Newsletter

Miriam Giugni

I have always held multiple positions of employment in the early childhood field. I like to be able to work on many levels so that I can learn in many ways and work with a diverse range of people. I see myself as an activist early childhood teacher and a research pedagogue. I work in early childhood because I think it is one context in which I can learn about and be politically engaged with communities, families, pedagogy and curriculum and as a result have a voice about inequalities that relate to the job and make a difference. I have also been involved in producing policy and advising political parties around early childhood policy based on my broad interest in the ‘structural issues’ that affect us (wages, ratios, qualifications) as well as the ‘process issues’ (curriculum, pedagogy and teacher-research). I am always interested in bringing all aspects of early childhood politics, policy, theory and practice together. This is why I like to work in many aspects of the early childhood field.

I work in early childhood because I think it is one context
in which I can learn about and be politically engaged with communities,
families, pedagogy and curriculum…

Early Years Learning Framework
One of the projects that I was most recently privileged to be part of was conceptualising and writing the national Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) (Commonwealth of Australia, 2009) under the incredibly inspiring leadership of Professor Jennifer Sumsion and Associate Professor Linda Harrison from Charles Sturt University, Bathurst NSW. Thirty-five early childhood people from around Australia were part of the EYLF consortium. The diversity of views, knowledges and experiences of the people who were part of this consortium who came together from across Australia created a space for rich and critical debate about the ideas that shape early childhood. Having a leadership role in that process was an amazing learning experience because it was professionally challenging in ways I had not imagined. I hope that the EYLF offers this kind of opportunity for debate, new learning and professional challenge to early childhood educators across the country.

I hope that the EYLF offers this kind of opportunity
for debate, new learning and professional challenge
to early childhood educators across the country.

Social Justice In Early Childhood
My activist work in early childhood includes being an active member of the Social Justice In Early Childhood group. socialjusticeinearlychildhood. This is a not-for-profit activist community group that operates through a group of people who volunteer their time to undertake activist practices such as:

• critiquing and responding to government policies (state and federal);
• supporting critical issues in the early childhood field;
• organising fundraisers for social justice issues across the world (eg, a preschool in Jenin, West Bank, Palestine); and
• running an annual conference—see details below for our 2010 conference!

Social Justice In Early Childhood Conference 7
5 June 2010
Redfern Community Centre, The Block, Redfern
Australia

The Social Justice in Early Childhood group had an active part to play in the early stages of the 1:4 ratio campaign, then Community Childcare Co-operative and the 1:4 Task Force took the lead and won a change in legalisation! More recently we have been critically engaged in trying to have an influence on the National Quality Framework through close relationships with NCAC and constantly lobbying DEEWR. The core group of committed colleagues with whom I work—and with whom I cannot do without—include Dr Marianne Fenech, Kathryn Bown, Lorraine Madden, Kathy Gelding, Anthony Semann, Alicia Flack and Toby Honig.

Critical Curriculum Community
I am also part of a ‘Critical Curriculum Community’. This group is a not-for-profit community group of early childhood educators working with children who come together to discuss curriculum and pedagogy, read theory, explore concepts, ask critical questions and search for new ways to engage equity and social justice in our everyday work. Our ‘Critical Curriculum Community’ is currently part of an international project with pedagogues in Oslo, Norway, exploring equity and social justice in everyday practice (we are also working in partnership with early childhood educators from SDN Children’s Services—see below!).

Early childhood teaching and my research

I place high importance on being within a centre community
in amongst the everyday complexities of teaching and learning in early childhood.

I am currently employed by SDN Children’s Services Inc. as an Early Childhood Teacher (at SDN Redfern) where I am privileged to work with Frida Caris who is currently the Centre Director of SDN Redfern Children’s Education and Care Centre. I also work as an Early Childhood Research and Learning Adviser (across all SDN Children’s Education and Care Centres). In this part of my job I have been conceptualising new ways to develop and undertake ‘teacher-research’ with the early childhood staff. I place high importance on being within a centre community in amongst the everyday complexities of teaching and learning in early childhood. This also enables me to be a participant in the studies that I conceptualise and lead. Two of the projects I have conceptualised and am leading at the moment are:

• ‘Becoming teacher–researcher’ through encountering, exploring and engaging with the Early Years Learning Framework; and
• The Oslo–Sydney Project—an international project where pedagogues from Oslo in Norway and Sydney Australia share their experiences of exploring equity and social justice in everyday practice and seeking ways to create change. I am collaborating with Associate Professor Ann Merete Otterstad and Camilla Eline Andersen who are leading the project from Oslo University College in Norway (the ‘Critical Curriculum Community’ is also a partner in this project).

