Suchergebnisse

Conceptual distinctions between care and early childhood education have influenced and reinforced the construction of knowledge about the early childhood education and care (ECEC) policy area. Discursive constructions in policy texts permeate wider society and become embodied in the broad social domain as "truths", establishing the status quo about how social issues are perceived. Close scrutiny of the knowledge constructed about key concepts within Irish ECEC policy texts between 1998 and 2008 can shed some light on the ideological perspectives shaping the truths about ECEC in Irish society. This research used a critical discourse analysis (CDA) methodology to investigate policy texts; involving the undertaking of a thorough linguistic textual analysis, while also considering the wider political and social context of these texts. Using the CDA method this thesis aimed to understand the conceptual construction of ECEC policy, focusing in on how children's rights are both constructed and obstructed within the truths known about ECEC and how this impacts on a rights based construction of policy. Recent ECEC policy in Ireland has developed in a reactive fashion, paying lip service to the rights of children while more often serving the needs of others. Findings show that the key knowledge constructions within Irish ECEC policy shape early education as subordinate to childcare; thus within this notion of childcare, the provision of places is more urgent than reconceptualising the ECEC sector. The concept of parental choice, and meeting parent's needs and rights, influences policy more so than the rights or needs of children; children are predominantly constructed as in need of early education as preparation for formal schooling. The concept of rights is subordinated to that of needs; targeting has been the favoured policy action as opposed to the provision of universal services. While language of rights, universality and more joined-up policy approaches have permeated the linguistic construction of policy texts, there has been no significant shift within understandings of ECEC or children's rights in the wider policy realm. Without a shift in the conceptual understanding of ECEC policy, a children's rights focus will remain underdeveloped.

The Irish government have invested considerably in the broad early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector over the last decade. However, a distinction persists within Irish policy between childcare and early education, both structurally and conceptually. Early education frequently refers to intervention based pre-school services; conversely childcare frequently refers to the broad spectrum of care services for 0-12 year olds, from family based child care through to centre-based provision (Hayes & Bradley, 2006; NESF, 2005; OECD, 2004). As a result of this, 'early childhood services in Ireland are fractured across the welfare (childcare) and educational (early education) domains and … targeted in nature'(Hayes, 2008, p. 33). The National Children's Strategy marked 'the beginning of a shift towards using rights-based language in policy development … by strongly reflecting the UNCRC' (Hayes, 2002, p. 49). The ambitious language of Irish ECEC policy documents is not always realised in policy implementation, which leads to a tendency toward rhetoric. Using a children's rights lens this paper reports on the preliminary findings of a research study which has sampled these policy documents to analyse the extent to which they consider children and are rights-based from a linguistic perspective. A critical discourse analysis (CDA), which involves thorough analysis of the linguistic structure of documents alongside wider consideration of the socio-political culture in which they were created, allows us to find 'ways into texts' (Pennycook, 2008). Consequently, this paper aims to use CDA to locate Irish ECEC policy, particularly it's approach to 'children's rights', in terms of language and ideology.

Ireland's second periodic report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) presents the government's case that it is succeeding in protecting and promoting the rights of all children in Ireland. This article presents a critical discourse analysis of the governments Report to the CRC. Using a refined critical discourse analysis (CDA) model, based on the framework proposed by Chouliaraki & Fairclough (1999); the linguistic structure of the Report is examined alongside consideration of the wider socio-political context in which it exists. The Report is itself a promotional genre . It lists legislative change, strategy plans and other policy activity intended to have an impact on children's rights. This promotional genre is realised in the Report through drawing on the language necessary to sell the government as successful in implementation of the Convention, to the CRC. Through adherence to the structured language of reporting, in tandem with the careful positioning of paragraphs, the report serves to circumvent the absences of legislation and provisions which directly influence and impact on children's rights. Thus, the analysis reported in this article confirms the view that much of the discourse is rhetorical. Nevertheless, the Report generally represents the government as progressing in the field of implementation of the UNCRC. This has led to an assumption that the reporting mechanisms of the CRC may allow for such rhetorical construction of reports, thus a brief linguistic textual analysis of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child guidelines for periodic reports is included to reveal if there is a case for this assumption.

This paper explores the construction of knowledge about ‗children', ‗rights' and ‗ECEC' in Irish early childhood policy discourses. This research forms part of a wider thematic research project exploring Irish early childhood policy design from a number of angles; this strand of the research is concerned with ―revealing meaning‖ from Irish ECEC policy texts through a critical discourse analysis study. The theoretical goal of a critical discourse analysis study aims to understand how specific realities have come into being in the policy area; how they are reproduced through policy literature, how language use is an integral facet of social processes, and how this shapes meaning about ECEC in wider society. The methodology used in this study follows the general rules proposed in the CDA framework devised by Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999); alongside Foucault's notion that language, power and knowledge are fundamentally interconnected at the level of discourses (1977). The CDA framework was applied to policy texts using a thorough linguistic textual analysis, while also considering the wider dominant political and social context at the time of publication and dissemination. Discourses of knowledge about Irish ECEC policy have been constructed twofold; as policy responding to a ‗childcare crisis', and, as policy targeting educational disadvantage; both of which fall short of conceptualising services and supports as rights-based. This paper aims to show how knowledge about each concept is constructed and represented through the language used in the policy document and explore the significance of these constructs for future policy.