Bryndís Gunnarsdóttir

Listening to Young Children:

Agency and Power in a Maltese Reception Class

Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Erasmus

Mundus joint degree “Master in Early Childhood Education and Care”.

15th of August, 2012

International Master of Early Childhood Education and Care.

Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences,

Dublin Institute of Technology and University of Malta.

 Declaration

I hereby certify that the material which is submitted in this thesis towards the
award of the Masters in Early Childhood Education and Care is entirely my own
work and has not been submitted for any academic assessment other than
part-fulfilment of the award named above.

Signature of candidate:

………………………………………….

Date

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 Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Duncan Mercieca, at the University of Malta for his
guidance during the research process. I would also like to thank him for lending me books
and suggesting articles for me to read as well as providing me with valuable feedback and
guidance when I was not sure if I was on the right track.

I feel very fortunate to have been a part of this IMEC program. I would therefore like to
thank all of the professors, staff and visiting scholars I got to know during the last two years.
I have had the most amazing and valuable experience and am very grateful for the
opportunity of joining this program. I would also like to thank my fellow IMEC students for
their friendship and support. I have made many good friends but I would especially like to
thank Martina, Daisy and Rusminah for all the great time we spent together, especially
during our stay in Oslo and Malta. I could not have asked for nicer flatmates.

Ég vil þakka fjölskyldunni minni og góðum vinum sérstaklega fyrir allan stuðninginn
síðastliðin tvö ár. Hann hefur verið ómetanlegur þegar stress, heimþrá, peningaleysi og
örvænting var við það að buga mig og ég vildi ekkert annað en að koma heim. Að eiga góða
að er dýrmætt og ég sakna ykkar endalaust og þykir ómetanlega vænt um ykkur öll.

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 Dedication

I dedicate this work to all the wonderful children in my live that have touched my heart with
their imagination, joy, honesty and playfulness.

“Imagine”
John Lennon

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 Abstract

The main aim and objective of this study was to examine the issues of agency and power in an
early childhood education and care institution in Malta. Michel Foucault’s writings on the
issues were used as the theoretical framework. Foucault claims that it is immensely important
that we criticise educational institutions so we do not start to look at them as unchangeable
and their practices as unavoidable. Observing children in ECEC settings and in the class-room
can give us some valuable insights into their capabilities and competencies as well as new
knowledge that can be used to better their experiences at ECEC settings and schools. The
approach of the study was a qualitative one with two groups of participants, the teachers and
children of the class. Participant observations and semi-structured interviews were the mode
of gathering data. The findings indicate that the key to listening to young children is viewing
them as strong and competent social actors that have abilities, capabilities and agency. They
indicate that the power dynamics within the class-room do not favour children having agency
or power over their lives. The participant teachers mostly view children as incompetent and in
need of protection and teaching and that the role of the reception class is to socialise and
prepare children for kindergarten and further schooling. Still, there were many moments of
resistance in the class-room, with the children using different strategies and methods to
challenge the power structure, proving that children indeed have agency and are innovative
and competent in their social behaviours within an ECEC setting.

Key terms: Agency, power relations, normalisation, resistance, early childhood education
and care (ECEC), listening.

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Table of Contents

Cover page
Declaration
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Abstract
Key terms

Chapter One: Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1

1.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1
1.2 Research questions and hypothesis .............................................................................................. 2
1.3 Rationale of the study ................................................................................................................... 2
1.4 Theoretical framework .................................................................................................................. 4
Chapter two: Literature Review .............................................................................................................. 6
2.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 6
2.1.1 The road to Foucault .............................................................................................................. 7
2.2 Agency ........................................................................................................................................... 8
2.3 Power........................................................................................................................................... 11
2.4 Normalisation .............................................................................................................................. 13
2.5 Resistance .................................................................................................................................... 15
Chapter three: Methodology ................................................................................................................ 18
3.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 18
3.2 Research questions and hypothesis ............................................................................................ 18
3.3 Design .......................................................................................................................................... 19
3.4 Sample ......................................................................................................................................... 19
3.5 Measures and procedures ........................................................................................................... 20
3.6 Limitations of the study ............................................................................................................... 21
3.7 Analysis ........................................................................................................................................ 21
3.8 Ethics ........................................................................................................................................... 22
3.9 Personal reflections ..................................................................................................................... 23

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Chapter Four: Findings and Discussions ................................................................................................ 25
4.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 25
4.2 Agency ......................................................................................................................................... 26
4.2.1 Agency and the child ............................................................................................................ 26
4.2.2 Agency and the teacher........................................................................................................ 27
4.3 Power........................................................................................................................................... 29
4.3.1 Power and relationships ....................................................................................................... 29
4.3.2 Power and knowledge .......................................................................................................... 30
4.4 Normalisation .............................................................................................................................. 32
4.4.1 Normalisation through common activities ........................................................................... 32
4.4.2 Normalisation through socialisation .................................................................................... 34
4.5. Resistance ................................................................................................................................... 35
4.5.1 Resistance through humour ................................................................................................. 35
4.5.2 Resistance through non-compliance .................................................................................... 36
Chapter five: Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 38
5.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 38
5.2 Recommendations for future work ............................................................................................. 39
5.3 Implications ................................................................................................................................. 40
References ............................................................................................................................................. 42
Appendices ............................................................................................................................................ 47
Appendix 1: Invitation letter to school.............................................................................................. 47
Appendix 2: Consent form for school................................................................................................ 48
Appendix 3: Information letter to teachers ...................................................................................... 49
Appendix 4: Consent form for teachers ............................................................................................ 50
Appendix 5: Questions for interviews with teachers ........................................................................ 51

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Chapter One: Introduction

1.1 Introduction

Miss Joan: “Emma, what colour is your horse?”

Emma (2.8): “It is pink!” (She laughs and giggles looking at the other
children).
Miss Joan: “Pink? No, it is not pink. What colour is it?”
Emma does not answer.
Miss Joan: “Is it brown and black?”
Emma nods her head, looking down.
Miss Joan: “Yes, it is brown and black, your horse” (field notes, 2nd May
2012).

In the recent decades, the issues of power and the ideas of post structuralism have been in the
foreground in educational research (Cannella, 1999; Lafton, 2008; Woodhead, 2009). This
can be said to have been influenced by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child (UNCRC) (1989) which has been ratified by almost every nation in the world. The
UNCRC has influenced early childhood education and care (ECEC) immensely and puts great
responsibility on the adults to make sure that the rights and agency of children are respected.
Having knowledge about the power relationship between children and adults in ECEC is an
important factor when addressing the issue of agency.

As can be seen in the little story at the beginning of this chapter, the relationship between
knowledge and power is a strong one and children are often made to sit through situations
where their knowledge or interpretation of the universe is seen as inferior to the factual
knowledge of the adult. Children are often seen as incompetent and immature, hence not
‘capable of forming his or her own views’, but in need of correction and ‘teaching’ by the
more powerful adult. Therefore, in connection to the issue of rights is the issue of how
children are viewed. Are young children capable or incompetent? Do they have agency and
what does having agency mean? Should we listen to them, as the title of this thesis suggests?
And if we do indeed listen, how do we address the power issue regarding what listening
entails and how it can best serve children and their agency and power. Observing children in
ECEC settings and in the class-room can give us some valuable insights into their capabilities

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and competencies and new knowledge that can be used to better their experiences at ECEC
settings and schools. Observing what children do to express their views, how they strategise
to overcome barriers that adults put up in their environment to control them, such as rules and
schedules, as well as how they resist when confronted with an oppressive power, can indeed
increase the knowledge base we have in this field and make the view of the child as strong
and capable more prevalent.

1.2 Research questions and hypothesis

The main research question this study will attempt to answer is:

- How does the power relationship within a Maltese early childhood education and
care class-room reflect children’s agency?

There are two sub-questions I am interested in finding answers to as well:

1) How do teachers view the children in their class-room?

2) How do children resist power within their class-room?

My hypothesis before I started this study was that the issues of power and agency are not in
the forefront of how teachers view children or when they plan and organise their daily
practice. I hypothesise also that children do indeed show innovative methods to resist when
faced with rules and expectations they may not agree with.

1.3 Rationale of the study

Young children around the world are spending more and more time within ECEC settings. In
the richest countries, most children spend some time there before starting primary school and
in other countries the number has been rising in the last few decades (Woodhead, 2007). The
quality of the pedagogical practices vary greatly which makes it very important to examine
how these settings are influencing children’s lives in order to improve the practice in the best
interest of children as well as their early experiences with education. Some research has been
done in this field (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD), 2006; Sylva et al., 2006) and it suggests that it is not a negative aspect
of children’s lives that they are spending more time in ECEC settings as long as the quality of

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the provision is high. The results from these studies indicate that young children can benefit
greatly socially, developmentally, academically and economically from spending time in a
high quality ECEC setting.

I am a first time researcher with experience as an early childhood educator (playschool

teacher) from Iceland. I come from the tradition of the Nordic preschool system which has
play-based pedagogy as its foundation, well-educated teachers and is thought of as a social
good to be provided for all children from the age of around one year old (Wagner, 2006). The
ECEC system in Malta is in many ways very different from the Icelandic one. There is no
universal provision. Most children start kindergarten at three years of age, and the
kindergartens are located within the primary schools with a rather formal academic schedule.
Many children attend reception classes, nurseries or playschools before they move up to
kindergarten but those settings are limited in number although the demand is increasing
(Sollars, 2002).

During my master’s studies I have become intrigued with the issues of power, ethics and
reflections as a base for my professional identity. I find the postmodern and post structural
ideas of subjectivity, respect for the Other and the believe that there is no such thing as one
universal truth to make sense to me and therefore I wanted to include that in my research for
my master’s thesis. I am also fascinated with children’s agency and their imaginative ways of
having fun and enjoying themselves in the different circumstances they find themselves. I
think that we can learn a great deal from children about how to best organise and plan their
education and care; they have a lot to say if we will only listen and hear them.

Doing my research in Malta was something I thought would be interesting as the ECEC
systems in Malta and Iceland are very different and I feel that this will be a great challenge
and a good learning experience for me. I am sure that my time spent with these Maltese
children will give me many opportunities to reflect and critique my own practice and
behaviour towards children and hope that my reflection and analysis will be of value, not only
to the parties involved but also to the field in general. Within my discussion in this thesis I am
not planning to discuss the situation either in Iceland or in Malta, the discussion will be more
general and international. It will though, of course, influence my discussion that I come from
a certain background and am conducting the research in a different context.

