Beyond a logic of quality: Opening space for material-discursive practices of ‘readiness’ in early years education

Abstract

This article is an exploration of the possibilities encountered through shifting from a ‘logic of quality’ to a ‘space of meaning-making’ within early years education. Focusing on ideas of ‘readiness’, this discussion aims to challenge normative understandings that relate this concept to the predictable achievement of fixed goals and outcomes. This article approaches ‘quality’ as a particular form of logic and seeks to explore new directions in thought and practice opened by shifting into a space of ‘meaning-making’. Aspects of new materialist thought are entangled in this space of meaning-making, creating opportunities for renewed understandings and practices of ‘readiness’. Binaries of human/material and discourse/matter are problematized with the intention of unsettling dominant constructions of ‘readiness’ as an independently representable and individualized identity. The article concludes by exploring an alternative understanding of ‘readiness’ as a material-affective relation between bodies (both material and human). Situated through a self-reflexive example from an early years setting in England, it is argued that entangling an attention to materiality within a space of meaning-making creates space to challenge the status quo, creating the potential for new ways of understanding experiences and happenings in early years contexts.