Not solving problems,managing messes

Abstract

EU 2020, the current strategic framework of the European Union (European Commission, 2010) sets ambitious policy goals based on a rather bleak analysis of a complex crisis scenario the Union finds itself in. A key role is given to early childhood education and care to achieve these goals, and ‘highest benefits’ are predicted for children and society provided that ECEC services are of ‘high quality’ (Council of the European Union, 2010). Recent European and international research emphasizes the importance of systemic, trans-sectoral and trans-disciplinary approaches to developing and improving early childhood experiences for all children, families and communities (Urban et al., 2011a, 2012). Drawing on findings of the study, the article outlines the concept of ‘competent systems’ in early childhood and discusses implications for governance. It questions the persistent use of a ‘language of technology and normalisation’ (Dahlberg et al., 2007) in policy documents and argues for alternatives that recognize and embrace the relational, political and uncertain characteristics of early childhood professional practice.

Keywords

competent systems democratic professionalism early childhood in Europe systemic approaches

Introduction

The fundamental certainty is that I can know. I know that I know. In the same way, I also know that I do not know, which predisposes me to know the following: first, that I can know better what I know; second, that I can know what I do not know yet; third, that I can produce forms of knowledge that do not exist yet. (Freire, 1997: 37)

To the best of my knowledge, Paulo Freire has never explicitly written about early childhood education and care, let alone in the policy context of the European Union. He has, however, inspired practitioners and scholars in many countries beyond his native Brazil to work towards new understandings of the purpose of education – as an emancipatory, transformative interaction between teachers and students, grounded in the concrete experiences of contemporary society, with the aim to transform it. ‘The revelatory, gnosiological practice of education’, he writes, ‘does not itself effect the transformation of the world: but it implies it’ (Freire, 2004: 23; emphasis added). Education implies change, and what that change is for (and for whom, to what end) is, at best, subject to democratic debate about the public good, the bien vivir, and the possible pathways towards social justice, inclusion and equality.

The educational practitioner (Freire uses the generic term ‘teacher’) has a fundamental role in the process of realizing the emancipatory, liberating and transformative potential of education: through her conscious, political decision to take sides with the marginalized (or to maintain the oppressive status quo) and through her professional repositioning as researcher, learner and active participant, with her students, in the process of generating situated knowledge and developing critical consciousness (conscientizaçao).

Why start an article on professional competence in early childhood education and care with a reference to Paulo Freire, social justice and transformative practice? Early childhood – its institutions, practices and practitioners – has received the unprecedented attention of international bodies and organizations in recent years. As I have discussed in more detail elsewhere (Urban, 2012b), society’s engagement with the upbringing and education of, and care for, the youngest children has become a highly political issue, and a range of international organizations have placed early childhood education and care at the centre of their various (often contradictory) policy agendas. They include the World Bank (2003), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, 2001, 2006) and UNICEF (2008), who have all identified early childhood as central to societies’ and countries’ present and future development. The European Union has dealt with young children as objects of transnational policy for more than two decades, since the publication of the Council Recommendations on Childcare (Council of the European Communities, 1992). The Recommendations were addressed at the then 15 member states, in the run-up to the so-called Lisbon Strategy that aimed at turning the EU into ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world’ (European Council, 2000). In order to achieve this goal, the participation of women in the labour market had to be increased significantly – and this is where childcare provision enters the policy arena. The EU has kept early childhood high on its agenda since, leading to the publication of Early childhood education and care: Providing all our children with the best start for the world of tomorrow in 2011 (European Commission, 2011) and, at the time of writing, to the development of a European Quality Framework for early childhood education and care services.¹

The authors of European Union policy documents make no reference to Paulo Freire, and practitioners’ conscientizaçao does not feature prominently in the policy strategies either. What ties the European macro-political scenario to Freirian critical pedagogy (from my admittedly subjective point of view) is the role the documents assign to those working with young children and their families. The early childhood workforce – educators, childcare workers, early childhood teachers, pedagogues, etc. – is seen as key to achieving the ambitious policy goals of increasing both quantity and quality of early childhood education and care provision.

Professional competence in times of crises

Moving on from the acknowledged ‘failure’ of the Lisbon Strategy (www.euractiv.com/priorities/sweden-admits-lisbon-agenda-fail-news-221962), the current strategic framework of the European Union is based on a much bleaker analysis of the State of the Union:

Europe faces a moment of transformation. The crisis has wiped out years of economic and social progress and exposed structural weaknesses in Europe’s economy. In the meantime, the world is moving fast and long-term challenges – globalisation, pressure on resources, ageing – intensify. The EU must now take charge of its future. (European Commission, 2010: 3)

There are at least three dimensions to this analysis that are of utmost relevance to the question of professional knowledge, practice and orienting values (these are the fundamental dimensions of professional competence):

1. The almost immediate connection made by the EU between the macro-political analysis and early childhood education and care as a key policy tool to address the crisis. There is an ‘urgent need’, the EU states, ‘to increase participation in early childhood education and care’:

Such needs are particularly acute in the case of those from a disadvantaged background, who statistically tend to perform significantly less well against each of the benchmarks. Only by addressing the needs of those at risk of social exclusion can the objectives of the Strategic Framework be properly met. (Council of the European Union, 2010: 6)

2. The acknowledgement that the early childhood workforce, its practices, qualifications and working conditions are key predictors of better outcomes for all children:

Participation in high-quality early childhood education and care, with highly skilled staff and adequate child-to-staff ratios, produces positive results for all children and has highest benefits for the most disadvantaged. (Council of the European Union, 2010)

3. A growing uncertainty about what exactly characterizes a ‘highly skilled’, competent early childhood workforce in the light of the complexity of the task and the diversity of the field. In the words of the briefing document written by the European Commission for the recent European study on ‘Competence requirements in early childhood education and care’ (Urban et al., 2011a):

A key aspect of quality is the extent to which the education and training of ECEC staff equips them with the knowledge, skills and attitudes they need to support child development including cognitive and socio-emotional development also those from disadvantaged backgrounds and – increasingly – to work closely with families and the wider community.

However, little is known about the relationship between high quality ECEC services and the competences of the staff providing it.

There is a need to work towards a common understanding of the issue at European level. (European Commission, 2009, emphasis added)

From ‘skilled practitioners’ to ‘competent systems’

The policy context for the CORE research project is as complex as the field that early childhood practitioners find themselves in. Any attempt to define a universal set of skills for an imagined universal early childhood practitioner is a chase for fool’s gold – even more so in the context of a study that encompasses all member states of the EU, with countries and early childhood education and care systems so different as in the UK, Sweden, Italy or Slovenia. Nonetheless, is it possible, and necessary, to explore, map and theorize conceptualizations of ‘competence’ and professionalism in early childhood, and to identify systemic conditions for developing, supporting and maintaining competence at all levels of the early childhood system? The systemic shift enabled us to document and re-conceptualize competence as something that reaches far beyond the individual practitioner and her or his formal level of qualification.²

A key finding of CORE is that competence in the early childhood education and care context must be understood as a characteristic of the entire early childhood system. Often, we associate the term ‘competence’ with the qualities of an individual practitioner – as something that can be acquired through training and professional preparation (i.e. the integration of knowledge, skills, attitudes, motivation…). The difficulty with this concept is that it is rather narrow. Especially in the English language context, being competent (a fully human attribute) is often reduced to competencies – a selection of skills and fragments of knowledge that individuals need to possess in order to perform a particular task. The predominantly English-language early childhood research literature often focuses on a rather narrow conceptualization of education, understood as formalized learning, with less value given to care or to the inseparable connection between the two aspects of practice (Urban et al., 2011a: 21–22). Approaches outside the limitations of the English language (e.g. the German concept of Bildung, the Danish concept of social pedagogy and the Italian concept of collegialità) allow for more holistic and systemic understandings of professional competence.

In CORE, we have framed our approach to understanding competence with a holistic understanding of early childhood education and care – as education in the broadest sense. Such an understanding, we argue, inevitably leads to a broad and holistic understanding of competence and competence requirements to work in this field.

A competent system develops in reciprocal relationships between individuals, teams, institutions and the wider socio-political context. A key feature is its support for individuals to realize their capability to develop responsible and responsive practices that respond to the needs of children and families in ever-changing societal contexts (Urban et al., 2011b: 15–17). At the level of the individual practitioner, being and becoming competent is a continuous process that comprises the capability and ability to build on a body of professional knowledge and practice and to develop and show professional values. Although the knowledge and practice are critical, practitioners and teams also need reflective competences as they work in highly complex, unpredictable and diverse contexts. A competent system requires possibilities for all staff to engage in joint learning and critical reflection. This includes sufficient paid time for these activities. A competent system includes collaborations between individuals and teams, institutions (pre-schools, schools, support services for children and families etc.) as well as competent governance at policy level.

Combined findings from the three project phases (literature review in several European languages, 15-country survey and seven in-depth case studies) indicate that competence unfolds in four dimensions, at every layer of the ECEC system:

individual level

institutional and team level

inter-institutional level

level of governance.

Brought together in a coherent framework, competence at each of these four layers characterizes a competent system. This systemic conceptualization extends the traditional understanding of competence (as an individual property) to the institutional and governance domain – a view that is supported by literature (e.g. OECD, 2005; Timar and Kirp, 1991). The understanding of competence moves beyond the acquisition of knowledge and training of skills to fully embrace reflectiveness as its core. Therefore the conceptualization developed by CORE expands the traditional understanding of competence – usually defined in terms of knowledge, skills and attitudes – in order to embrace the complexity that characterizes educational practice.