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1.4 Theoretical framework

In this thesis, the ideas of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) stand as my theoretical framework.
He studied power relations and the role of knowledge in those relations. He was interested in
“...what may be said, by whom, in what context and with what effect” (Gordon, 1994, p. xvi).
As poststructuralists in general, Foucault believed that language is very important as it not
only describes who we are but in fact makes us who we are through discourses and ‘regimes
of truth’ that we have been disciplined into following. His ideas on this relationship between
language, power and knowledge has been described as radical because he claimed that “truth
does not exist” (MacNaughton, 2005, p. 5). The conventional ideas were that there was an
objective, universal truth out there for rational science to discover. To poststructuralists, there
is no such thing. They argue “...that it is impossible to have ‘undistorted’ knowledge free from
the interests of the people it serves. Knowledge can never be free from ideology, because all
knowledge is biased, incomplete and linked to the interests of specific groups of people”
(MacNaughton, 2005, p. 22).

Because knowledge and power are linked so strongly it is important to be critical of the
manner in which they manifest themselves within educational institutions. To Foucault
(1988), power uses institutions to gain control over us, not the other way around. He claims,
therefore, that it is immensely important that we criticise those institutions so we do not start
to look at them as unchangeable and their practices as unavoidable. It is important to “…show
that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident
will no longer be accepted as such” (p. 155). Examining and criticising ECEC practices are
therefore important if we wish to improve them.

Using these ideas to study issues in ECEC can give us a different perspective of how to view
children and their experiences. This study will focus on the issues of normalisation, power
relations, agency and resistance. It is important to be aware of all of these issues when
working with young children if we want to give them the best possible experience in early
childhood education and care. In the next chapter I will discuss these issues in detail and
connect them to current literature in the field.

In chapter two of this thesis, I will discuss the theoretical framework for the study in detail. I
start with a little discussion about how I ended up knee-deep in post structural theories and
completely fascinated with Michel Foucault. I discuss the issues of agency, power,
normalisation and resistance as well as connecting them with other relevant literature within

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the field of early childhood education and care. In chapter three, I discuss my methodology in
detail. This is a qualitative case study where I use the research tools of participant
observations and semi-structured interviews as well as literature review to triangulate my
results. Ethics are important in the field and I explore the ethical issues that can arise in such a
study as well. In chapter four, I discuss my findings and analysis. I use passages from my
field notes and extracts from my interviews to illustrate the questions that arose in my mind
during my data collection. I look at them through a Foucaultian lens and connect them to my
literature review. The final chapter is the conclusion where I attempt to finish my discussion
and make my findings clear and precise as well as discussing what the implications of the
study and the next steps might be.

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Chapter two: Literature Review

2.1 Introduction

Discussing education through the post structural lens of multiple truths opens up for great
many possibilities and gives us the opportunity to truly listen to children. The word ‘listening’
in the title of this thesis does not only mean to listen in the conventional sense but to really
hear children and what they are saying with all of their different languages. “Listening to
thought is about being able to hear the ideas and theories of the Other, and to treat them
seriously and with respect, neither ignoring them nor dismissing them for not providing the
right answer” (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005, p. 99). It implies that the child is intelligent and
competent, meaning that through her experiences she is able to make meaning of the world
around her. Although I feel that truly listening to children is important it is also imperative to
be critical of what listening entails. Those who listen are those who hold the power to listen
and we need to question and be critical of the idea of listening. How can we listen and hear
children without the power relation dynamics getting in the way and children’s agency getting
lost in the process? These are big questions and I cannot pretend to have the answers here but
asking them and reflecting on how we listen to children may perhaps be the first step towards
a better understanding and practice of the topic.

In this chapter I will discuss the theoretical framework for this study in detail. Michel
Foucault and his ideas around the issues of power and agency are the central focus but I will
also discuss other literature within the field of early childhood education and connect them
together. My discussion on Foucault is not meant to be a comprehensive study of his ideas
and writings. I am simply taking some ideas from him and connecting them to other ideas I
find interesting and relevant to my research. Before I begin with my discussion on Foucault, I
will start off with a little introduction into how I came to agree with the writings of
poststructuralists. I find it very important that we become more critical of the way we educate
our young children in order to safeguard critical thinking and democracy in the world and as a
professional in my field I find it very important to be reflective of why we do what we do.
Post structuralism in general and Michel Foucault in particular, have been very helpful to me
in my quest of creating me as an ethical educator and researcher.

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2.1.1 The road to Foucault

My journey to the land of post structuralism has taken me several years and it all started with
a little book I read while doing my undergraduate studies in ECEC at the University of
Iceland. This book and its author, John Dewey, have influenced me deeply over the years and
he has had great influence in the preschool system in Iceland. He was indeed not a
poststructuralist but a fierce believer in the modernist ideal of strong individualism, reason
and freedom (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991). He was, however, the starting point for me to
continue my quest for something other than the developmentally appropriate practices that
seem to have swallowed up early childhood education and care around the world.

Dewey (1997) was an American philosopher and educator in what was called the progressive
school movement in the US. In his book, Democracy and Education (2011), which was first
published in 1916, he puts forward his ideas about the importance of quality education.
“There may be training, but there is no education” (p. 20) is a statement that has stuck with
me. It often seems to me that children are more being trained than educated in preschools
around the world. They are being trained to sit still, not to talk unless given permission, to
believe the teacher, to be good and well-behaved, to repeat the alphabet. Of course, one can
say that these are important skills to have in order to function well in the class-room, but
perhaps they are not what should be emphasised within ECEC.

I agree with Dewey where he talks about the importance of dispositions being nurtured, the
natural inclination to explore and ask questions should be encouraged. “Education is thus a
fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating process” (p. 10) where we can imagine the teacher as a
partner and a guide to children’s learning. When considering that Dewey wrote this book
originally in 1916, it is impressive to see how he believes that children are active and
competent, they have agency. “Growth is not something done to them; it is something they
do” (p. 26). More than twenty years later, Dewey (1997) wrote the book Experience and
Education where he also describes the child as an active, competent and strong participant in
education. He advocates for good, educative experiences in schools and argues that some
experiences children have, also in schools, can indeed be “mis-educative” (p. 25). This type of
education may seem to educate, or train, children but they do not really as the education they
are offering is not relevant to the children. It is very important, Dewey asserts, that the
experiences children have at school are relevant to them in order for them to be of educational
value. I have to agree with Dewey on this matter as, in my experience, children learn by

7
taking what they already know and expand on it themselves or with the assistance of a teacher
and/or other children. His idea of experiences does, however, take away from the children the
agency he gives to them in other examples, as he does in fact seem to be claiming that
children themselves cannot make their own educative experiences but need adults for that. In
spite of this, Dewey’s writings make sense to me, even though he wrote them so many
decades ago, and I find them very relevant to my study of the issues of power and agency in
early childhood education and care.

Let me now start with Foucault. I will discuss the four themes that came up during my data
collection, agency, power, normalisation and resistance. I start with agency as it is the starting
point for how we view children and their education. Foucault is not so much in the foreground
of my discussion on agency but in the next section where I discuss power relationships and
the power/knowledge dynamic his writings are very important. Agency and power are both
strongly connected, with each other as well as with the other two themes. Normalisation is the
third theme I discuss. Normalisation practices of educational institutions are also connected
with the fourth theme of resistance as children themselves have their own opinions of how
they want their lives in ECEC to be and they have some interesting methods of resisting adult
authority.

2.2 Agency

How the child is viewed is a very important issue to me, not only as a researcher but also as
an educator. It defines how I work with children, how I think about children and how I talk
about children. While I was reading In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia (Rinaldi, 2006) one
sentence stuck with me: “A competent child is one who has an adult who views her as such:
The level of expectations is a determining factor” (p. 113). This claim has really struck a
chord with me and I feel that both in my professional experience as well as in my reading for
this research, this is the basis for my professional identity as a preschool teacher and as a
future researcher.

This view of the child as strong, competent and capable is a view that has started to dominate
the field of education in the recent years and perhaps decades. Several writers describe the
child in this way. William Corsaro (2005a) addresses the notion of agency and power and
claims that within their peer cultures, children use different methods and techniques to gain

8
control over their lives, and that the main concern of preschool age children are “...social
participation and challenging and gaining control over adult authority” (p. 134). He has
conducted several studies with children regarding their social relationships and the peer
culture. Other studies also show that children are innovative and imaginative in their social
interactions and will use play to come up with interesting scenarios and to make friends
(Cobb, Danby, & Farrell, 2005). Some interesting research on the youngest children and their
social relationships and competencies has also been coming from Norway in the recent years
(Greve, 2005; Løkken, 2004). They show that very young children, even one and two year
olds, are capable of making friends, of interacting fully with their world as long as us adults
are ready to listen to their language, which is usually non-verbal. I have found these results
very inspiring and they have confirmed what I have believed myself, that all children in the
preschools are strong, capable and competent.

Foucault was concerned about the existing ‘regimes of truth’ hindering us in seeing things in a
different and new light and keeping us close minded and suspicious of new ideas. This could
have a serious implication for early childhood education and care as it can make it difficult for
educators to change their view of young children and stop using power as an oppressive tool
within education. Individuals can indeed refuse to be suppressed by power, they “...can learn
how not to be governed so much” (Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence, 2007, p. 33). This should be the
goal of education, to gain critical thinking skills which can be said to be crucial if one is not to
be governed by others. Indeed, if individuals have that possibility, they should also have the
possibility of learning not to govern so much, which could have great implications for
education as a whole and more specifically for early childhood education and care.

The debate on the being or/and becoming child connects closely to the view of the child. The
being child is strong and active in her learning experiences and able to express herself
confidently and make herself heard. The becoming child is seen as lacking, incomplete,
deficient and in need of the teachings of a knowledgeable adult (Uprichard, 2008). In her
article, Uprichard claims that the child can indeed be both a being and a becoming. Children
themselves often view themselves as individuals who are becoming older and wiser and they
do not only live in the here and now. By viewing the child as both we make their future life as
adults important but without decreasing the importance of them having a good life experience
today. As I have already discussed, John Dewey believed strongly in good, educative
experiences being very important for children and according to him, it is important to build on
past experiences. Experiences are also important to Loris Malaguzzi (1993) and according to

9
him “...children are not shaped by experiences, but are the ones that give shape to it” (p. 82).
They are therefore seen as the creators of their own learning which indicates that children are
agents of their own lives and experiences if given the opportunity.

