This study explored the experiences of early childhood educators who sought to increase young children’s participation with the purpose of identifying how children’s participation can be made sustainable in early childhood settings. Increasing interest in young children’s participation rights as a result of the UNCRC, General Comment 7 and the new sociology of childhood, has led to a growing expectation that early childhood educators will enact participation rights in practice. There is a limited body of research on both young children’s participation and on the sustainability of early childhood practices. Of the available literature, the majority is framed within a modernist paradigm that fails to acknowledge the multiple and contradictory nature of early childhood practice. / This study used Foucauldian discourse analysis and selected poststructuralist understandings of power, knowledge and truth to explore how socially constructed understandings of young children and of early childhood educators influence participation practices and their sustainability. Three semi-structured interviews were conducted with four early childhood educators across three settings. The analysis of interviews showed particular discourses of childhood informing early childhood practices and creating and maintaining regimes of truth. It highlighted the need to recognise that early childhood educators work within and through multiple and conflicting discourses, each offering a particular subjectivity. The analysis also illuminates the micro-practices of power that limit the possibilities for children’s participation and illustrate the ‘danger’ of assimilating children’s participation into existing early childhood practices without critically reflecting on that process. The study raised the question of whether—rather than how—children’s participation should be sustained if it is operating within a singular dominant discourse. The study’s selected poststructuraist approach enabled it to fill a gap in the existing research, and has implications for practice, policy and training and provides direction for future research in the area of children’s participation.

The main objective of this master&rsquo / s thesis is to analyze the place assigned to human subjectivity by French philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. In order to fulfil the requirements of this objective, what is focused on is their shared critique which is exercised against the traditional conceptions of humanity and subjectivity. Through the thesis, first Foucault&rsquo / s analyses which demonstrate that universal man as a construction emerges as an effect of discursive practices and power relations, and his archaeological method that illustrates knowledge process is not dependent on transcendental consciousness are explained and discussed. Then it is argued that Deleuzian philosophy of becoming which does not submit to any transcendent unity that governs experience is an actual alternative to subject-centered understandings of the world. Throughout the course of arguments it is emphasized that according to both Foucault and Deleuze the human subject is an effect of network type relations that occur in a non-subjective fashion.

The aim of this study is to examine the way preschool teachers relate to, and apply the concept of teaching in various aspects. Furthermore, this study has the purpose of portraying the constructions of the concept of teaching, that give meaning and a course of action in their goal-directed work. The following questions are the starting point for the study: How do preschool teachers interpret the concept of teaching in the preschools practice? How do preschool teachers construct the concept of teaching in their team of co-workers? In what ways is the concept of teaching expressed in projects on the preschools educational documentation (processvägg)? To conduct our study a qualitative research method is applied. We interviewed eight preschool teachers from six different preschools in Stockholm county with sound recording. Further we accumulated photos and notes of each preschools educational documentation. The theoretical framework includes an social constructivistic perspective along with the concepts of the impact of language as well as discourses power. The aim and questions of the study is answered through the appliance of the theoretical framework which is presented in the study’s result and analysis part. The main results of the study are presented in three main categories that present the conclusion that preschool teachers do not perceive the concept of teaching as unclear. However there are different interpretations and discourses that, in collaboration, can cause a difference in how teaching is constructed, practiced and expressed. The preschool teacher's responsibility and leadership is shown to have an impact on how the concept of teaching is constructed. The impact of construction is shown through the use of language and discourses power in their team of co-workers, from planning to expression in practice and in educational documentation.

This research explores parent-teacher consultations in a range of early years settings. Data were collected from eighteen audio-recorded parent-teacher consultations from six different settings and from follow up interviews with parents and teachers. The data related to the consultations and participants’ direct experience of these and revealed the practices of power within these consultations. Using a Foucauldian approach to analysis, the exercise of power and its impact on the parent-teacher relationship was explored. The analysis revealed the ways in which surveillance, normalising judgements and the ‘examination’ of all involved in the reporting process to parents, constitutes an exercise of power. Within the consultation parents, teachers and children are positioned as subjects who are homogenised and judged accordingly. Conversely, the presentation of observations and assessment information leads to the individualisation of children, allowing classifications and comparisons to be made in relation to a particular set of ‘truths’ about what it is to be a child, a parent and a teacher. Throughout the consultations parents and teachers assert and defend their positions and in doing so, attempts at resistance are evident. The findings of the research open up new possibilities for challenging existing modes of practice in parent-teacher consultations. These include implications for initial teacher education and CPD programmes, in order to develop awareness of the way in which power is exercised through parent-teacher interactions and the effects it can have. The need for policy makers to take greater account of the exercise of power when developing policies in relation to partnership with parents, and indeed in evaluating the impact of existing policy is also identified.

A body of critical legal scholarship argues that, by the time they have completed their studies, students who enter legal education holding social ideals and intending to use their legal education to achieve social change, have become cynical about the ability of the law to do so and no longer possess such ideals. This is explained by critical scholars to be the result of a process of ideological indoctrination, aimed at ensuring that graduates uphold the narrow and conservative interests of the legal profession and capitalist society, being exercised by law schools acting as adjuncts of the legal profession, and exercised upon the passive body of the law student. By using Foucault’s work on knowledge, power, and the subject to interrogate the assumptions upon which this narrative is based, this thesis intends to suggest a way of thinking differently to the approach taken by many critical legal scholars. It then uses an analytics of government (based on Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’) to consider the construction of the legal identity differently. It examines the ways in which the governance of the legal identity is rationalised, programmed, and implemented, in three Queensland law schools. It also looks at the way that five prescriptive texts to ‘surviving’ law school suggest students establish and practise a relation to themselves in order to construct their own legal identities. Overall, this analysis shows that governance is not simply conducted in the profession’s interests, but occurs due to a complex arrangement of different practices, which can lead to the construction of skilled legal professional identities as well as ethical lawyer-citizens that hold an interest in justice. The implications of such an analytics provide the basis for original ways of understanding legal education, and legal education scholarship.