Doing Foucault in Early Childhood Studies: Applying poststructural ideas
By Glenda Mac Naughton
(Routledge, 041532100X, 22.99, 020 7017 6000)
Reviewed by Denni Morrison, advanced teaching and learning practitioner, Hertford Regional College
By reading this book I've learned a new word - rhyzoanalysis. As someone who has taught research methodology for several years, it is both interesting and worrying to discover new research terminology. Am I the last to know?
Rhyzoanalysis is, according to Glenda Mac Naughton, 'a way to explore the politics of a text in order to create new texts.' She shows how rhyzoanalysis can be used to deconstruct text recorded during child observations and to create new and different ways of understanding what has taken place.
She bases this technique on the philosophical and cultural theories of Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari, who use the metaphor of a rhizome as a 'dynamic, flexible and lateral logic...' in contrast to the linear structure of a tree. It is this linear analysis from root to twig that we regularly use to explain cause and effect when evaluating children's interactions.
This book has sent me on a mental journey. A journey that has taken me not only to Australia, where the research studies took place, but out across the internet and into libraries to find out about the theories and philosophies which underpin the politics of this book, and also to visit others in my line of work to discuss these new ways of thinking.
On p212 Mac Naughton expresses a hope that 'this book has created a crisis in your thinking...' It has certainly done that for me. Whether this is a good thing or not is yet to be seen.
