Comparing Across Difference in Early Childhood Education
Common Challenges and Productive Juxtaposition in Bangladesh and Sweden
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7577/njcie.6595Keywords:
early childhood education (ECE), juxtaposition, commensurability, criss-crossingAbstract
This explorative study compares early childhood education (ECE) in Bangladesh and Sweden using a most-different systems design, aiming to identify common challenges and to examine how comparison itself can proceed as a relational practice across very different systems. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Dhaka and Stockholm, on notions of comparison as active connections and productive juxtaposition, and on commensuration as a social process, the paper uses vignettes as a representational form holding together space, time, and scales to analyze common challenges across contexts. The analysis works through paired ethnographic vignettes, approaching comparison as a relational process enacted through productive juxtaposition and multi-scalar analytical movements. Empirical findings suggest similarities in the function of teachers as time-brokers, in the function of pedagogy as a forum for negotiation between colliding value systems of pedagogical aims and societal norms, and in ECE functioning as an absorptive margin at the periphery of educational systems. The study shows that challenges in ECE are not reducible to questions of development, resourcing, or governance capacity alone, but are tied to how ECE is structurally organized and positioned in relation to wider institutional, cultural, and societal demands. Through reconsideration of juxtaposition, the study further problematizes 'where' difference may be located within a 'messy' system and discusses the scale and scope of the unit of comparison in ECE.
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