Beyond Developmentalism? Early Childhood Teachers' Understandings of Multiage Grouping in Early Childhood Education and Care (Report‪)‬

Beyond the developmental question: A new space for multiage research For more than 15 years reconceptualist researchers have been questioning the role of developmental knowledge in the field of early childhood education and care (Cannella, 1997; Grieshaber & Cannella, 2001; Kessler & Swadner, 1992; Ryan & Goffin, 2008; Silin, 1995). They have been arguing that a developmental body of knowledge regulates children, parents and teachers because it is regarded as a set of 'scientific' facts about the child that are considered true. Drawing on Foucault (1980a, 1980b), developmental knowledge can be thought of as developmental discourse. As a theoretical concept, developmental discourse shapes, regulates and constitutes the field of early childhood (Graue, 2005). To move beyond developmental discourse, it is necessary for the field to generate a diverse knowledge base that might constitute early childhood in different ways. As others have shown (e.g. Blaise, 2005; Cannella & Bailey, 1999; Genishi, Ryan, Ochsner & Yarnall, 2001; Grieshaber & Ryan, 2006), postmodern perspectives provide useful frameworks for informing the field, and developing different ways of thinking about early learning and growth. This paper employs the term 'postdevelopmental', in recognition of the many shifts occurring within the field of early childhood education and care in recent years. This term, employed by Blaise (2005, 2009) in her work regarding the usefulness of queer theory and feminist poststructuralism for understanding children's subjectivity, is used broadly in this paper. Postdevelopmentalism encompasses theoretical movements that have been used to question modernist assumptions of truth, universality and certainty, with respect to children's learning and development in early childhood education and care. In this paper, we are also using the term postdevelopmental to reference theoretical understandings about children's learning derived from cultural-historical theory as they are interpreted in relation to early childhood education (see for example, Fleer, 2006). While we acknowledge theoretical tensions associated with using the term postdevelopmental to encompass critical, poststructural, postmodern and cultural-historical ideas, our intention is to use the term as a basis for examining the many ways our understandings of children's learning and development can be interpreted beyond a traditional developmental perspective.