ABSTRACT
In early childhood institutions, we often say that we are taking the perspective of the child and that our pedagogical practice is child-centred. What do we mean by that? Childcentredness seems to be such a concrete and unproblematic concept. But in practice it is very abstract and rather problematic. The very term child-centred might be thought to embody a particular modernist understanding of the child, as a unified, reified and essentialized subject-at the centre of the world-that can be viewed and treated apart from relationships and context. The postmodern perspective, in contrast, would decentre the child, viewing the child as existing through its relations with others and always in a particular context. Furthermore, what the term might mean depends on what we understand the young child is and might be-who is the child on whom practice is centred? From our postmodern perspective, there is no such thing as ‘the child’ or ‘childhood’, an essential being and state waiting to be discovered, defined and realized, so that we can say to ourselves and others ‘that is how children are, that is what childhood is’. Instead, there are many children and many childhoods, each constructed by our ‘understandings of childhood and what children are and should be’. Instead of waiting upon scientific knowledge to tell us who the child is, we have choices to make about who we think the child is, and these choices have enormous significance since our construction of the child and early childhood are productive, by which we mean that they determine the institutions we provide for children and the pedagogical work that adults and children undertake in these institutions.
