Going to the big school :managing institutional time and space in a Lebanese daycare -

Abstract

There are over two hundred daycare facilities in Lebanon, and over 60 percent of Lebanese children attend daycares in the country. While the daycare represents a site of care, it is also a place where children and adults live their lives. This study provides an ethnographic account of a group of 25 two and three-year-olds and their 4 teachers at an elite daycare center in urban Beirut. This age group is significant, as the children were on the cusp of leaving the daycare to enter formal educational institutions, including local private and international schools. This study utilized a non-participant observation approach to explore the ways that “time” and “space” are rendered meaningful in everyday practices of the daycare. Interviews with teachers, field analysis, and mapping of the children’s movements within the learning space revealed that the daycare, as an institution, ordered children in the present, and endeavored to prepare them for the future they were to experience in the formal education system, or the “big school.” While the “big school” and its imagined constraints were a constant concern, field observations and interviews demonstrated that both children, staff and clients were made “docile” (Foucault 1977) by the management techniques that revolved around two constructs, “time” and “space,” endowing them with urgency, suffusing them with significance that was realized in the present and future. Still, observations of the way daycare “time” and “space” hailed the children suggest the latter learned interactive skills that did not necessarily conform to adult constructions of these concepts. This study contributes to the burgeoning field of childhood studies, as well as to research concerned with power, young children, and early childhood education and care.