DISTANT PLACES IN CHILDREN’S EVERYDAY ACTIVITIES: MULTIPLE WORLDS IN AN AUSTRALIAN PRESCHOOL

• Authors: Millei Zsuzsa
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Global flows and their geopolitical power relations powerfully shape the environments in which children lead their everyday lives. Children’s images, imaginations and ideas of distant places are part of these global flows and the everyday activities children perform in preschool. Research explores how through curricula young children are moulded into global and cosmopolitan citizens and how children make sense of distant places through globally circulating ideas, images and imaginations. How these ideas, images and imaginations form an unproblematised part of young children’s everyday preschool activities and identity formation has been much less explored, if at all. The author uses Massey’s (2005) concept of a ‘global sense of place’ in her analysis of ethnographic data collected in an Australian preschool to explore how children produce global qualities of preschool places and form and perform identities by relating to distant places. She pays special attention to how place, objects and children become entangled, and to the sensory aspects of their emplaced experiences, as distant spatialities embed in and as children’s bodies inhabit the preschool place. To conclude the author calls for critical pedagogies to engage with children’s use of these constructions to draw similarities or contrast aspects of distant places and self, potentially reproducing global power relations by fixing representations of places and through uncritically enacting stereotypes.

Keywords

EN

GLOBALISATION; CHILDHOOD EDUCATION; COSMOPOLITANISM; ETHNOGRAPHY

• Publisher: Faculty of Education, Trnava University
• Journal: Pedagogický časopis (Journal of Pedagogy)
• Year: 2018
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 133 – 153

Contributors

author

Millei Zsuzsa

• University of Tampere, Faculty of Education, Institute for Advanced Social Research, Kanslerinrinne 1, Tampere, FI-33014, Finland

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/jped-2018-0007