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Dahlberg Et Al 2023 Ciec Colloquium Reflections On Beyond Quality at 25 Years
Dahlberg Et Al 2023 Ciec Colloquium Reflections On Beyond Quality at 25 Years
Gunilla Dahlberg
Stockholm University, Sweden
Peter Moss
University College London IOE Faculty of Education and Society, UK
Alan Pence
University of Victoria, Canada
Abstract
In this colloquium, the authors of Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care, which was
published 25 years ago, reflect on the book’s core arguments about the ‘problem with quality’, the
neoliberal origins of ‘the age of quality’ and the book’s impact.
Keywords
early childhood education and care, quality, neoliberalism, evaluation
Corresponding author:
Peter Moss, Thomas Coram Research Unit, University College London IOE Faculty of Education and Society, 27 Woburn
Square, London WC1H 0AL, UK.
Email: peter.moss@ucl.ac.uk
132 Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 25(1)
Could the concept and practice of quality welcome and include context and values, subjectivity and
multiple perspectives, complexity and uncertainty, participation and argumentation? And if so, how?
Without convincing answers, quality seemed to lead down a dangerous road, contributing to two dis-
turbing processes: the increasing standardisation and regulation of modern life (which is accompanied
by a rhetoric of individualism, diversity and choice) and the substitution of democratic politics by man-
agerial practice (accompanied by a rhetoric of participation, listening and empowerment). (2013: xiii)
The book’s conclusion about the problem was clear: ‘the concept and language of quality cannot
accommodate issues such as diversity, and multiple perspectives, contextual specificity and subject-
ivity. To do that we must go beyond the concept of quality’ (2013: 7). ‘Quality’ cannot accommo-
date these issues because it is not a neutral term; the concept of ‘quality’ is inscribed with values and
assumptions, not only universality and objectivity, but also stability, certainty and closure – values
and assumptions incompatible with welcoming context, diversity, subjectivity and multiplicity.
Indeed, ‘quality’ is a socially constructed concept with a very particular meaning: conformity to
expert-derived norms that are presumed to be universal, objective and stable. As such, ‘it is a tech-
nology of regulation, providing a powerful tool for management to govern at a distance through the
setting and measurement of norms of performance’ (2013: xv).
Practicing ‘quality’ is, therefore, a choice and not a necessity. By all means, we concluded,
choose to use the concept. But then recognise you’ve made a political choice, a choice with con-
sequences, a choice for which you take responsibility. In short, don’t take ‘quality’ for granted.
‘Quality’ is often used in evaluation, another theme of the book. The publishers of the Italian
edition, Reggio Children, altered the book’s subtitle from our original Postmodern Perspectives
to Languages of Evaluation – a title we, as authors, liked and adopted for later English editions.
The book offers an other language of evaluation, contrasting with the language of quality, what
we termed ‘meaning making’, a language that
foregrounds deepening understanding of the pedagogical work and other projects of the institution,
leading to the possibility of making a judgment of value about these projects. If the ‘discourse of
quality’ can be seen as part of a wider movement of quantification and objectivity intended to reduce
or exclude the role of personal judgment, with its attendant problems of partiality and prejudice, self-
interest and inconsistency, the ‘discourse of meaning making’ can be seen as reclaiming the idea of
judgment – but understood now to be a discursive act, always made in relationship with others.
(2013: 92)
through the English language, is inscribed with an instrumental, managerial and economistic ration-
ality that has advocated early childhood education and care as a solution to a range of problems –
provided only that correct ‘human technologies’ are applied at the right time and in the correct
manner. It is a discourse that one of us has termed the ‘Story of Quality and High Returns’
(Moss, 2014).
One reason for the book’s relative success has been its resonance with members of that growing
resistance movement. It brings critical thinking to bear on the Story of Quality and High Returns.
And it also holds out hope that there are alternative narratives, alternatives that are richer, more
complex and more satisfying, alternatives that hold out the prospect of getting beyond quality
and everything it stands for.
