Leadership and Policy in ECE: Leadership, Policy, Discourse, and Critique

Leadership and Policy in ECE
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Leadership and Policy in ECE
Discourse basically implies more than the usage of language in conversations or in texts. As Foucault pointed out, discourse is beyond language: it is institutionally, socially and historically structured (Dahlberg, Moss & Pence, 2013). In this paper, the content addressed in the readings is critically examined and reflected upon, and the correlation between discourse, systems of legitimation and leadership is discussed.
In the past 10 years, the notion of discourse has been utilized as a critical-analytical tool by scholars in Early Childhood Education (ECE) among other fields in studying the way some discourses expand and/or limit our understanding of childhood, children, policy and education, and in inquiring into the way that discourses shape how people understand themselves as citizens, administrators and tutors (O’Hagan, 2010). Examples of discourses in ECE are the notion of school readiness and the discourse of child development. On the whole, discourse analysis makes evident the suppositions which have been assumed regarding a phenomenon, topic or issue (Dahlberg, Moss & Pence, 2013).
Postmodern discourse brings legitimation crisis, which queries the modernist notion of knowledge as objective truth and certainty, the assertion to which is validated or legitimated due to being the product of objective and abstract scientific enquiry – effectively giving science a monopoly on truth. Knowledge, from a post-modern discourse standpoint, is considered as inscribed in power relations that determine what is regarded as falsity or truth. In a world that is socially-constructed, there could be no external position of certainty, no metanarrative to provide external legitimation. Through the crises of representation and legitimation, postmodernity problemizes science as well as its assertions to hold a monopoly of the truth (Dahlberg, Moss & Pence, 2013).
According to Habermas, it is feasible to determine the social rules that are wrong or right, and thus to come to general foundations through communication between people via discourse producing communicative reason. Habermas applies cooperation and interaction, discourse and reflection, basing upon procedural rules in constructing foundations (O’Hagan, 2010). Argumentation is used to achieve intersubjective agreement, and what is normatively right or true is judged by means of such argumentative discourse (Dahlberg, Mos...