Discipline and Normalisation in the Nursery: The Foucauldian Gaze

Abstract

In this paper we provide a Foucauldian critical analysis of empirical data derived from interviews with nursery teachers. The aim of the interviews was to illuminate teachers’ perceptions of the teaching and learning of values in the pre-school. Foucault’s social theory is regarded by commentators (Smart, 1995) as being subversively oriented towards knowledge and its utilisation by the professions. Our study draws upon some of his main concepts such as power-knowledge, surveillance, normalisation and govemmentality and employs them to help explicate the interpretation of our data. At first blush a Foucauldian perspective would appear to be particularly inappropriate as applied to nursery education given the latter’s association with ideals of individual freedom and self-expression, but it is suggested that greater govemmentality at an official level may be eroding the orthodox discourse of educational child-centredness (Bruce,1987), It is principally maintained that, in line with Foucault’s ideas, professional practice in nurseries may be understood as laying the foundations for the production of governable subjects. Three case studies constitute the field work underpinning this study, two of which were undertaken in working-class urban areas and the other in an affluent middle-class suburb. Finally it is acknowledged that the integrity of his perspective might itself be regarded as suspect, there being no obviously independent stance by which to privilege Foucault’s critique over the teachers’ own paradigms of socialisation. However, we claim that the importance of Foucault’s ideas resides in their challenge to complacency and professional insularity.