Looking at children as becomings, individuals that need to be trained and prepared so they
become useful adults later on, opens up for the main goal of early childhood education being
preparation for the future. This is not really a new phenomenon. Foucault (1991) discusses the
history of modern education and makes the claim that preparation and training has indeed
been the main focus of education for centuries. Schools were places where pupils were
disciplined through the examination procedures of observation, documentation and
normalisation, turned into docile bodies and trained to follow rules and orders, almost like
soldiers. It is therefore a relatively new phenomenon to be discussing education in other terms
than as a means for preparation, the discussion only existing since the early parts of the last
century.

John Dewey (1997) was very critical of preparation being the goal of education. “When
preparation is made the controlling end, then the potentialities of the present are sacrificed to
a suppositious future. When this happens, the actual preparation for the future is missed or
distorted” (p. 49). Loris Malaguzzi (1993) agrees with Dewey on preparation:

If the school for young children has to be preparatory and provide continuity with the
elementary school, then we as educators are already prisoners of a model that ends up
as a funnel. I think, moreover, that the funnel is a detestable object, and it is not much
appreciated by the children either. Its purpose is to narrow down what is big into what
is small. This choking device is against nature (p. 86).
Because of the emphasis on preparation there is great pressure on the ECEC settings to
provide ‘school-ready’ children which increases the likelihood of ‘schoolification’ (Moss,
2007). Schoolification’ as a process refers to

...an emphasis on the acquisition of specific pre-academic skills and

knowledge transfer by the adult rather than a focus on broad development
goals such as socio-emotional well-being and the gaining of understanding and
knowledge by the child through direct experience and experimentation
(Doherty, 2007, p. 7).
Dahlberg and Moss (2005) criticise that preschools are often being used to make children
ready for learning in schools, indicating that children are not already learning in preschools.
Also, this is done without thinking whether the learning in ‘schools’ is the best method, there
seems to be little critical thought about this at policy making level. They warn about the

10
‘schoolification’ of the early childhood education sector as a result of this emphasis on
preparation. They are very much focused on the importance of ethics when it comes to early
childhood education. They criticise the focus most countries have on the economic benefits to
nations for having a good ECEC system, and they are not in favour of the ‘becoming’ child
discourse that this economically driven attention focuses upon. Instead, we should be focusing
on the ethics of care and the ethics of an encounter, where creativity, respect and care for
others are the moral basis of everyday practice. This is a view I find refreshing as it is very
optimistic and positive, something I find we need in our field. It produces hope. Hope for the
present and hope for the future, hope that we are striving to provide the best possible
education for our children.

2.3 Power

Foucault (1994a) was very interested in examining the ‘how’ of power, the different power
relations instead of power as a separate entity. According to him, “power exists only as
exercised by some on others...” (p. 339). He defines a relationship of power as:

... a set of actions on possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier
or more difficult; it releases or contrives, makes more probable or less; in the extreme,
it constrains or forbids absolutely, but it is always a way of acting upon one or more
acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions
upon other actions (p. 341).
The words, power relationship, indicate a dichotomy of someone having power and someone
not having power. However, Foucault (1994b) did not see it in such a negative, absolute way.
Power can be positive. In fact, power can be very productive, both to society and to the
individual. Power is not simply a force upon us but it “...always traverses and produces things,
it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse” (p. 120). Foucault (1987) claimed
that within education, power is very important and that there is nothing wrong with the
teacher being the one holding the power over the student, teaching and transferring
knowledge. The problem, according to him, is for us to know where these practices of power
should be avoided so they do not become oppressive and arbitrary.

With the increased influence of the ideas of power relations as well as the issues regarding the
rights of the child, there have been some studies focusing on Foucault and ECEC in the recent
years. Tove Lafton (2008) raises some very interesting questions in her study about power

11
relationships in the Norwegian kindergarten. Does participation actually give children any
power or are we adults simply “...playing that children have power over us” (transl., p. 18).
This is a very important question that Sharon Ryan (2005) also raises in her study on choice in
the preschool. She discusses the reasons behind children being given choices and, at least, the
illusion of power in what is called child-centred pedagogy and compares it to the post
structural view on what having power and agency actually means. The difference, she
concludes, is that in the child-centred pedagogy, power is seen as something given to you, a
commodity, while in post structural theories, power is more fluent and productive. In the
former, having agency means being free to make your own choice, while in the latter, agency
means that you take part in discourses, it is fluid and not necessarily connected to freedom as
nobody is truly free. This notion of taking part in a discourse is important as it means we have
to truly listen to what children are saying and take it into consideration.

With my work as an early childhood educator in Iceland, the Reggio Emilia approach has
influenced me greatly and the issues of relationships and power are integral to that approach.
Loris Malaguzzi (1993) explains that the goal of the approach was to build an “education
based on relationships and participation” (p. 59). These relationships are rooted in power
relations and interactions within the class-room. The role of the teacher is to help children to
imagine themselves as researchers, explorers and scientists and to “discover the pleasure of
inquiry” (p. 60). Within such a relationship, the power balance shifts between participants.
The action of the teacher acts upon the action of the child, and vice versa. Knowledge is
created through this action upon action and children and teacher experience the pleasure of
the exploration. The production of knowledge is thus a social endeavour with children and
teachers working together to learn, teach and explore. There is a sharing of the power,
sometimes the teacher knows more, sometimes the child knows more. In a relationship built
on respect it is important for teachers to listen to children in more than one way, listen with
your whole body and feelings in order to truly hear and understand children’s communication
and actions (Bae, 1996).

Foucault believed that knowledge creates power and that they are "...inseparable, immanent in
one another, each a condition for the possibility of the other" (Usher & Edwards, 1994, p. 87).
As well as other poststructuralist writers, he believed that it is not possible to separate the two
and the language we use to describe ourselves is always embedded in politics and power
struggles. It is not possible for individuals to “...think, and act freely outside of the politics of
knowledge” (MacNaughton, 2005, p. 4). An interesting development project was conducted in

12
Iceland some years ago (1998-2004) in a Reggio Emilia and Project approach inspired
playschool. The incentive for this study was a comment made by a young boy who had been
in this playschool and was now in the first grade of a primary school: “Mom, why does the
teacher say that my giraffe has to be yellow when it could be pink in Sæborg”? (Olafsdottir,
2005, p. ii). This example illustrates the different power dynamics that can often exist
between children and teachers within an educational institution. The teacher in the primary
school clearly belonged to the group of people that put factual knowledge above imagination
and creativity. Foucault would have seen this as knowledge being bonded with ideology,
“...because all knowledge is biased, incomplete and linked to the interest of specific groups of
people” (MacNaughton, 2005, p. 22). To him, although knowledge may be biased, it does not
necessarily mean that it is false, the knowledge-power dichotomy rather determines “...what
may be said, by whom, in what context and with what effect.” (Gordon, 1994, p. xvi). For
teachers in the ‘facts above imagination’ category, what may be said is what is factual and
correct.

As well as believing that knowledge is not free, Foucault (1991) did not believe that there was
just one truth and one ‘right’ answer to questions and problems. He claimed that the regimes
of truth are indeed regimes of power that train and ‘educate’ people to believe that there is one
particular truth that everybody must abide to. This should be challenged as the world is full of
contradictions, it is irrational and complex and there cannot be one simple truth, there must be
many possible truths.

2.4 Normalisation

In his book Discipline and Power: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault (1991) discusses the
three main practices of disciplining pupils in schools and creating ‘docile bodies’ through the
examination. The first one is observation. “It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able
always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection” (p. 187).
Documentation is the second practice of imposing discipline as the documents gathered about
children “...capture and fix them” (p. 189). The third disciplining practice is through
normalisation, where the individual is “...as he may be described, judged, measured,
compared with others, in his very individuality; and it is also the individual who has to be
trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc.” (p. 191). In my discussion in this

13
section I will mostly focus on the practice of normalisation as I find that to be very interesting
and I saw many examples of it during my data collection in the field.

Foucault (1991) claims that the school has become an “... apparatus of uninterrupted
examination” (p. 186) where children are constantly being judged, evaluated and categorised.
This has become a common practice in schools today, especially where economic factors
seem to be the main force behind educational reforms and ideology. Education in schools has
long been in the modernist manner where the student is seen as an individual who must be
prepared and ‘educated’ to contribute in a positive and economically efficient way to society.
In Foucault’s term, ‘normalisation’ is the main purpose of education in the modernist
tradition. Postmodernists criticise this and put forward the notion that we should embrace
differences in gender, race and ethnicity and they emphasise looking beyond this normalising
modernistic Western education (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991). Dahlberg and Moss (2005)
discuss the influence of neo-liberalism on early childhood education throughout the world
claiming that the increased interest from governments to invest in early childhood education is
economically driven with educational outcomes that are future oriented with the
“employability of the child” (p. 5) being a determining factor on whether the education is of
quality or not. I find this to be a sad fact that education is only seen as valuable if it is
profitable. The notion that the individual and society can benefit greatly from education,
regardless of whether it will have positive economic benefits, is something I feel strongly
about and will advocate for that every opportunity I get. I believe that educating children to be
open-minded critical thinkers is far more important than preparing them for a specific future
economically beneficial career. Preparing children for their future is not in itself a negative
aspect of education, but when it becomes the only aim we should perhaps question it. I will
discuss the issue of preparation in further detail later in this chapter.

One method of normalising and preparing children for their future can be said to be
socialisation. Children are put together in a group and made to interact with each other on
different levels and within different activities. They are made to ‘learn’ to play together, to
share, to be friends, to be social. These terms are in line with a traditional way of looking at
children, where children are seen as egocentric and individualistic beings that need to be
taught how to interact in a social setting (Corsaro & Eder, 1990). In recent years, a more
dynamic theory of childhood socialisation has emerged and children are now widely accepted
as being very active in their own socialisation, which is seen as a collective process within a
peer culture created by children themselves. Children are focused on spending time with other
14
children; they are not so interested in solitary play but much more intent on gaining access to
group play and making friends (Corsaro & Eder, 1990).

Loris Malaguzzi (as cited in Rankin, 2004) believed strongly in intentional socialisation
which needed to take place in small groups. For him, a group of two was perfect. Within this
group, children learn how to listen to the Other and while talking to the Other, the child can
realise that “…the other thinks, speaks, hypothesizes, imagines using keys and codes that are
different…” (p. 83). The role of the teacher is also very important when discussing
socialisation. For children to benefit from this process in a way that supports their agency,
gives them skills of listening, thinking critically and understanding the Other, the teachers
must understand the importance of peer culture and communication to children. Teachers
must also listen to children; truly listen to all their voices and modes of communication with
adults and with other children. Through talking and listening in a social setting, through a
positive form of socialisation, children not only “...learn how to learn, but the group becomes
conscious of itself as a ‘teaching place’, where the many languages are enriched, multiplied,
refined and generated, but also collide, ‘contaminate’ and hybridise each other, and are
renewed” (Rinaldi, 2005, p. 22). The child’s natural inclination to make friends, learn and
explore is enhanced in the peer group.

