Research and policy
Research: The good, the bad and the pacifier - unsettling accounts of early years practice
2 Jun 2008
Managers and practitioners source their knowledge from the media, family and friends, and short professional speech and language courses; however, their perceptions of pacifiers derive from mainly contested research that has filtered into the public domain. This creates tensions between perceived parental rights to offer a child a pacifier, current UK guidelines and participants' own, often ambivalent, views. The article engages with Foucauldian concepts to explore how authoritative knowledge filters into everyday practice and to deconstruct relations of power within the early years setting.
View the abstract from the Journal of Early Childhood Research:
(Journal of Early Childhood Research, Vol. 6, No. 2, 145-162, 2008).
Dr. Judy Whitmarsh, Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Studies, School of Education, University of Wolverhampton, email: j.whitmarsh@wlv.ac.uk.
