The Theory of ‘Belonging’: Defining concepts used within Belonging, Being and Becoming—The Australian Early Years Learning Framework

AbstractThe implementation in 2009–10 of the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) spearheaded the efforts of the Australian Commonwealth government to institute a national curriculum. The theme of the new early childhood framework follows three guiding concepts: Belonging, Being and Becoming. In this article, we discuss these three concepts in order to provide a theoretical context to the Early Years Learning Framework and to enrich the debate surrounding its writing and implementation. In particular, we address the significance of posing Belonging in contiguity with the concepts of Being and Becoming. The authors suggest a strategy to cultivate a deeper appreciation of the dialectical relationships between sameness and difference, belonging and nothingness. Our premise is that 'belonging' refers essentially to different beings, and implicitly to the prospect of a 'together-ness' or identity according to which different beings are located, understood and associated, in order that Becoming can take effect. We offer these commentaries as a means of deepening conversation about the importance of scholarly approaches to philosophy for early childhood research, and especially with respect to curriculum and pedagogy.Keywords: belongingEYLFVygotskyHeideggerdevelopmentalism Notes1. Different theorists treat the notions of everyday and theoretical in many ways, and the authors wish to acknowledge their awareness of this complexity. In particular, there are distinctions that could be made between the references to 'theoretical' as a category of ontological difference as advanced by Heidegger (1975) or as theoretical knowledge, which means something completely different. In addition, we have used the term theoretical to bring together the ideas that we have both drawn upon, to give more coherence to the discussion. We are mindful that the term theoretical has a specific meaning in cultural–historical theory (e.g. Davydov, 2008).2. By 'ontological categories' we refer to those concepts that can be applied to the task of combining subject and predicate in a logical form, e.g. Kant gives these as substance, simplicity, selfsameness and existence (Heidegger, 1975, p. 143).3. These are clearly epistemological categories rather than ontological ones.4. According to David Couzens Hoy (2006, p. 61), in his summary of Heidegger's approach to ontology, 'Kant left the main feature of ancient ontology intact: the centrality of substance, the thinghood of the thing, remained uncontested. That is to say, for Kant the independent substance that persists through time remains the fundamental building block of all reality … all these problems arise, Heidegger tells us, only if one posits a fundamental rift between the isolated subject or "mind" and an independently existing realm of objects. Such a rift for Heidegger is not a necessary presupposition; it is rather the result of the philosopher's mistaken "theoretical stance" and leads to what Heidegger calls a "splitting asunder of the phenomena"'.5. Heidegger's initial task is to disclose the relationship between everyday-ness and theoretical-ness, so as to demonstrate that one can never cancel out the other in a negational sense as would take effect in dialectical logic: 'When without reflecting we look at a clock in everyday behaviour, we always say "now", explicitly or not. But this now is not a naked, pure now but has the character of the "now it is time to …" [etc.] When we say "now" we are never directed toward the now as toward a merely extant thing … Saying "now" has a different character from saying "this window" … Saying "now" is not a speaking about something as an object, but it is surely a declaration about something' (Heidegger, 1975, p. 259). Heidegger explicitly refuses any suggestion that time and temporality have the same quality as an object, such as a window or a table. In the same way, Being is an existing that corresponds to a particular, everyday or individual Dasein, but from which that routine existing is manifestly distinguishable. Once we have recognized this categorical distinction between kinds of existing to which humans owe their capacity for existing, the fact that existing is always multiple follows accordingly. The problem that Heidegger encountered in arguing his case was that Dasein in itself appears to express a character of human being that is universal, undercutting the sense of multiplicity toward which his argument cast itself.6. Heidegger is following Nietzsche's discussion of the symbolic shift towards secularism and scientificity in late European humanism. Accordingly, science represents an instrument used by Man (the Ubermensch or Overman) to elevate himself to the place hitherto occupied by God, in an ontological sense (Zimmerman, 1990, p. 115). Heidegger therefore views the historical shift towards humanism as bearing implicitly destructive repercussions for the future of the human community, essentially relating to the collapsing of these two ontological categories for the sake of taking the Scientist as a technologically supreme Being. Developmental explanations of human rationality consequently perform the task of converting the human into a sufficient, self-regulating cause for himself, since science replaces God as the (hitherto external) source for the production of human being.7. The reader should also recall that all of this is predicated to some extent on reconciling the model of the child used in the EYLF with a human being modelled on the deceased Christian deity.8. We are using the masculine denotation for this 'universal' human because there is a significant theoretical consequence of neutralizing the gender of 'human'; at the same time we are employing Luce Irigaray's theory of sexual difference, and acknowledge gender as a critical element of the learning context.9. 'The shattering of the sole dominance of the church in legislating knowledge and action is understood [in humanist, Enlightenment frameworks] as a liberation of man to himself. But what man is as himself, wherein his being a self should consist is determined only in his liberation … Human "thinking", which here means the forming powers of man, becomes the fundamental law of things themselves. The conquest of the world in knowledge and action begins … Man, freely creating and fulfilling himself in creating; the genius becomes the law of being truly human' (Heidegger, 1985, p. 31). The model of the human is the divine, masked by a redolent self-sufficiency. The human being is taken up as adequate to itself. Heidegger's strategy involves reiterating the necessity of the two categories of being; he asserts that the questioning of being is itself at the core of an entity's mode of Being (1962, p. 27). This means that to enquire about the nature of existing is characteristic of an entity that knows it exists. The everyday and the theoretical are retained by him not so as to reiterate a religious account of the laws of existence, but to indicate that the Western tradition will not submit itself to collapse at the metaphysical level without corresponding implications for social and economic experience. 'Commerce and the economy turn into powers of their own in the most narrow, reciprocal connection with the origin of technology' (Heidegger, 1985, p. 31).10. Luce Irigaray (2002, pp. 24–34) gives this twofold-ness as 'twoness'; we think there is a potential connection to be made here between the kind of proximity described by Irigaray and the proximity meant by Vygotsky in his theory of the zone of proximal development.11. For example, when a child is acting as the bus driver refusing entry to the bus because she does not wish to include another play partner into the game, as can be heard when a child says, 'The bus is full, you can't come with us'.