2.5 Resistance

Foucault(1994a) claims that the issues of resistance and confrontation are almost inevitable in
relationships of power. There is no distinction between children and adults when it comes to
resistance. In fact, one might argue that children will resist more than adults as they have not
yet gone through the normalising practice of the educational institution and are still critical of
the ‘regime of truth’ that adults have often embraced. Malaguzzi (as cited in Rinaldi, 2006)
claimed that children try to gain control over their lives and situations from a very young age.
He stated that the child, “…right from the moment of birth, is so engaged in developing a
relationship with the world and intent on experiencing the world that he develops a complex
system of abilities, learning strategies and ways of organising relationships” (p. 83). Children
are persistent as they try out different strategies to gain power and they want to share the
control they manage to gain with their peers. Social participation and challenging the
authority of adults is often a very important factor in their lives (Edwards, Gandini, &
Forman, 1993).

15
Adults often put up rules and barriers in children’s lives in order to protect them or safeguard
the values in the society. Forbidding certain forms of play or certain toys from early
childhood settings is a common strategy, for example forbidden rough play or war games.
This may be changing as research results are indicating that this type of play is important for
young children (Tannock, 2008). The fact that the early childhood sector is dominated by
female educators can also have an impact on the restrictions we put on children’s behaviour
and play within our settings (Holland, 2003). Forcing adult culture and values on children is
perhaps something we should think twice about and give them more space to develop their
own culture so they will have the confidence to truly contribute to their social lives.

William Corsaro (2005b) makes the argument that children are not only active social agents in
their own right, but that their actions and contribution to adult culture and society is a crucial
part of our world. He claims that children have agency and power and that can be seen in their
social play and he concludes that “...agency is not the result of individual reflection or based
on means-end rational choice, but is instead deeply imbedded or situated in collective
activities in concrete social settings” (p. 242). This view of agency being a social construct
and not a commodity you can give to someone is in line with post structural views and with
what Foucault says about power relationships. According to him, power is relational and a
social construct, where knowledge is the issue of struggle between people or groups as
everybody wants to hold the ‘truth’ as their own. The struggle is therefore a “...battle to
authorise the truth” (MacNaughton, 2005, p. 27). Those who hold the truth are those who hold
the power, and vice versa.

As I have discussed above, children try to gain power from adults and they strategise and
work together in the peer group to do so. They can be very clever in circumventing rules
without getting into trouble for it. There is strategy to their resistance, solutions to the
problems that everybody can live with. In his research, Corsaro (2003) observed some
interesting strategies children used to get around certain rules, such as “exaggerated violation”
and “mocking” (p. 142). Children seem to enjoy doing the forbidden and sharing that with
their peers. The strategies Corsaro observed are so called ‘secondary adjustments’(Goffman &
Helmreich, 2007). According to Goffman, individuals or groups can bend the rules forced
upon them by using innovative ways to get around them in order for themselves or the group
to get what they want. One interesting factor in this is that adults often ignore those violations
and allow children to continue with their activities even if they are obviously going against
the rules. One example Corsaro (2003) observed was with a few Italian children playing with

16
an forbidden object in an innovative and creative way which impressed the teachers and
therefore they allowed the children to continue playing with the previously forbidden object.
He has indeed many examples of this type of creative strategies being used by children in
order for them to gain some control over their lives in the preschool. This is also behaviour I
have observed in my previous practice, where children use play, innovation and humour to
circumvent rules they do not like.

In my discussion here above I have been looking at agency and power as well as
normalisation and resistance. Agency is closely connected with how we view children; do we
see them as strong and competent or as lacking and inferior? How we view children
determines whether we see them as having agency or not. It also determines how we think
about the power issues within ECEC. Knowing about how power functions within educational
institutions is important as it can help us understand better what is happening in the setting.
Foucault believes that power is very important, and that it can be positive and productive. I
agree with Foucault here but feel that it can only be positive and productive if we view
children as competent in their own learning. Otherwise we are in danger of going down the
path of oppression. Normalisation is one method of oppression, where children are moulded,
prepared and socialised in a certain way decided by adults instead of looking at them as
capable of making their own decisions. Resistance is the result of this, as children will try
different ways of struggling against rules and regulations they are made to follow without
having any say in how those rules and regulations came into force. As can be seen, these four
themes of discussion are all connected and when put together they can hopefully help us
understand the issues of agency and power within ECEC better. I know turn to a discussion on
my methodology before continuing on to my findings and discussion chapter.

17
Chapter three: Methodology

3.1 Introduction

The main aim and objective of this study is to examine the issues of agency and power in an
early childhood education and care institution. Michel Foucault’s writings on these issues will
be used as the theoretical framework when analysing the data collected in the field. The study
will take place with children in their third year of life in a reception class in a Maltese
independent school. Through the writings of Foucault the power relations between the
children and their teachers will be observed and the way that relationship reflects children’s
agency will be examined. I will also look at the practice of normalisation as well as the
attempts children make to gain power over their daily lives and the struggles that may emerge
as they try to resist when faced with certain forms of power.

3.2 Research questions and hypothesis

The main research question this study will attempt to answer is:

- How does the power relationship within a Maltese early childhood education and
care class-room reflect children’s agency?

There are two sub-questions I am interested in finding answers to as well:

3) How do teachers view the children in their class-room?

4) How do children resist power within their class-room?

My hypothesis before I started this study was that the issues of power and agency are not in
the forefront of how teachers view children or when they plan and organise their daily
practice. I hypothesise also that children do indeed show innovative methods to resist when
faced with rules and expectations they may not agree with.

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3.3 Design

This research was a small-scale case study into the issues of power and agency in a reception
class of an English speaking independent school in Malta. The approach of the study was a
qualitative one and took place over the time period of three weeks in April and May of 2012.
The participants were children and teachers in this particular class-room.

Qualitative research approach is quite common within education and the social sciences as it
gives insights into the experiences and thoughts of the people in question. In a qualitative
approach, the researcher is "...more concerned to understand individuals' perception of the
world" (Roberts-Holmes, 2005, p. 5) and not so much trying to generalise over the board.
Data was collected through participant observations and semi-structured interviews.

I visited the school for three days in early March to introduce myself to the teachers and the
children. In late April and early May I gathered my data. I went to the school in total for 11
days and spent four hours each of those days there. All of those days I conducted my
observations and took field notes in my notebook. For two of the days I conducted the
interviews with the teachers, as well as doing some observations. I audio-recorded the
interviews and took notes as well.

3.4 Sample

The research participants were two different groups. The first group were three teachers in the
reception class. They are all women in the age range of late 30s to early 40s. The head teacher
in the class has six years of experience working with reception class age children and some
training from a governmental agency in childcare for children aged 0-8. The two other women
are called helpers and both of them only have secondary school education as well as some
courses in first aid and the like. One has worked in a reception class for 18 months, the other
for about three years.

The other group of participants were the children in this reception class. My observations
included them all. They are 17 in total, eight girls and nine boys. The oldest child was 3.3
years at the time of my study and the youngest was 2.8 years. Most of the children spend five
days a week in the class, four hours each day. There are three children that only attend class
three days a week. A few make use of an extra hour of school some days of the week.

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3.5 Measures and procedures

This research is a case study that uses participant observations and semi-structure interviews
as well as literature analysis as the mode of gathering data on the subject of power and agency
with young children. I was focused on my research being valid and ethically sound and
respectful of my participants. Validity is important in research as you want your analysis to be
a “... sound representation of the field of study” (MacNaughton et al., 2001, p. 124) and
therefore I used more than one method of gathering data in order to triangulate my results.

Participant observations can be helpful when the researcher wants to understand certain
culture and workings of certain groups (Denscombe, 2007). I got to know the children and the
teachers somewhat and feel I got well acquainted with the practice in the school. During my
observations, I took field notes and when I could be of assistance, I was active in the class,
helping out where needed and interacting fully with the children and the teachers. I became
Miss Bryndis.

The teachers views on children and their agency was elicited through a semi-structured
interview process. A semi-structured interview can be useful when the researcher wishes to
get certain information from the interviewee without being too directive. The role of the
researcher is mainly to listen carefully, putting forth questions only to guide the interviewee
and focus the answers on the topic (Roberts-Holmes, 2005). I had some problems getting the
answers I needed from my interviews. It was interesting, and a very good learning experience
for me to realise that some of my questions were too complicated and theoretical for my
participants to understand them. I had not thought of that before and I learned a great deal
about interview techniques simply by doing them.

My concern about my presence in the class and using observations as one of my research
tools was mostly because I am quite critical of observations as a possible oppressive tool.
There are always some power issues going on when one is observing others and as an adult, I
can never be anything else in the eyes of the children; “...to kids, no matter how hard an adult
might try to act otherwise, he or she is still an adult” (Corsaro, 2003, p. 5). I hope that being
aware of the power I have as a researcher and observer will be beneficial to my analysis
because it is difficult to know how we can gain important information from young children
without using observations.

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3.6 Limitations of the study

During my research, I was very much interested in the ethical aspects of doing research with
children. I feel that qualitative research methods that give insights into people’s lives are very
valuable in order to understand certain issues within a field of research. As a researcher, you
get in-depth information and you get to know the participants, not as subjects but as people
and individuals with their own live-stories to tell. This type of research does, however, also
have built in limitations as it is not possible to generalise the findings to a larger population.
My study is a small scale research on a master’s level. It has been conducted within ethical
and methodological frameworks in order to safeguard the participants and to produce findings
that are valid and sound. The findings can be said to be significant as they support the view
that children are competent and active social beings and I hope that it can give valuable
insight to interested parties in Malta and beyond. However, it is still a small study into a very
tiny aspect of our field and I would not like to pretend that it is anything else.