‘Beyond Quality’ was very much a collective effort over several years by the three of us, and
followed an earlier publication – Valuing Quality in Early Childhood Services (Moss and Pence,
1994) – to which we all contributed. This colloquium is, by contrast, three discrete reflections,
each by a different author. A more individualistic approach reflects, in part, the different directions
we have each taken since the book was first published – in our work, our interests and our perspec-
tives. It reflects, too, the geographical separation between us, coming as we do from Sweden,
England and Canada. But it also reflects a shortage of time to exchange, discuss, disagree and
come to new understandings.
A final word: if you have any reactions or reflections to offer on Beyond Quality, 25 years on, we
would love to hear from you. You can contact us via peter.moss@ucl.ac.uk.
enter the educational system (Broady, 1984). We could observe how the ideology and economistic
language of neoliberalism slipped into the administration of preschools, and then into their peda-
gogical practices. Preschools were also infiltrated by market logic: many began to market them-
selves, while parents were increasingly labelled ‘customers’ and ‘service users’, ‘services’ being
a new concept in Sweden when talking about preschools. ‘Quality’ also appeared, to be evaluated
by measuring ‘customer satisfaction’, while an array of rating scales began to circulate through the
preschool system.
makers of worlds, though more so the children, as they are not yet so constrained by categorisations
and representations.
This has led us to ask if it is the case that Reggio Emilia, through working for 60 years with ideas
such as the intelligent child, the hundred languages, experimentation, research and pedagogical
documentation, has been able to affirm and embrace that which is felt in the event. What Erin
Manning (2016) has called the minor gestures and their power to fashion relations, and their cap-
acity to open up for new modes of experience, manners of expression, and new relations. A kind of
artfulness, in which the pedagogue’s affirmative way of working with multiple listening to what is
already moving, makes it possible to take advantage of the intensity and vitality of the event. In A
Pragmatics of the Useless (2020b), Manning brings in Whitehead’s radical empiricism that refuses
to place the human at the centre, and asks, ‘where has subjectivity gone?’
This is not a search for any pre-existing notion of subjectivity. Rather, Manning’s question con-
cerns a collective individuation and a pragmatic account of what makes a difference become reso-
lutely more-than human. She states that at every turn the question is not ‘who did this?’, but ‘what
ecology of practices fashioned the conditions for its doings?’ To do so, she proposes to work with
an affirmative politics of emergent subjectivity. Like Massumi proposes above, she says that we
always happen in the middle, through immediation, in which the body is always a world: ‘Not
first a thought, then an action, then a result, but a middling … Not first a body, then a world,
but a worlding through which bodying emerges’ (Manning, 2020b: 33).
This is a reconstruction of the pragmatic scene of didactics. It is an immanent didactics that has
border-crossed the idea of action at a distance, in which the classroom space is manipulated from
outside by measurements and procedures constructed by others, as if the children and pedagogues
were disembodied subjects handling an object (Dahlberg, 2016; Massumi, 2002). It’s about staying
alive (Novosel and Dahlberg, 2021; Stern, 2010) through creating new ways of being together, that
may widen our existential horizons through researching and experimenting with critical questions,
without solutions already given. Like Gilles Deleuze has formulated so engagingly in the book
Dialogues written with Claire Parnet,
If you are not allowed to invent your questions from all over the place, from never mind where, if people
pour them into you, you haven’t much to say. While others, and while each child is bringing in her/his
lot, a becoming is sketched out between the different perspectives. Then a block starts moving, a block
which no longer belongs to anyone, but is ‘between’ everyone. Like a little boat which children let slip
and loose, and is stolen by others. (Deleuze and Parnet, 1977: 7)
To accomplish this, pedagogues need to install themselves in the work, together with the chil-
dren, through following the dynamic signs and traces that unfold (or are blocked) in the event. With
further inspiration from Manning’s work the following questions may be asked: What is happening
here? What kinds of experiences are produced? What new thoughts and actions are arising between
children, teachers and materials? What new perceptions and affects are opening in our bodies? This
is a language that goes ‘beyond quality’, with its false dichotomy between process and outcome,
and that transgresses social investment thinking and its standard-based performance assessments,
which since the late 1980s have intruded into pedagogical work through the logic of neoliberalism
and New Public Management.
Actually, it opens for Felix Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm (1995; see also Dahlberg,
2016), in which he stresses the importance of responding to the event, since it holds the possibility
for creativity of thought as a potential bearer of new constellations of universes of existence.
