The negation of babysitting: Deconstruction and care in early childhood

Abstract

In April 2020, during the COVID-19 Pandemic, New Zealand media reports revealed competing discourses of care in education. Specifically, the media narrated an apparent resistance to care evident in a primary and secondary teacher resistance to a return to school. While the resistance was clearly and explicitly concerned with care for teachers and their communities, at the same time a negation of caring occurred in the positioning of babysitting and caregiving as unreasonable activities for teachers. In this paper these different discourses are explored through a deconstruction of care. The first section of this paper explores deconstruction through a range of texts that explain and explore Derrida’s thinking. The paper then presents a positioning of care through one news media article. An analysis of one text that speaks to the meaning and problem of care in early childhood provides not just a reading of care in and as education, but also a reading of deconstruction as care. Through a reading of deconstruction as care, this paper offers an understanding of the positioning of caring in relation to teaching. Taking deconstruction as more than an attempt to make a case for caring (the saving of caring so to speak), this paper also takes up the challenge of the relationship between caring and not-caring, or the uncaring. Caring in relation to uncaring provides a way past the prescription and exploitation of caring as teaching and recognises the limits of a professionalisation of caring for practices of care. In the sense that deconstruction is care, the paper concludes with a re-imagining of teacher education through deconstruction.