3.7 Analysis

During all phases of my study, I kept the writings and ideas of Michel Foucault in the
foreground. During the reading phase, I read countless books and articles, both written by
Foucault himself and also written by other authors. Everything I read, even when Foucault
was not mentioned at all, was connected to him and the ideas of agency and power. It is the
basis of my study and the corner stone of my analysis. During my data collection I did my
best to observe and reflect on what I saw through a Foucaultian lens. I continued to use this
lens during my analysis and discussion and will do that in my findings and discussion chapter
that is coming up next. Using a Foucaultian perspective when analysing data is something that
is being done a lot today and it can give valuable insights into issues of power within
educational institutions. I feel that Foucault has a lot to say regarding my data and by
analysing it through his lens I feel I will get interesting insights into practices in ECEC. I
could have used other means of analysis, such as constructivism or sociology of education,
but I chose to use Foucault and post structuralism as my theoretical framework for my
analysis as it is highly relevant to us to know more about children’s agency, power
relationships, the practices of normalisation and children’s resistance. Knowing more about
these issues can help us provide better educational experiences for children and I find that to
be of outmost importance.

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3.8 Ethics

When researching young children ethical considerations are many. It is important for the
researcher to be reflective of his/her own research methods and tools in order to safeguard
children’s right to participate without causing them any harm. It is the researcher’s
responsibility to make sure that the potential for risks to children is minimal and the
researcher should, and must, evaluate the situation regularly to make sure that the children are
not experiencing stress or discomfort during the research. This balance between children’s
participation rights and their need for protections is crucial and must be at the forefront of any
research project (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005). As a first time researcher, I am very much
concerned with these ethical considerations and did everything possible to make sure that I
was not causing any harm. Before starting the field research, I acquired approval from both
the Ethical Committee of the Faculty of Education at the University of Malta and the Ethical
Committee of the University of Malta.

I sent an invitation letter and a consent form to the school I planned to conduct my field
research and the consent form was signed by the assistant head of the school. The three
teachers were given information letters and consent form and they all signed and agreed to
take part. In order to safeguard the participating children, informed consent was obtained from
the management and teachers of the school in question. The school acted in ‘loco parentis’
which means that it granted permission on behalf of the child and its parents. This is a
common practice within early childhood education institutions (Roberts-Holmes, 2005).
Examples of these letters and forms can be seen in the appendices at the back of this thesis. It
is also important to gain assent from the children and remember that informed consent needs
to be “continuously negotiated” (Roberts-Holmes, 2005, p. 68). It is important to keep in
mind that it is difficult to gain informed consent from such young children. I was therefore
careful to watch the children for signs of them feeling uneasy about my being there with my
notebook and I made sure not to follow them around if I felt they were avoiding me or I was
interrupting their play.

It is important also to discuss the ethical considerations of researching in early childhood

institution and working with the staff there. Early childhood teachers are most often female.
They often have little, or no education in the field and are “...engaged in work that receives
little recognition from society at large” (Bae, 2005, p. 284). Trust and honesty is therefore
very important as it is easy for the researcher to “...contribute to further reductionism and

22
objectification of them and their work” (Bae, 2005, p. 284). I have a background as an
educator in an ECEC setting back home in Iceland, and I plan to go back to work as an
educator in Norway after this thesis is finished. I know that our field is often looked down
upon and that we still have a long way to go to get the same respect as educators at other
school levels. I therefore understand and agree that the power relations between ECEC staff
and researchers can be tricky and complicated. Although the teachers agreed to take part in
my study, I cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that it was implicitly forced upon them by the
management of the school as it can be difficult for an employee to refuse her or his
employer’s requests. Given the power relationships that always exist between researcher and
participant, I made an extra effort to reflect on the research process and the atmosphere in the
classroom. Trust is important in research, and I did make all effort to gain the trust of the
children and teachers by treating them and the data gathered with respect and full
confidentiality.

Michel Foucault talks about the idea of normalisation and classification of people through
observations: "A power-knowledge discourse always points away from power towards the
'objective' measurement of what is there 'naturally'" (Usher & Edwards, 1994, p. 103). As
Foucault's theories on power and agency stand as the theoretical framework for this study, I
tried my best not to over-interpret the interactions in the class room nor the answers given by
the teachers in the interviews. By using Foucault as the basis for the analysis of the data, it
can "...deepen our ability to make repeated, careful, open-minded examinations of how we are
affected by the cultural choices which prevail in our society in our everyday lives" (Jardine,
2005, p. 9). It will be a challenging but a worthwhile attempt to gain the information needed
from the observations and interviews without over explaining it and interpreting it in a
manner that may not be correct.

3.9 Personal reflections

The biggest challenge I faced during my data collection was balancing my observations with
my participation in the class room. As I have stated before, I have several years of experience
working with children in ECEC settings and because of this I did not want to be a silent
researcher sitting in the corner hoping nobody would notice me and trying to get ‘objective’
observations. I found the idea of taking part in the class room activities and being active much
more appealing, and also thought that because of my limited time to collect my data, I would

23
more easily gain the trust and respect of the children and teachers if I helped out. This plan
worked quite well, although my main problem was that because of my participation I
sometimes found it difficult to have time to note down my observations. I also feel that
perhaps I missed some interesting episodes because I was too busy helping out with the
practical things like taking children to the restroom, assisting them with their lunch or playing
hide-and-seek in the outdoor area. Having said that, I do not think I would have done this
research any differently even with the challenges it gave me. Of course, this is only a small
scale research on master’s level, but for me it is perhaps a start. If I decide to continue my
career within research, I hope I can find a balance, a balance of being a participating
researcher, as I feel that by taking part in the work of the teachers I show them the respect
they deserve, and by being active with the children, I also show them the respect they deserve
as I am not someone who comes in to watch and ask questions and then leaves without giving
anything back. I hope, at least, that this is what I did. It was what I tried to do.

I find that doing qualitative research fits me very well. I like observing people and their
interactions, talking to them about what they are thinking and getting to know the participants
who are helping me with my work. Everybody has something to say and it has been
interesting to listen to these educators and children. As the researcher, the observer and the
listener, I have great power. I was aware of this and tried my best to do good rather than harm
to my participants. As a first time researcher and a master student I feel that I do not have any
right or basis for being judgemental of the practice I observed at the reception class. I come
from a different culture in the Nordic countries where we emphasise different things as
important for children to learn in early childhood. I am also using Foucault as my role model
and he was not passing judgment on issues of power but merely describing what he observed.
That will be my attempt in this thesis although I know that “point of view is always subjective
and observation is always partial” (Rinaldi, 2006, p. 128). Now I will turn to the analysis and
discussion of my findings.

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Chapter Four: Findings and Discussions

4.1 Introduction

In this chapter I present the findings of my study as well as their analysis and discussion. The
data was gathered using qualitative participan observations and semi-structured interviews
and the results have been organised into four major themes for the purpose of the discussion.
The themes are agency, power, normalisation and resistance. Although they are split into
different headings in the discussion that follows, they do all connect with each other and the
data can in many instances contribute to a discussion in another theme. I simply use this
categorisation as a tool to organise my discussion and make it easier for the reader to follow.

I had a very enjoyable time at this school during my study. The atmosphere in the class room
was very friendly and loving, the children seemed to be happy to be there and the teachers had
a good working relationship with each other. My discussion is not meant to be a critique of
the practice at the school. I am simply interested in examining the themes that I have
identified in my data and discussing how things are done, connecting them to literature in the
field and to the writings and theories of Michel Foucault. If there is critique present, it is my
hope that it will be of benefit to all parties involved. It is important to be critical of the way
things are done and to be open to new understandings. In Foucault’s (2000) own words, “...
doing criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy” (p. 456). My reason for
this study is, however, not to pass judgment. I am simply trying to examine the issues through
reflections and critical thinking.

All names of the children and teachers have been changed in order to safeguard their privacy.

25
4.2 Agency
4.2.1 Agency and the child

Circle time. 17 children are in attendance. They are all sitting in the circle
with their three teachers. One teacher is asking one child at a time about what
they had been doing the previous weekend. Two boys, Brad (2.9) and Tom
(3.2) are sitting next to each other and seemingly not paying attention to the
questions. Tom starts rocking his chair, looking at Brad. Then Brad starts
rocking his chair as well. The teacher, Miss Joan, tells them to stop. Brad
starts rocking his chair again and Tom laughs. Tom starts rocking his chair as
well. Miss Joan stands up and takes Tom to another seat, making Billy (3.0) sit
down in the chair next to Brad. Brad had stopped but starts rocking his chair
again, now looking at Tom across the circle. Tom rocks his chair, looking
around him at Jack (2.10) who is sitting next to him. Jack starts to rock his
chair as well. Of the four boys, Billy is the only one who is paying attention to
the teacher. The other three are rocking their chairs, looking at each other,
giggling. Miss Joan puts on a CD with music and the boys start dancing with
the other children, Brad and Tom dance together.

My feeling after watching this episode was that the activity that was going on in the circle
time was not interesting to the boys so they found other ways of making the circle time
enjoyable. The teacher used her technique of changing the children’s seats when she found
them to be disturbing the rest of the class but left them mostly alone at other times. When
children do not find their experiences enjoyable they will find a way to change the situation in
order to have fun. Play comes naturally to them and as they are social beings, playing around
and inventing a common play is not unexpected. Dealing with being governed and controlled
by adults in a social way in partnership with their peers is common for children. They make
up their own little world with their own rules and interactions (Cobb, Danby, & Farrell, 2005).
This episode could also be used to discuss resistance and power relations, as well as agency,
but I choose to discuss it here as it shows clearly that young children are not simply waiting to
be filled with knowledge by the powerful adult/teacher. The boys are busy making their time
more enjoyable and strengthening their social relationship through their common play with
the chairs. They look at each other, take hints from one another and are actively constructing a
common understanding of the situation they are in and the interaction they are having with the
teacher. Foucault may not have written about children of this age but I think that he would
have enjoyed observing children in this situation. They have such innovative methods of
making a boring and somewhat suppressing, situation more tolerable.

26
Corsaro (2003) discusses children’s social relationships and explains their innovative
behaviour claiming that they are active and competent in creating their own cultures and they
enjoy making sense of the world in cooperation with their peers. They will not simply sit
quietly and wait for their minds to be filled with knowledge and skills by adults. Their minds
are already full and active and they have a need to express themselves. In this episode from
circle time, one interpretation could be that they are expressing their views of the lesson. It
does not interest them. So they find things to do that are interesting. Like rocking their chairs
can easily be to anyone interested in experimentation and movement. What could happen if
we rock the chair too much? Will we fall? Or just make noise? These are interesting questions
I am supposing may have been in the minds of these boys. Of course, it is my interpretation
and I may be completely wrong. I cannot pretend to know what children about three years of
age are thinking. As Corsaro says, “...no matter how hard an adult might try to act otherwise,
he or she is still and adult” (p. 5). As an educator, however, I can make an educated guess on
what they may be thinking and it seems very obvious to me that the lesson simply did not
interest the boys and therefore it is the responsibility of the teacher, not the children, to adapt
the lesson. Having a more positive view of children as competent and active would perhaps be
a first step towards making lessons like this fit into what I believe children should be
experiencing in the reception class.