Without this, he argues, we will not be able to solve any of the enormous environmental, social
and mental problems that we face in the twenty-first century.
Dahlberg et al. 137
I want to reflect on these words from the ‘Authors’ introduction’ to the third edition of the
English-language version of Beyond Quality. Twenty-five years on from the book’s initial publica-
tion, I still attempt to work with this ‘simple idea’, choosing not to talk or write about ‘quality’ –
except when writing critically about it. I have also dug deeper into the problem with quality, which
lies at the heart of the book, as well as my own antipathy, almost visceral, to the word and the
concept it represents. Yet in doing so, it has seemed like ploughing a lonely furrow, as the cacoph-
ony of voices talking ‘quality’ seems to become ever more deafening, with precious little recogni-
tion that ‘quality’ is ‘a choice not a necessity’. Whether in reports from international organisations,
policy documents from governments or the publications of researchers, there are few signs of
‘people and organisations think[ing] twice before using’ the term.
because there should be one correct technical answer to producing a good aeroplane, an answer
that is universally agreed by experts and applies irrespective of cultural, historical, political or
social context – in this respect, it should make no difference where I fly. In short, when it
comes to flying in aeroplanes, I want universal standards and objective, certain and decontextua-
lised measurement of performance.
But doing education is different to flying in an aeroplane. As Loris Malaguzzi put it pedagogy is
‘always a political discourse whether we know it or not … it clearly means working with political
choices’ (Cagliari et al., 2016: 267). For there is no one correct technical answer to defining and
producing a good education, no objective, certain and decontextualised standard of performance.
There are only political choices to political questions, political because there are many possible
and often conflicting answers to vital questions about education, such as ‘what is our image of
the child?’, ‘what are the purposes of education?’, ‘what do we mean by “education” or
“care”?’, or ‘what are the fundamental values and ethics of education?’ Early childhood education,
all education, is therefore inherently political and contestable. To search for ‘quality’ in education is
to misunderstand the subject, seeking universal standards and expert consensus where none exist.
Aeroplanes and education are essentially different!
a story of control and calculation, technology and measurement that, in a nutshell, goes like this. Find,
invest in and apply the correct human technologies – aka ‘quality’ – during early childhood and you will
get high returns on investment including improved education, employment and earnings and reduced
social problems … Invest early and invest smartly and we will all live happily ever after in a world
of more of the same – only more so. (Moss, 2014: 3)
Getting ‘beyond quality’ calls for putting a stutter in this dominant narrative, and for telling new
stories (as well as reclaiming some old ones). For, as Monbiot (2017) concludes, ‘the only thing that
can displace a story is a story’. This chimes with the remit of the book series ‘Contesting Early
Childhood’ (www.routledge.com/Contesting-Early-Childhood/book-series/SE0623), co-edited by
myself and Gunilla Dahlberg for a number of years, which ‘questions the current dominant dis-
courses surrounding early childhood and offers instead alternative narratives of an area that is
now made up of a multitude of perspectives and debates’.
My contribution to this project of alternative storytelling has been to offer, in the
Transformative Change book, what I call the ‘story of democracy, experimentation and poten-
tiality’. This is a story of
an education built upon and inscribed with two fundamental values – democracy and experimentation –
and a belief in the endless and unknowable potentialities of people and the institutions they create … It is
a story that attaches the utmost importance to early childhood education, but for reasons quite different
from the story of quality and high returns. (Moss, 2014: 5)
Dahlberg et al. 139
As well as setting out ideas about a good education, based explicitly on political choices to pol-
itical questions, this story suggests how to get ‘beyond quality’ in our everyday language and dia-
logue. So instead of talking about ‘quality early childhood education’, which renders political
choices invisible behind the bland mask of ‘quality’, we can use one or more of the salient
choices we have made – for example, ‘democracy, experimentation and potentiality’ – to name
and signify the kind of education we desire and to talk about ‘what is important to us’.
He wished to discuss concerns the Council had about an ECD post-secondary programme it was
currently offering and its desire to work with a new partner to ensure that the values, understandings
and complex socio-historical dynamics of life in their communities would be part of a
university-accredited programme delivered on-site in their communities. This was to prove a
first for the Council and for UVic.
