ABSTRACT

This chapter aims to foster critical questions about early childhood education policy and pedagogy, and to examine and challenge the structures and practices that maintain dominant power and power/knowledge relations. In parallel, international influences are evident in narrow views of the purposes and outcomes of early childhood education, and in conceptualisations of the child, conveyed in social welfare policy documents as “vulnerable” and in education policy documents as “priority” and as “learners”. The lines with an upward trajectory in relative terms are percentages of private education and care centres and private homebased services. The context for Safia’s story is the Carol White Family Centre, an education and care centre for children aged birth to 5 years and their families. Asserting democratic values and adopting Freirean ideas is a way towards radical alternatives in early childhood education policy and practice.