4.2.2 Agency and the teacher

“They are sweet, loving and adventurous, some of them are very clever indeed, not all
of them...”

“... if they tell you something, you have to listen to what they are saying” (Interview
with Lilly, 7th of May, 2012).
“You have to have a lot of patience and be with the children in what they are doing,
and go down to their level” (Interview with Mary, 7th of May 2012).
When looking at how the teachers in this school think about children and how they view the
child, one sees the influence of the developmentally appropriate practices common in many
early childhood settings around the world. Children are seen as being in different stages of
development, where as they grow up and ‘develop’ they become more competent, more
capable. Young children are seen as creatures we need to teach and work on to make them
into productive and well-adjusted adults (Corsaro, 2003, p. 2). This view is strong here, the
children are not all clever, you cannot expect much from them and we have to get down to
their level. These words and descriptions indicate strongly that the adults look at children as

27
‘becomings’ and not as strong, competent and capable individuals who are “… active,
creative social agents” (Corsaro, 2005, p. 7) as is becoming a more and more common view
within the field. The view and understanding of children and childhoods is strongly linked to
the issues of their agency and competence. The teachers in this reception class clearly believe
that it is important to protect the children so that they can learn and develop safely. I agree
that we do indeed need to protect children to some extent, but my impression from my stay in
this class and this school is that there is too much emphasis on protection and safety. This can
indeed hinder children in expressing their agency, exploring and experimenting (Cobb et al.,
2005).

Lilly is the one teacher that makes the comment that we “have to listen to what they are
saying”. She does follow this statement with the comment that we have to go down to their
level in order to understand but her statement is positive. I find this to be very important for
early childhood educators. That we do not always pretend to be the ones that know everything
best and that we include children in decision making and planning. I am not sure that this is
what Lilly meant. Perhaps she meant that when children have a story to say or a comment to
make, we should listen and give them time to speak. It would, however, be simple to take this
listening further. Truly listening to the children and try to elicit from them their views on what
they should be doing in the class. This is a possibility I would find very interesting to research
further within this class room.

Having almost drowned myself in reading on post structural and critical thinking about
education in general and early childhood education and care in particular, I find that it is
important to start the journey to activism and criticise the ‘truths’ that we are made to believe
within our field. This truth of ‘developmentally appropriate practice’ which looks at children
as ‘incomplete’ is very strong in the views of the teachers in this reception class, and not
surprisingly. This view is very strong around the world and especially in the English speaking
world (MacNaughton, 2005) and I think it is important that we change it. Educators need to
get reflective in their practice, asking themselves why they are doing things the way they are
and change them if they find them not to be correct. I am certain that if we in early childhood
education really do reflect and criticise our practice, we will change it and improve the
experiences children have in our settings.

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4.3 Power
4.3.1 Power and relationships

Circle time. This activity goes on every day for about 30 to 45 minutes. 13
children and three teachers are sitting on plastic chairs in a circle in the centre
of the classroom. One teacher is leading the learning activity which is about
numbers, colours, shapes, dates and the weather. She uses hand-puppies to
engage the children and songs from a CD to sing about the learning activities.
Today, she starts with the numbers. She shows the children a poster with each
number on and asks them to tell her what the number is called. She puts the
poster on the floor. When all the numbers are on the floor she calls one child
to her at a time, asks them to pick a small number from a box and match it with
the numbers on the floor. Few of the children are able to do this on their own;
some can do it with a little help while others need more help from the teachers
(field notes, 26th April 2012).

... you have to show them that there are moments when you have to sit down
and there are moments when you have to jump and play, and there are
moments when you are ... so you have to show them that there is time for
everything”.

“You have to try to get them interested in what we are doing ... well you know, you
can’t expect too much from them”.

“I think that teachers and helpers have to go more down to their levels to understand
so we can help them more with what they have” (Interview with Joan, 8th May 2012).

Preparation for kindergarten was a major theme I got from my observations and interviews.
The main aim of the reception class seems to be to prepare children for more formal learning
in kindergarten, which made the learning in the reception class also quite formal as can be
seen in the circle time episode. The focus of the circle time is to teach children about numbers
and other things like that so that they will know them before they start kindergarten. One of
the teachers, Joan, expressed her worry over this trend of having the children do too much
academic work when they were not all ready, but she felt pressured by the school
administration and parents to follow the curriculum and not question it openly.

When discussing this in connection to power relations, it is clear who has the power and who
does not. Children are seen as incompetent and in need of teaching and training in order to
succeed in school. The focus is on what they do not know and how we can ‘improve’ them so
they will be ready for the next step in their lives. There is little or no focus on the here and
now of children’s lives. In Foucault’s (1991) terms, this preparation is a way of creating

29
‘docile bodies’, preparing the individual for the future and to become a valid member of
society, someone who contributes and helps maintain the status quo, a “useful individual”
(p. 211). Preparation has become the main aim of many early childhood settings around the
world, creating docile bodies ready to be filled with the knowledge and the ‘regime of truth’
of the powers that be. The main aim for why the children in this reception class were there
was so they would be ready for kindergarten. One can see that clearly in this episode where
children are being made to learn numbers so they are ready to continue to kindergarten even if
they perhaps are not all ready for this kind of lessons. Few of the children in the group were
able to repeat the numbers successfully and most of them did not seem to understand at all
what was expected of them. This really made me question the appropriateness of this kind of
lessons and if they do indeed prepare children. It seems more to make the children feel less
competent and less adequate when perhaps it should be the goal of ECEC to help children feel
more competent and more adequate so they will belief in themselves and be confident to start
the more formal learning of kindergarten and primary school. I really feel that this is a trend
we should be aware of and question as well as asking ourselves if the learning and teaching in
formal education are necessarily better than the learning and teaching that goes on in many
early childhood settings around the world.

4.3.2 Power and knowledge

Observation during circle time:

Miss Joan: “Emma, what colour is your horse?”

Emma (2.8): “It is pink!” (She laughs and giggles looking at the other
children).
Miss Joan: “Pink? No, it is not pink. What colour is it?”
Emma does not answer.
Miss Joan: “Is it brown and black?”
Emma nods her head, looking down.
Miss Joan: “Yes, it is brown and black, your horse” (field notes, 2nd May
2012).
This is an episode I witnessed where the focus is on the teaching of the correct answer. The
teacher is in the role of the powerful knowledgeable expert and the child is the one that does
not know and needs to be corrected. I understand that the teacher is working on teaching the
children certain skills that they ‘need’ to learn in the reception class so that they are ‘ready’

30
for kindergarten, knowing their colours being one of those skills. I also understand that the
teacher is under some pressure and perhaps was also trying to show me that she was a ‘good’
teacher. The presence of a researcher is always going to have some impact on the behaviour
of those being observed. What I found surprising was that there was no room for the child to
use her imagination and play with the truth. Because horses are not pink, we should not
pretend they are pink. Even if we really like pink! This example is similar to the one in the
development project (Olafsdottir, 2005) conducted in Iceland in the Sæborg playschool I
discussed in my literature review chapter, where the boy was not allowed to have his giraffe
pink. So the issue of factual knowledge being prioritised and the power-knowledge issue
influencing the practice of teachers are not bound to one culture or one educational system.

I suppose this episodes to some extend describes both a clash of cultures as well as a
difference in professional practice. I am not used to having academic pressure put on my work
in early childhood education so for me it makes no difference if a horse is pink or brown as I
believe that children will eventually find out the real colours of horses anyway. There is,
therefore, no harm in allowing them to play around with facts and truths. As Foucault says,
there is no such thing as ‘the truth’; perhaps Emma’s horse is pink to her even though to other
people it is brown. She loves her horse and she loves the colour pink so to her it may make
sense that they merge together.

Foucault (1991) was very clear about the relationship between knowledge and power. To him,
knowledge creates power, and the one with power is the one holding the key to the ‘truth’ that
everybody is made to believe. It can therefore be scary for teachers, who are holding this
power, to let go and allow children to create their own truth. In this episode, the teacher may
feel pressure to teach children the right and true colour of horses and to remain serious and
‘professional’ in her teaching as well as wanting to keep the power balance intact. I feel that
within ECEC we should at least have the space and the inclination to allow such playfulness
to exist and even encourage it in our children. Berit Bae (1996) discusses how important it is
for teachers of the youngest children to be awake mentally and ready to accept children’s
thinking and reasoning even if it is unexpected and not in line with reality. She claims that it
is important not “...to kill their thinking with the “right answer” and underestimate their desire
for independent meaning-making” (transl., p. 37). When we make the ‘truth’ and ‘reality’
become too important in early childhood education we can often destroy children’s creative
thinking, even if we do not mean to.

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4.4 Normalisation
4.4.1 Normalisation through common activities

It is time for an activity. In the classroom there are three circular tables with
room for six children. Today, 15 children are in attendance and they are sitting
five at each table with one teacher each. The children all have on protective
clothing so they do not get paint on themselves. The teachers put newspapers
on the tables to protect them from the paint. Each child is given a white paper
plate and a brush. The teacher has yellow paint in a container and tells the
children to take some paint and colour all of the plate yellow. One teacher tells
the children that they are making bees, and points to a readymade bee on the
wall. “This is what we are doing because we are learning about bees”, she
says to them. The children put paint on their brushes and start painting their
plates. The teachers give them more paint when they need it and encourage
them to paint all of the plate. One child turns the plate around and starts
painting on the other side but the teacher quickly corrects the child. “No, you
have to paint on this side, for the bee”. The child continues, painting on the
correct side of the plate. Those children who finish painting the whole of their
plate are told to put it away outside of the classroom for it to dry. Those
children who have not covered whole of their plate are assisted in doing so by
the teachers (field notes, 2nd May 2012).

Some days later, during free table play. One teacher positions herself at one
table in the corner of the classroom. She has the yellow plates that the children
painted earlier. She also has a brush and black paint in a container. She calls
one child at a time to come to her and tells them that they are finishing making
the bee, because bees have black stripes on them. The children are given a
brush. The teacher holds their hand as they put the black paint on the brush
and make a few stripes on the yellow paint. She takes the brush away and
praises the child for doing a good job. The plate is then put away to dry (field
notes, 7th May 2012).