At present, I work under the leadership of Rebecca Watson at SDN who has moved furniture, walls, and sometimes buildings for me to spread my intellectual, political and creative wings in order to work in new ways with children, families, early childhood educators and communities and to make a difference.
I work as a lecturer at the University of Western Sydney. I currently teach a subject called ‘Policy politics and educational futures’. This subject has a specific focus on what Dr Jen Skattebol and Associate Professor Christine Woodrow call ‘political literacy’. Political literacy is a practice of ‘critically reading the politics’ in and around policy, curriculum documents, early childhood research and the discourses that produce them. There is an explicit focus on reimagining professional identities based on political engagement with the everyday life of ‘becoming’ an early childhood teacher.

I also work as an independent early childhood consultant. At present I am privileged enough to be working with a number of early childhood educators in practitioner inquiry and action research projects nationally and internationally. These projects have a focus on equity and social justice in a range of different and creative ways. I am particularly interested in looking at how we can research, learn, ‘become’, invent curriculum and pedagogy through practices such as ‘arts based inquiry’. Too often we rely solely on the written word and forget that experiences, stories, yarns, narratives, moments can be expressed and shared through scribble, doodles, and poetry, through spoken word and images, digital stuff, installations, architecture, video, creative, expressive and visual arts of any kind, ordinary everyday social practices, ways of doing and being that we have not yet invented!

Talkin’ Up and Speakin’ Out: Aboriginal and Multicultural Voices in Early Childhood
All of this work contributes to pushing me to think, do and become (all at the same time) in new ways everyday! These ways then translate to the writing that I like to engage with in partnership with early childhood educators to produce more literature written by early childhood educators for early childhood educators. Talkin’ Up and Speakin’ Out: Aboriginal and Multicultural Voices in Early Childhood (in press with Pademelon) is a book that offers a number of new ways to consider equity and social justice in everyday early childhood curriculum and pedagogy. It is a beginning point for conversation. It is a collection of an amazing group of early childhood educators, children, parents, activists, social commentators, sharing their stories, yarns and narratives. The power of encountering this collection of stories, yarns and narratives to prompt new thinking is profound. It was a privilege to work with Aunty Kerry Mundine (co-editor) again to bring together this range of views about the world and early childhood. When we work for change it is too easy to expect that people change their views to fit into our own. I hope this book encourages people to resist, think anew and have a voice in the debate. There are views in this book that completely oppose each other, yet sit together in an ‘assemblage’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) of movement and tension. The movement and tension produced by the stories, yarns and narratives offers something new in terms of what we consider to be valid knowledge, valid views and the ‘truth’ of early childhood curriculum and pedagogy. Each and every author is testimony to the transformation that writing for this book has enabled, politically, personally, professionally, and collectively. I hope you enjoy it! I hope it prompts debate, critique, new learning, disagreement, challenge to early childhood ‘truths’ and things we have not yet imagined! I hope there is something in there that ‘talks up and speaks out’ in order to break the silence around so many issues that have gone unnoticed, ignored and undervalued in early childhood for too long…

It is a collection of an amazing group of early childhood educators, children, parents,
activists, social commentators, sharing their stories, yarns and narratives.

