Troubling the Changing Paradigms

Book excerpt: Troubling the Changing Paradigms is the fourth volume in the Educational Philosophy and Theory: Editor’s Choice series and represents a collection of texts that were selected as representations of the philosophy and pedagogy of early years, childhood and early childhood education. The philosophy of the early years is complex, and this book demonstrates how this fascinating subject can be interlinked with both the philosophy and history of education as being instrumental in shaping the child subject, childhoods and children’s educational futures. This book demonstrates the application of philosophical and theoretical perspectives that provide us with global and local narratives and understandings of children as subjects, and their subjectivities. The philosophical traditions offer new spaces in which to think about alternative childhoods, and contribute to an important analysis in which philosophy has the capacity to shape children’s lives and education, and to elevate the multiplicity of discourses around very young children and their education and care. Through the texts in this volume, the authors aim to find creative philosophical forms that are capable of interrupting, if not disrupting, traditional and, in some settings, perhaps more conventional discourses about children and their childhoods. These philosophical forms present productive ways that allow fresh conceptions of what is all too often an assumed set of subjectivities and experiences about very young children. Troubling the Changing Paradigms will be key reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, philosophy, education, educational theory, post-structural theory, the policy and politics of education, and the pedagogy of education.