With such clarity of purpose, and with the Tribal Council firmly in the ‘driver’s seat’, the oppor-
tunity to co-construct an alternative to conventional, colonially based practices in ‘higher’ educa-
tion was not to be missed and a partnership was formed. Both partners agreed that singular, Western
knowledge would not achieve the desired, context-relevant outcomes. Adding other sources of
knowledge opened the door for complexity, contestation and argumentation. It allowed ‘quality’,
relevance, ownership and empowerment to interact. One key source would be knowledge from
the community – typically, but not exclusively, knowledge from respected Elders. With a diverse
‘pool’ of knowledge sources, students could consider and then ‘generate’ their own understandings
and practices, to be followed by contextually sensitive evaluations.
An external evaluation, led by a nationally recognised Elder familiar with the Council commu-
nities, concluded that not only had the programme exceeded expectations regarding student com-
pletion rates1 and demonstrated competence, but that the most significant outcome was a change in
the communities’ image of themselves as capable contributors to their own students’ learning (Jette,
1993). This central finding opened a much broader discussion about the possibilities of, and ways of
understanding, ‘quality’ in ECD – moving beyond a micro-focus to consider broader societal
implications.
Interestingly, at the same time that the Indigenous evaluator was finding a remarkable increase in
communities’ image of themselves as competent, a commonly used ECD ‘quality’ checkmark tool
was finding a decrease in ‘quality’ scores within the programme. Somewhat surprised, an assess-
ment of those scores found they were the result of staff taking the initiative to enhance the
‘Indigenisation’ of their early childhood spaces, resulting in some materials and experiences
being supplanted by others which were not encompassed by the Western instrument. That variance
between exogenous and endogenous indicators became food for a useful ‘quality’/‘beyond quality’
discussion.
These early 1990s generative curriculum and community development experiences coincided
with discussions Peter Moss and I were having about the need to rethink many aspects of ECD glo-
bally. These discussions formed the basis for the 1994 volume, Valuing Quality. The FNPP, and
certain discussions taking place in developing Valuing Quality and subsequently Beyond
Quality, contributed to the shaping of what became a ‘set’ of ECD capacity development initiatives
in Africa that commenced in the mid-1990s.
ECD in Africa: Seminars, conference series, ECDVU and AS&I. As noted, ECD capacity development
work in Africa in many respects grew out of earlier ECD Summer Institutes as well as learnings
from the generatively focused FNPP. The FNPP and various evolving initiatives within Africa
enabled ideas discussed within Valuing Quality and Beyond Quality to be more fully explored
and operationally addressed across different cultures and Majority World contexts.
While the FNPP had focused on relatively small communities within a typically rural Tribal
Council structure, the work in Africa engaged country-identified leaders from central governments,
post-secondary institutions, national networks and non-governmental organisations, as well as
smaller ‘units’ within each, such as regional and local governments, and local training institutions.
These contextually sensitive, community-involving initiatives frequently encountered very differ-
ent international currents of thought and action – currents that often had little regard for context,
culture or diversity with claims that their externally formulated approaches represented ‘quality’.
142 Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 25(1)
Enhancing bottom-up power and challenging long-standing (and still common) ‘colonial’ top-down
dynamics were central objectives of the Africa work.
The ECD capacity development activities in Africa evolved sequentially, each initiative opening
up possibilities for another. They shared a certain ‘DNA’: each embraced a commitment to promot-
ing and supporting local understanding, local leadership and local capacity (Pence et al., 2023). The
first Africa-wide ECD Conference (held in 1999 in Kampala, Uganda) had the title: Showcasing
Early Childhood Care and Development Innovation and Application in Africa. That conference,
and three subsequent ones (2002, 2005, 2009), featured African keynote speakers, but with a
wide range of other presenters.
After the inaugural 1999 conference, the World Bank announced funding for the development of
a hybrid (online and face-to-face) ECD Leadership and Capacity Development initiative: the ECD
Virtual University (ECDVU; 2001–2017). The idea of a ‘virtual university’ grew out of the suc-
cesses experienced with the African ECD Seminars. The seminars had brought together ECD
leaders from many countries, opening intra-African pathways for sharing and learning that went
beyond dominant North to South knowledge transfer processes.
