Early Childhood Educators’ Political Dialogues during the Pandemic: A Bakhtinian Dialogic Analysis in Facebook Groups

This thesis reports on a study that explored early childhood education (ECE) educators’ political dialogues during the 2020-21 Pandemic in the Australian state of Victoria. Within these dimensions, I investigated the strategies and spaces enabling educators’ responses about what was happening to them, including the ways that they ‘spoke back’ to authority and received truths with intent. To access these nuanced, and at times hidden responses, I entered into ECE closed Facebook groups to access insights into how educators were speaking back to political issues impacting their everyday lives. By Suspending finalised judgements, or political truths, I gained deeper insights into educators’ nuanced language styles, investigating dimensions prompting how educators spoke up, or fostered their voices to stay hidden. Drawing extensively from a mid to late life Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1930s-1970s) philosophically orientated dialogism, I applied his concepts of chronotope, genre and carnivalesque as a theoretical framework. Offering a methodological framing, the chronotope offered dimensions to consider the ties of narrative prompting how educators’ politically dialogued. Employing genre as my unit of analysis, I interrogated the form, content, and strategic intent of educators’ political dialogues. Furthermore, as significant genres of political dialogues, I investigated how carnivalesque and authoritative speaking back opened up and closed down such encounters in Facebook groups. My findings indicated the pandemic was a crisis chronotope that prompted a carnivalesque genre of renewal. Carnivalesque enabled educators’ political dialogues to enter a second life of the people that flipped received truths - arguably problematic for the wellbeing of ECE educators, such as selfless, unobtainable perfection and being labelled ‘glorified babysitters’. The findings implicated the potential for carnivalesque to revitalise educators’ political dialogues, prompting consideration of how to enter into, and sustain this genre. Strategies to do so include the use of plural pronouns, sharing content in ECE educators’ Facebook groups, graphic interchangeable formats (GIFs) and emoji reactions to prompt an opening up to the counterculture of comradery. These strategies suggest educators seek every day, social networking, peer spaces to open up their political responses. Conversely, my findings also highlight how when not feeling heard, a chronotope of voicelessness may be fostered that further silences educators’ political dialogues. Having their carnivalesque speaking up seemingly ignored in official spaces, educators offered their allegiance to authoritative genre, as a limited means to be heard. This endeavour included placing organisations and worldviews beyond reproach. As a consequence, this strategy closed down dialogic encounters due to enforced notions of the ‘correct way’ to respond. A dialectic was prompted by this enforcement that sought to prove the self was correct, and the other flawed, causing increasing frustration and finalising objectivisation. Insights from the research signal the need to safeguard the equal rights of all educators’ political dialogues in online spaces, even those that might be inconvenient. If not defended, one-dimensional political responses may reduce ECE’s rich and complex work, encouraging educators’ divergent, enriching political dialogues to stay hidden. These research insights establish the importance of peer educators not only enshrining strategies to speak up, but the significance of listening to other educators’ political dialogues. Such an undertaking, if seeking to consider the perspectives of another, enables an opening up of discussions in ways that can challenge and reinvigorate worldviews. Opposingly dialectic responses appear to close down discussions and further entrench us-versus-them divisions, offering educators provocations for renewing political dialogues.