Abstract
This chapter sets the scene for an emphasis on ‘becoming’ for our youngest children living in a twenty-first-century global world. Taking the view that becoming (or Bildung) is now viewed as central to teaching and learning, a genealogy (Foucault M. The order of discourse. In Young R (ed) Untying the text: a post-structuralist reader. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, pp 51–78, 1981) of its positioning in ECE is offered. Common philosophical and social beliefs concerning infant and toddler ‘becoming’ will be examined with consideration to the time and space of their orientation – historically, geographically and, by association, ideologically. In taking this approach, the chapter will then attempt to relocate ‘becoming’ through a contemplation of the conditions of its meaning in a globalised contemporary world. Through such means the chapter will speculate on what becoming offers (and simultaneously denies) the infant subject as he or she is located within pedagogical practice today.
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Notes
- 1.
Kantian orientations away from knowing this ‘thing’ in itself cannot pass by unnoticed in this interrogation; by bringing morality to bear on the concept of measurement, Kant and his followers provided an imperative that created an urgency in this regard. Kant (1948) sets a revised analytical path for measurement independent of its relation to ‘things’. Here mystery paves the way for various forms of aesthetic judgment that seek to give universal textuality to the forms of masked rationality that lurk beneath certainty and its limits. Formalist approaches to measurement further cement its locale by providing frameworks through which ‘things’ can be judged according to established criteria.
- 2.
Heidegger’s uptake has been variable, and so, in a strange sense, he has been subjected to a becoming of sorts. He has been criticised for his Nazi sympathising (for fuller discussion, see, e.g. Young, 2010). Any writer on Heidegger is challenged with whether they should refer to him or not, and hence they themselves are uncomfortably ‘becoming’.
- 3.
This description of Novalis’ encounter with something other may sound familiar to Hegelians, although there is one crucial difference between the early German Romantics and Hegel. Hegel would prove to be much more globally popular than the early German Romantics, but he would also offer a formalised approach to knowledge. The Romantics were less concerned with structure than inquiring into an enduring and imperceptible impact on the self. They believed, then, that the path to knowledge was infinite, where for Hegel this was not the case.
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White, E.J., Mika, C. (2019). A Genealogy of Becoming (and Being) in the First 1000 Days. In: The First 1000 Days of Early Childhood. Policy and Pedagogy with Under-three Year Olds: Cross-disciplinary Insights and Innovations, vol 2. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9656-5_2
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