These activities led in 2008 to the launch of an African Scholars and Institutions Initiative
(AS&I), created as a forum to support not only African-based but African-led research in
context-relevant ECD and enhance academic capacity in Africa. Seven different forums, with 8
to 18 participants at each, took place in various regions of Africa (2008–2018). Some led to
draft, multiple-institution proposals that sought funding to move submissions. However, funds
were never found for such African-led initiatives, while externally driven, non–African-led research
projects remained active in many countries.
Shortly after the AS&I forums were launched, Arnett (2008) published a critique of the
American Psychological Association (APA) literature. He made the case that the research published
in APA journals is based on a ‘small corner [the US] of the human population’ (p. 602). He also
noted that less than 1% of the subjects in the thousands of studies reviewed were in Africa, with
no African lead authors. A 2021 follow-up study confirmed little had changed since. This
absence of African voices exists despite projections that by 2050 40% of the world’s children
will live in Africa (World Economic Forum, 2020)!
The various ways that ‘quality’ for the majority of children in the world might be defined is but
one of many unanswered questions in the ECD literature. The answers to that question lie ‘beyond
quality’ – beyond the literature Joseph Henrich and colleagues describe as coming from WEIRD
populations: populations that are ‘frequent outliers’ globally (Henrich et al., 2010: 1).
These ECD capacity development ‘lessons learned’ in Africa became centrally important when a
new opportunity arose, this time in Canada.
Investigating quality (IQ). The IQ Project was also the result of an invitation, this time from the
British Columbia (BC) Ministry for Child and Family Development (MCFD). The request was
to address the question of ‘quality’ in BC’s early childhood services. Again, ‘quality’ appeared
as a key term and ‘politically’ the term could not be ignored. Fortunately, by this time, 2005,
both Valuing Quality and Beyond Quality had been well received and ‘Reconceptualising Early
Childhood Education’ had become a significant scholarly stream within the early childhood
literature.
The co-leads for IQ, myself and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, saw the intent of the IQ Project to
be transformative and consistent with Beyond Quality aspirations. As such it was important to allay
fears of change anticipated across the systems and structures that made up the ECD eco-system in
BC. Successful transformers globally became key presenters for a series of eleven, three-to-five day
‘IQ forums’ held between 2006 and 2009 (see Pence, 2021). Each forum included sessions tailored
Dahlberg et al. 143
for different parts of the eco-system: government policy and regulatory bodies; education and train-
ing institutions; early childhood professional associations; early childhood frontline care providers;
researchers; and interested individuals from communities. The intent was to allow each part to hear
from the same globally significant leaders in order to create harmonised reverberations that would
allow for and reinforce systemic change. The intent was not to create a top-down, uniform way of
doing things, but instead to promote an approach to ECD that was open to contestation and respon-
sive to diverse contexts, cultures and conditions across the province.
Overlapping IQ’s first two phases (2005–2009), the BC government undertook to develop a new
ECD policy document, that came to be called BC’s Early Learning Framework (ELF) (Government
of British Columbia, 2008, 2019). The timing provided the opportunity for IQ to help shape this
new policy. The Ministry of Education subsequently contracted the IQ ‘team’ to coordinate the
implementation of the ELF, which included a focus on pedagogical documentation.
As the IQ Project’s funding stretched beyond the initial four years, the Project became not just
one ‘story’, but many. The IQ Project is now engaged with second- and third-generation actors,
those brought into the ‘IQ family’ through earlier participant-leaders. With each ‘generation’
new influences and directions can be seen and felt, but in the words of one ‘first generation’
leader, the Executive Director of BC’s ECE Professional Association, ‘You can see IQ DNA
across the province!’ (Gawlick, 2020).
These three ‘beyond stories’ are not ended: their ‘DNA’ continues to influence new initiatives.
Going ‘beyond quality’ is a continuing journey, undertaken by new generations that opens up new
vistas and new ways of understanding.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Note
1. At the time of the FNPP’s several evaluations the student completion rate for Indigenous programmes was
often less than 30%, while the FNPP’s approach was over 85% (Ball and Pence, 2006: 97).
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Author biographies
Gunilla Dahlberg is Professor Emerita at Stockholm University in Sweden.