The first thing I noticed when I came into this classroom was that all the artwork looked the
same. You could not tell if the children had done them or the teachers, except that the
children’s names where written on each of them. Each and every bee or ladybug looked
identical and when reading this episode you can see why as the children are not given a free
choice of what they did or how they did it when they are creating artwork. The teacher would
take one child at a time, hold the hand and make the child do the artwork the ‘right’ way. In
this way, all the artwork looks ‘beautiful’ and like the original, that is, the bee the child
‘made’ looks like a real bee. The concern of the teachers was that the artwork looked beautiful
and that everybody had the same. It was part of the curriculum to work with bees or ladybugs

32
and the parents were expecting to get artwork that showed that the children had been learning
what they were supposed to learn.

This example of practice is very different from the practice I am used to from Iceland. Back
home, I might give the children a task of making a bee, even showing them a bee as a model
for them to copy, but the result of the artwork would be up to the children. The focus is more
on the process of making the artwork, the thinking of the child and the experience she has
while doing the work, while the end result itself is a bi-product of the process. Here, I found
that the only focus, or at least the main focus, is on the result, the process itself is not
considered important.

Michel Foucault (1991) was critical of the Western ideal of individualism. For him, the more
individual you are the more abnormal you are. Individuality is a construct created to control
us and keep us striving for freedom that does not really exist and education is one way of
making the individual easier to control. Now, emphasising Foucault’s critique of
individuality, one could say that the practice of having the entire artwork look identical would
be a positive one as each child is not made into an individual but the group of children are as
one whole. Because every piece looks the same it is not possible to draw out the ‘normal’
ones or classify the children based on their product in any way except as members of a group.
In fact, each child is invisible; the individual child cannot be seen in the artwork. Only the
group, the class, can be seen, measured and categorised.

There is, however, also a different Foucaultian perspective that can be applied here. In the
artwork, one can see the techniques of a ‘normalising judgment’ typical of the examination.
The artwork is judged on the basis of it being beautiful and looking like the original, and the
children are being judged as not being able to do a good enough job on their own. In
Foucault’s words, “the superimposition of the power relations and knowledge relations
assumes in the examination all its visible brilliance” (1991, p. 185). Normalisation is a big
part of the examination, as Foucault describes it, and here it can also be tied to power
relationships and children’s agency. The teachers and the parents are the ones with the
knowledge of how a bee or a ladybug should look like, and they have the power to impose
that knowledge upon the children who have no control over what they are made to produce.

33
4.4.2 Normalisation through socialisation

“They really want to be social and to be with you and other children.
Sometimes they are not all at the same level of being able to be social, they
don’t know how to be with other children and how to share and play with them,
but some are very good at it” (Interview with Mary, 7th May 2012).

“And I think you have to have a little bit of discipline with them, you have to
put them into a routine. You have to love them a lot ... we work hard to gain
their trust in the beginning. Then we start working on putting them into a
routine, to show them around, how to play and things like that” (Interview
with Joan, 8th May 2012).

In the interviews, two of the teachers made the remark that the children are indeed different
and they have their own personalities and characteristics. One teacher said that it was
important to teach the children how to behave in the class and to play with other children,
how to help them be like the other children. This is what is traditionally called ‘socialisation’,
which can be said to be one form of normalisation, teaching or ‘training’ children to fit into a
group, to behave like other children. To be the Same and not the Other.

John Dewey (1997) was very clear on how important experiences are to children and how
important it is that those experiences are good, enjoyable and educative for children to get the
true benefits of education. William Corsaro (2005) is also very clear in his writings on
socialisation that it is important that we move away from the traditional view of socialising
children to be with other children and instead look at children as engaged social actors who
want and know how to be with their peers. Mary seems to acknowledge that the children
really do want to be social and are trying but that sometimes they do not know how to be.
Joan’s view echoes Mary’s in many ways. They need to show and teach children how to play
and be with other children. This is in line with the traditional view of children needing to be
taught and ‘trained’ by us adults for them to learn to behave in a manner we want them to
behave in. For Foucault, teaching and training is not necessarily a negative aspect of
education. It is simply a part of it. We will always need somebody to have power and
somebody to be subject to power for society to work and not ascend into chaos. Foucault’s
opinion is simply that we must be aware of the power relationships between people, in this
case, between young children and adults (Said, 1986). I feel that we need to look differently at
the competencies children have to be social and have an open mind to how their social
interactions function as often they are different from the social interactions of adults. Children
are more physical and innovative in their interactions and often the unexpected takes place,

34
which can have adults feeling somewhat uncomfortable (Bae, 1996) and in need to ‘socialise’
children into behaving like adults. Looking at children as competent and active in their own
social interactions and relationships may help us go beyond the traditional view and into a
future with early childhood education seen as important and crucial for young children, not
just as a place for preparation and socialisation, but as a place of innovation, imagination and
immense joy and happy experiences.

4.5. Resistance

4.5.1 Resistance through humour

Michael (3.0) is playing with the building blocks. He is making a shooting gun.
He tells me that it is a shooting gun, but a joke. I don’t really understand him
at first, just say that it is a very nice gun (at this time I don’t know the rule that
it is not allowed to make guns). I think he realised quickly that I don’t know the
rule and he starts playing much more loudly at shooting me and Billy (3.0),
who was playing as well. Next to me, Jack (2.10) is also playing, making a very
nice yellow tower. He keeps showing it to me again and again, very proud.
Opposite me is Aaron (2.10) making a sailboat, but the children had just been
making sailboats in their previous activity. At this time, Michael is getting very
loud and rough, both with me and with Billy. Miss Joan comes over and sits
next to Michael. Eliza (3.2) also joins the play. Michael and Billy continue
their gun play and Michael says loudly to Miss Joan that this is a shooting gun.
First she doesn’t hear him but he repeats it several times until she listens. She
says, “no, then you must leave the block play, it is not allowed to use guns”.
Michael is very quick to say that it is a joke; he repeats it many times over until
Miss Joan repeats it back to him. Then he calms down and keeps playing for a
few moments until it is time to clean up (field notes, 30th April 2012).

I find this episode very interesting and I believe it is very common to see this within early
childhood settings around the world. Penny Holland (2003) discusses this issue in her book
and concludes that because the field of early childhood education is dominated by females we
often do not allow boys, and she claims it is mostly boys, to play rough or to play war games.
This is in line with what can be seen in the episode above and I have also witnessed it, and
most probably attributed to this practice, in my own experience. However, children are
resourceful and will find ways of doing what they want to do when faced with unfair rules. It
is interesting to discuss the issue of this ban on war games and rough play imposed on
children in early childhood settings. Who decided that it should be banned? And why? And

35
given the resistance of children to this rule, why is it still so popular? These are questions I
find very important for us to ask ourselves and to reflect on whether this practice is good,
necessary and important.

The manner the boy uses the secondary adjustment of humour as a tool to reduce the tension
and the possibility of him getting into trouble shows great innovation and creative thinking on
his part. This would indicate that he is very much capable of thinking outside the box and
using his intellect to read the teacher and her intension. He knows what will happen if he does
not diffuse the situation and he comes up with the solution to use humour. My findings are in
line with the observations Corsaro (2003) had in his studies in Italy and Berkley, where the
children are not afraid and very imaginative in their strategies to resist adult control.

Children are indeed very adept at resisting rules and dealing with governance of their
behaviour within the class room. This resistance shows their agency at work, they are actively
participating in the social relationships in the class room, negotiating with adults about issues
that affect them directly, trying to create new ways of interacting and behaving that they
would find more satisfying (Cobb et al., 2005). I was very impressed by this little boy as this
episode is only one of many I observed. He never gave up trying to have fun and enjoying his
time in the class room, he showed great resilience and such powers of imagination, problem
solving and social aptitude.

4.5.2 Resistance through non-compliance

It is circle time. One boy, Aaron (2.10), has a book with him. He brought it
from home. It is one of those little books children can get from children’s
meals at a fast food chain. It is about cars. He shows it to me and to the other
children many times but never shows it to his teachers. Miss Joan tells him to
put the book under the chair he is sitting on because she says it is disturbing
him from listening to her. He does not. She continues the lesson but soon again
asks him to put the book under the chair. He does not. She then tells him to put
it on the teacher’s desk because it is disturbing him and he is disturbing the
other children. He does not. When she makes a gesture to come and take the
book from him he puts it under the chair. Miss Joan continues her lesson.
Aaron soon picks the book up again. Miss Joan can see that he has the book
but does not say or do anything. Now the circle time is over. Miss Joan tells
Aaron to put the book on the desk because they are going out to play. Aaron
does it without hesitation (field notes, 26th April 2012).

This was a lovely circle time. The children and the teachers were all relaxed and the
atmosphere in the class room was calm and inviting. I could see that Aaron really liked his
36
book. He showed it to me and the other children many times and would forget where he was
and start talking about the cars being red and blue and going very fast. I noticed that he never
showed it to his teachers during circle time, which I suppose is because he knew he should not
be disturbing the lesson. Joan was aware of him having the book but simply ignored it unless
a disturbance occurred. Even after he took the book up again after putting it under his chair
for a moment, she ignored it. I assume it was because at that time he was not disturbing
anyone. This is a method of controlling the classroom I saw repeatedly used by Joan. This is
also a method I would use, and have used previously, when working with young children.
Joan could easily have used her powers as an adult and simply taken the book away from the
boy, but she chooses to read the situation and be flexible. I think that is a very good way of
handling a situation like this. There is a give and take relationship here. Although the teacher
is the one with the power in this relationship, the boy’s agency is respected to some extent.

Both Malaguzzi (as cited in Rinaldi, 2006) and Corsaro (2005) claim that young children use
different strategies to gain control over their lives. They want to have the power to make their
own decisions and they want to share that power with their peers. In spite of this circle time
being relaxed and seemingly pleasant, there is a great deal of struggle and resistance going on
here. Aaron is very much trying to resist a rule he does not seem to like, using the passive
method of non-compliance to do so. To Foucault, there is no power without resistance and no
resistance without power (Usher & Edwards, 1994). Taken that way, Aaron’s resistance to a
rule he perhaps finds oppressive is completely normal and should be acceptable. Foucault
(1994) also claimed that resistance is an integral part of any power relation as everybody
always wants to hold the power, be it a child or an adult. Within ECEC it does come down to
the educator being able and willing to use this resistance to the benefit of the child and, hence,
respect the child’s agency and keep the balance of the power relationship levelled. Perhaps the
teacher could have used his interest in this book by making it a part of the lesson. There were
different colours and numbers that could have been discussed there, what where the cars
doing and why? Are they friends or are they fighting? Does anyone else have a book about
cars they would like to talk about? Many things could have been learned and examined by
using the book and the interest in the lesson. Children have a way of creating their own peer
culture out of their daily lives at early childhood education settings and we as educators
should be willing and able to express our interest in their lives.

