Ian Stronach – författare

This book explores the problems involved in ‘touching’ children in an educational environment. It uses real-life examples taken from groundbreaking research into the mentality of today’s risk culture, and highlights a maddening state of affairs in which ordinary well-meaning professionals feel they cannot offer even very young children basic levels of comforting or affection. This fascinating and long-overdue book examines the ‘no-touch’ pandemic in early years settings, by use of extensive interviews with practitioners, parents and pupils, which: outline the confusion experienced by many in knowing if, when and how to touch and the more recent backlash by those who attempted to buck the trend suggest why this issue is important now (for example, at a time when men are being encouraged to work in early years settings) consider explanations such as panic, risk, society and fear. This book also examines and explains where the law stands on these issues, and keeps its key focus on practice throughout; representing an unsensationalized and sensible approach to an issue that causes so much professional anxiety, and it will be welcomed by the entire teaching profession, child care professionals, along with academics and researchers within education and the social sciences.

This book explores the problems involved in ‘touching’ children in an educational environment. It uses real-life examples taken from groundbreaking research into the mentality of today’s risk culture, and highlights a maddening state of affairs in which ordinary well-meaning professionals feel they cannot offer even very young children basic levels of comforting or affection. This fascinating and long-overdue book examines the ‘no-touch’ pandemic in early years settings, by use of extensive interviews with practitioners, parents and pupils, which: outline the confusion experienced by many in knowing if, when and how to touch and the more recent backlash by those who attempted to buck the trend suggest why this issue is important now (for example, at a time when men are being encouraged to work in early years settings) consider explanations such as panic, risk, society and fear. This book also examines and explains where the law stands on these issues, and keeps its key focus on practice throughout; representing an unsensationalized and sensible approach to an issue that causes so much professional anxiety, and it will be welcomed by the entire teaching profession, child care professionals, along with academics and researchers within education and the social sciences.

This book offers a critical and deconstructive account of global discourses on education, arguing that these overblown ‘hypernarratives’ are neither economically, technically nor philosophically defensible. Nor even sane. Their ‘mythic economic instrumentalism’ mimic rather than meet the economic needs of global capitalism in ways that the Crash of 2008 brings into vivid disarray. They reduce national education to the same ‘hollowed out’ state as national capitalisms, subject to global pseudo-accountancy and fads. The book calls for a philosophical and methodological revolution, arguing for more transformative narratives that remodel qualitative inquiry, particularly in addressing a more performative rather than representative ideal. The first part of the book aims to critique, deconstruct and satirise contemporary assumptions about educational achievement and outputs, the nature of contemporary educational discourses, and the nature of the professionalism that sustain them. The second part offers innovative postmodernist ways of reconstructing a theory and methodology that aims at ‘educating the local’ rather than succumbing to the fantasies of the universal.This is a very timely book in that the economic crisis re-exposes the mythic nature of education-economic linkages, putting discourses prefaced on such ‘connections’ into parallel crisis. Our global educational discourses have also crashed, and new futures need urgently to be found. Such a ‘turnaround’ is both proposed and argued for. The book will appeal to a wide range of readers who are committed to educational and cultural change, and who are interested in a new politics of education. It will have an immediate relevance and appeal in the UK, USA, Australia and New Zealand in particular.