Chapter 10: Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education: Challenging Taken-for-Granted Ideas

We must begin wherever we are… in the text where we already believe ourselves to be. (Derrida, 1976, p.162)

In 1995 Jeanette Rhedding-Jones published an article titled “What Do You Do after You’ve Met Poststructuralism?” In this chapter I want to show how a poststructuralist-inspired, theoretically multidimensional, and inclusionary approach to learning theories and the practices that arise from them challenge the still-prevalent modernist idea of articulating one grand learning theory for postmodern education.

Poststructural theory, as in after (post) structuralism, took a decidedly linguistic turn away from the idea of uncovering essential and fundamentally unchangeable human traits as mental or societal structures, suggesting instead that anything we think we know about ourselves or the world is simply constructed and formulated meanings in different forms of human expressions and languaging. Nothing can be understood in any kind of way, without being given a meaning; that is, without being languaged (“tex-tualized”).