Consensus, Dissensus or Community: The Politics of Parent Involvement in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Parents appear in early childhood texts and policy documents within discourses that position them as ‘others’, preventing the creation of equitable parent—staff relationships. This article draws on discussions with early childhood staff to explore the implications of ‘othering’ parents and it canvasses two contrasting communication strategies through which to challenge this ‘othering’. The first strategy derives from Habermas's modernist notion of communicative consensus; the second from Lyotard's postmodern notion of emancipatory dissensus.