Competence, we argue, unfolds in the dimensions of knowledge, practices and values that are relevant at all layers of the system. By referring to practices instead of skills we distance ourselves from a technical conceptualization of educational practice (do I do things right?) and move towards its reflective nature (do I do the right things?) (Vandenbroeck et al., 2010). By referring to values instead of attitudes we distance ourselves from an individualized conceptualization of ECEC purposes and move towards a vision of early childhood education underpinned by negotiated goals and collective aspirations. Within this framework, competences are intentionally rather than explicitly listed: in fact, the interplay of knowledge, practices and values can generate different practices and approaches according to different countries and cultural contexts. The fundamental values expressed by recent European documents constitute the common ground on which the collective aspirations of a local community can flourish. A solid base of knowledge, building upon academic research and practical experience, represents a starting point for developing local practice-based research and critical reflection. Examples of competent practices are provided to encourage local experimentalism. Although detailed examples of the dimensions of competence (knowledge, practices and values) at different levels of the early childhood system were included in the CORE report (Urban et al., 2011a: 34–35), they are not meant to be exhaustive. Rather, they are offered as a source for inspiration and democratic experiment (Moss and Urban, 2010).

Conclusions – implications for management and governance

There is a marked difference between the complexity in the working environment for early childhood practitioners and the attempts to pin down professional practice, experience and judgement to lists of skills and a defined set of expert knowledge. As much as professional competence is an attribute of complex systems (rather than of skilled individuals alone), managing professional expertise has become highly problematic. In times that are characterized by a ‘complex intersolidarity of problems, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet’, as Morin and Kern (1999) put it, all expert knowledge has become problematic. From a traditional, structural-functionalist perspective (e.g. Parsons, 1968), experts and professionals³ are there to provide answers and to ‘solve’ social problems. It is increasingly obvious that this rather simplistic understanding of society as a clockwork and the professional as the technician has become dysfunctional in the current context. Problem-solving experts and answer-providing professionals are likely to come up with yesterday’s solutions for today’s challenges, resulting in ever ‘more-of-the same’ policy approaches that fail to make a difference. It is widely accepted and supported by research, for instance, that children from poor and marginalized communities are considerably worse achievers in the education system than are children from the dominant groups in society. Research has identified the ‘gap’ and provided the ‘evidence’ for policy-makers, professionals and experts to offer solutions to close the gap (as documented in the European Union policy documents cited earlier in this article). What is the problem? It is that the question, and the way it is framed, implies the ‘solution’, e.g. greater participation in early childhood education and care in order to raise literacy and numeracy levels of pre-schoolers. Once the ‘problem’ is identified as one of lacking educational attainment, more education is inevitably offered as the solution.

But what if the situation is not as straightforward as it seems through the educational lens? What if the question of educational attainment is tangled up with structural injustice, systemic inequality, oppression or blatant racism (Murray, 2012; Murray and Urban, 2012)? How is it possible to reframe the question of who does well in education as a question of dominant and widely accepted knowledge versus other forms of knowledge, e.g. indigenous, that are ignored, seen as irrelevant or openly suppressed? What if, as Freire (2000a, 2000b) argues, the education system itself – its pre-schools, schools and universities – played an active role in perpetuating the oppressive situation? How do poor housing, poverty and exclusion come together with educational experience in multifaceted ‘problematiques’ and Morin’s ‘intersolidarity of crises’ in the lived experience of ‘disadvantaged’ children and communities?

These questions, and how we approach them, have immediate implications for our conceptualization of what it means to be, to become, and to act as, a professional in early childhood. As professionals we are required to engage in a continuous process of positioning and re-positioning in relation to the micro- and macro-politics of care and education in unequal societies (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005). We are confronted with three defining aspects of professional practice with young children, families and communities: inevitably, early childhood professional practice is always relational, political and uncertain.⁴ This approach positions early childhood professional practice in contrast to the managerial and technocratic language that dominates the discourse on early childhood education and care. It is a language that generates its own questions, as Dahlberg et al. argue:

The common feature of such questions is their technical and managerial nature. They seek techniques that will ensure standardization, predictability and control. They aspire to methods that can reduce the world to a set of objective statements of fact, independent of statements of value and the need to make judgements…They are not questioning questions, which ask about value, acknowledge the probability of multiple perspectives and meanings, diversity and uncertainty, and which open up for democratic participation, dialogue and further questioning. In short, they express a desire for a clean and orderly world, devoid of messiness and complexity. (Dahlberg et al., 2007: 2)

Moving towards competent systems in early childhood education and care raises questions of management and governance. In simple terms, the fundamental challenge for those in control is to acknowledge they are not. Rather, that management and governance, like competence, are intrinsic aspects of professional practice, to be found and developed at all levels of the system. This would include the capability to ask critical questions and develop critically reflective practice throughout the system and with all actors – conscientizaçao is a task that cannot be delegated.

The task that managers face in times of complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty is not something that has suddenly and unexpectedly appeared like a jack-in-the-box. As early as the 1970s, authors like Donald Schön and Russel Ackoff identified ‘the crisis of confidence in professional knowledge’ (Schön, 1983: 3–20) and argued for management approaches that embrace instead of avoid complexity. As Ackoff puts it so succinctly in his 1979 essay, ‘The future of operational research is past’,

Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes. Problems are abstractions extracted from messes by analysis…Managers do not solve problems; they manage messes. (Ackoff, 1979: 99–100)

Footnotes

Notes

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