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Chapter five: Conclusion

5.1 Introduction

The main aims and objectives of this study were to examine the issues of agency and power
within ECEC using the ideas and writings of Michel Foucault. I did my research with a group
of children and educators within a Maltese reception class. As well as using Foucault to
examine the issues of agency and power, I also looked at the practice of normalisation and
children’s resistance and attempts to gain power over their lives. These are issues that I
strongly believe are important within ECEC and beyond, and I feel that it is crucial for
educators and researchers within the field to gain more knowledge about children’s daily lives
and experiences within early childhood and care institutions so that we may better provide for
them and better understand what is going on and what should be going on.

The findings indicate that the key to listening to young children is viewing them as strong and
competent social actors that have abilities, capabilities and agency. This is a view I would
argue for as well. I truly believe it from the bottom of my heart that children are competent,
that they already have agency although us adults often do not acknowledge that they do, and
that if we treat children as strong and capable, they will be just that because that is how they
are meant to be. The findings helped me understand better the issues I wanted to explore. I
wanted to know what is going on in children’s lives within an ECEC setting, how the issues
of power, knowledge, agency, normalisation, observation, struggle and resistance are
influencing the lives of children and teachers.

When looking at the research questions, I can draw certain conclusions from my findings. My
main research question was how the power relationship within a Maltese ECEC class-room
reflects children’s agency? My conclusion is that the power dynamics within the class-room
do not favour children having agency or power over their lives. The educators are the one
holding the power, they are the ones that hold the knowledge, they plan and organise the
setting and children’s voice or opinion is not thought of as important at all. Still, the power
relationship is not completely linear. The educators are indeed the ones that seem to hold all
the power, but they also have to follow what the leaders of the school and parents want, and
during the school day they do follow children’s needs and will when it comes to certain
activities such as lunch and play. The power dynamics therefore changes and moves during

38
the day and depending on different interactions, but I find it mostly to move away from the
children and towards adults. The main instance when children have more freedom is during
free-play outside, but that is still on the adult’s terms who regulate when children can play,
with what they can play and how they can play.

My first sub-research question was regarding how the teachers view the children in their
class-room? My participant teachers mostly view children as incompetent and in need of
protection and teaching by the expert teacher and that the role of the reception class is to
socialise and prepare children for kindergarten and further schooling. This view did not,
however, prevent the children from trying to be active in their peer group. I observed many
moments of resistance in the class-room, with the children using different strategies and
methods to challenge the power structure, proving that children indeed have agency and are
innovative and competent in their social behaviours within the class-room. That answers my
second sub-question regarding how children resist power within their class-room.

The findings of this study therefore support my hypothesis that I put forward before I started
that the issues of agency and power are not considered important and that children do use
innovative methods and strategies to resist rules they do not like.

5.2 Recommendations for future work

My research findings gave me the answers I was looking for but they also gave me many
more questions that I would be interested in researching further, either in Malta or anywhere
else in the world.

The view of the main aim of the reception class in Malta being preparation for kindergarten is
a possible research topic to take further. I found that the teachers were somewhat worried that
they were putting too much pressure on the children to gain academic skills even when they
understood that perhaps the children were not ready to learn those skills. The pressure was
coming from the school management and from parents. The circle time activities were often
accompanied with a great deal of corrections and ‘nagging’ by the teachers when children
simply did not understand what they were supposed to do or found the activities not relevant
to them at all. My research was very small and I cannot generalise that this is the situation in
the whole of Malta. However, it might be interesting to see if this is a view shared by more
reception class teachers and helpers and if so, what can be done about it?
39
Connected to my first recommendation could be a study into why the ECEC environment is
the way it is in Malta. What has influenced the system? Is there something in the culture or
history that can explain why preparation is considered so important? This is perhaps also
connected to the issue of the view of the child within ECEC and it may be possible to
examine that issue further by finding out why adults have this view and what can be done to
expand it so children’s agency and power can become more in the forefront in the practice.

The view of the child within this class room is also a possible research topic that could be
interesting to examine further. A development project could be undertaken where children’s
views on activities and learning experiences could be elicited and teachers could be helped to
use those views when they plan and organise their class room. This might open the eyes of
many within the field to just how capable children can be when they are treated with respect
and given the opportunity to express themselves and be listened to.

5.3 Implications

The Maltese ECEC system is under much development at this time and great progress has
been made already in the services available to children and the quality of those services and
settings. Studying how children’s lives are affected by these settings has the potential to have
great implications for the future of the ECEC system in Malta. The fact that the children I
observed did indeed show great resilience and patience in their interactions with their teachers
and the peer group indicates that children are much stronger and more capable than they are
often given credit for. Sitting still, not braking any rules and doing everything you are told is
not a sign of a ‘good’ child but perhaps a child that has been turned into a ‘docile body’ and
that will function within the ‘regime of truth’. We should prefer children like the one I
observed, imaginative, non-complying to a degree, resisting and full of resilience and fire to
fight against powers that oppress them and try to turn them into the Same, when they might
much further prefer to be the Other. Perhaps I am being utopian in my aspirations for our
field, but “...Utopia ... provides us with guidance, something to strive for, and the possibility
of occasional achievement” (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005, p. 178). Dahlberg and Moss also admit
to perhaps being too utopian in their ideas and hopes for the future of early childhood
education but they think that it is very important to think outside the box and come up with
new and fresh ideas. I find this notion of Utopia very refreshing and positive and something

40
necessary in the field of early childhood education and care. Perhaps unbridled optimism is
what we need to move our field away from preparation and technical practice as the main aim
of education for the youngest children into having a meaningful discourse about what we
want for our children.

Giving children the best possible experiences in early childhood education and care settings
should be a priority for us all. Understanding their worlds, their behaviours and seeing them
as individuals in their own rights opens up for many possibilities for them to make themselves
heard in the adult world. Children have agency, they are strong and capable and they will
resist and fight when faced with oppression. “A competent child is one who has an adult who
views her as such: The level of expectations is a determining factor” (Rinaldi, 2006, p. 113).

41
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Appendices

Appendix 1: Invitation letter to school

Malta, March 2012

To whom it may concern.

My name is Bryndis Gunnarsdottir and I am a postgraduate student at the University of Malta.

My program is an International Masters in Early Childhood Education and Care conducted
within a consortium of three universities, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied
Sciences, Dublin Institute of Technology and the University of Malta. I am required to
conduct a small scale study in order to fulfil my degree requirements and write about it in a
master’s dissertation. My supervisor for this study is Dr. Duncan Mercieca at the Faculty of
Education.

I would like to invite your school to be a part of my study. My research will focus on the
youngest children’s (2-3 year olds) social relationships. I am planning to do observations of
interactions within the receptions class-room as a whole. The study should not take more than
2-3 weeks in your school and I am planning to stay around 3-4 hours each day. As well as
conducting observations I would like to interview the teachers in the reception class. I want to
stress that the name of the school and all participants will be kept confidential and all data
collected will be destroyed after the dissertation is finished.

Before starting my research, it will be approved by the ethics committees of both the faculty
of education and the university.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions regarding my invitation. My e-mail address
is bryndisg75@gmail.com, mob. 94 64 64 04.
Best regards, Bryndis Gunnarsdottir

47
Appendix 2: Consent form for school

March, 2012

Listening to Young Children: Agency and Power in a Maltese Reception Class.

Bryndis Gunnarsdottir, International Masters in Early Childhood Education and Care at the
University of Malta, bryndisg75@gmail.com, mob. 99 64 64 04.

All information gathered in this study will be kept anonymous and confidential. All data gathered will
be kept in a password-secure laptop until the dissertation is finished when it will be destroyed. This
includes field notes and audio-recordings.

Yes No

1. I confirm that I understand what the study entails and have had the
opportunity to ask relevant questions.

2. I understand that our participation is voluntary and that we are free

to withdraw at any time, without giving reason.

3. I agree to have my school take part in the

above study.

Signature: _______________________________________________

48
Appendix 3: Information letter to teachers

Malta, March 2012

To whom it may concern.

My name is Bryndis Gunnarsdottir and I am a postgraduate student at the University of Malta. My

program is an International Masters in Early Childhood Education and Care conducted within a
consortium of three universities, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Dublin
Institute of Technology and the University of Malta. I am required to conduct a small scale study in
order to fulfil my degree requirements and write about it in a masters dissertation. My supervisor for
this study is Dr. Duncan Mercieca at the Faculty of Education.

I would like to invite you to be a part of my study. My research will focus on the youngest
children’s (2-3 year olds) social relationships. I am planning to do observations of interactions
within the receptions class room as a whole. The study should not take more than 2-3 weeks
in your school and I am planning to stay around 3-4 hours each day.

As well as conducting observations I would like to interview the teachers in the reception
class. All interviews will be anonymous and confidential. All data collected in the interview
will be kept safe on a password-protected laptop until after the dissertation is finished, when it
will be destroyed. I want to stress that the name of the school and all participants will be kept
confidential.

Bryndis Gunnarsdottir. Tel: 99 64 64 04, email: bryndisg75@gmail.com

49
Appendix 4: Consent form for teachers

Listening to Young Children: Agency and Power in a Maltese Reception Class.

Bryndis Gunnarsdottir, International Masters in Early Childhood Education and Care at the
University of Malta, bryndisg75@gmail.com, mob. 99 64 64 04.

All information gathered in this study will be kept anonymous and confidential. All data gathered will
be kept in a password-secure laptop until the dissertation is finished when all data will be destroyed.
This includes field notes and audio-recordings.

Yes No

1. I confirm that I understand what the study entails and have had the
opportunity to ask relevant questions.

2. I understand that my participation is voluntary and that I am free to

withdraw at any time, without giving reason.

3. I agree to take part in the above study.

Name of Participant Date Signature

Name of Researcher Date Signature

________________________ _______________ ___________________

Name of Supervisor Date Signature

50
Appendix 5: Questions for interviews with teachers

1. How long have you worked in a reception class, either in this school or elsewhere?

2. What is your educational level?

3. What do you think is most important when working with receptions class age
children?

4. If you could describe a typical child in your class, what words would you use?

5. What is your understanding of children having agency?

6. What do you think of the statement: The child as powerful?

51