The title of this book was the result of a brainstorm between Aunty Kerry and myself one summer’s morn. It reflects urban Koori as well as working class ways of speakin’ which reflect two dimensions of our backgrounds as editors and authors—Aunty Kerry (Koori and working class background) Miriam (working class background). Following our brainstorm we encountered the inspiring work of Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s Talkin' up to the white woman: Aboriginal women and feminism (Moreton-Robinson, 2002) and one of our reviewers had brought to our attention a book titled ‘Steppin’ Out and Speakin’ Up from the Older Women’s Network (2003) that shared stories of Aboriginal women and community life. The titles of both of these books indicate breaking silence. In this spirit Talkin’ Up and Speakin’ Out: Aboriginal and Multicultural Voices in Early Childhood follows in the footsteps of bringing stories, yarns and narratives to the ears of anyone who will listen. We use the term ‘Aboriginal’ cautiously as it is a colonial name for the many Aboriginal groups in Australia. We use the tem ‘multicultural’ broadly to encompass ethnic and racial diversities (including white and middle class voices), linguistic diversities (including English), sexualities (including heterosexuality), geographical diversity and families. This is an attempt to illustrate that ‘multicultural’ is not simply a term that describes those who have migrated to Australia from ‘somewhere else’ but any and all ‘cultural’ groups. We have chosen to specify ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘multicultural’ based on the wishes and experiences of the authors in the book. Our book begins with the following quote:

‘Australia has always been a multicultural continent. At least 350 nations of Indigenous Australians have lived here “since the beginning”’.
(Townsend Cross, 2004, p.4)

More specifically, Associate Professor Karen Martin (Martin, 2005) argues that writings by and with Aboriginal peoples:

‘… should not be considered as generic Aboriginal understandings of reality. While some universal principles may appear and there may be some common principles among us as Aboriginal peoples, I can only speak from my own understanding, experiences and realities. Therefore, one size does not fit all because the one-size-fits-all model is not respectful.’ (Martin, 2005, p 28)

Martin’s point reminds me that I have to think carefully about what it means to be a non-Aboriginal Australian particularly in terms of the assumptions I make about ‘knowing’ Aboriginal or for that matter multicultural cultures that are different from my own ‘understandings, experiences and realities’. Sometimes this might mean recognising the tensions between different views and taking responsibility for the potential effects that can arise when one view seems to be valued, seen or heard over another.

Sometimes this might mean recognising the tensions between different
views and taking responsibility for the potential effects that can arise when one
view seems to be valued, seen or heard over another.

In our book we chose to describe the heard and unheard yarns stories and narratives by what we saw in the sky one night. We describe it in our book in the following way:

When we got out of the car in Wellington NSW that Friday night, we looked up to the velvety night sky and were greeted with the stars, the Milky Way. We stood looking up in awe at the range of different stars, their age, their lore, their mythologies and their gifts to the night. We marvelled at how much there was to learn about the world, and that the Milky Way gave us so many different opportunities to consider knowledge. Some stars seemed clear and bright, whilst others were like new stars just beginning to twinkle and tell their story. Other stars were connected and shone together, glowing with glimpses of history. In Aboriginal terms (in some communities) the Milky Way is the resting place of people and animals that have gone before us—millions of years before us. We were inspired to think about our work as sets of ‘constellations’, like the stars, of people with histories, their stories and experiences. We reflected upon how the stars are hidden during the day and only come out at night, yet they are always there.

For us the night sky revealed the stars that were always there, moving, changing, being born and keeping hold of stories, yarns and narratives of unrecognised significance. In this way the day time sky cast uncertainty on the diversity of stories that could be told with its sun, clouds and blue refractions of light offering beauties but eclipsing what the night sky could reveal. These stories, yarns and narratives shone and twinkled at night while the world slept and were not so easily seen or noticed as they were in the day time.

We offer this book to you in the hope that you will spread the word and share stories not yet told. We hope it inspires you to talk up and speak out about social injustices and inequalities. And in some small way, we hope to make a contribution to the conversations and actions that change the world.

Miriam Giugni
Gadigal Country March 2010

References
Commonwealth of Australia, 2009, Belonging, Being & Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia, retrieved from http://www.deewr.gov.au/EarlyChildhood/Policy_Agenda/Quality/Pages/EarlyYearsLearningFramework.aspx.

Deleuze G and Guattari F, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone Press, London.

Martin K, 2005, 'Childhood, life and relatedness: Aboriginal ways of being, knowing and doing', in J Phillips and J Lampert (Eds), Introductory Indigenous Studies in Education: The Importance of Knowing, (pp 27–40), Pearson Education, Frenchs Forest.

Moreton-Robinson A, 2002, Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld.

Older Women's Network NSW, 2003, Steppin' Out and Speakin' Up, McPherson's Printing Group Miller's Point.

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