselves, you know, even though there's not pressure coming from somewhere else. Somebody should get on that. But oh my goodness. This has been such such a joy, such a pleasure, such a privilege to talk with you. Doctor Chloe Keegan, congrats again. Thank you.

Speaker 4 Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player. Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free at our website, humanrestorationproject.org. Thank you.