Global Trends, Local Contexts: ideological Positions and their Impact on Early Childhood Education Practices in Algeria

This thesis explores how ideological positions impact on a group of early childhood educators and managers’ everyday life activities and educational practices. This research was carried out at three different types of childhood reception centres in Algeria.

To investigate the complexity of ideologies, this qualitative ethnographic study employed fieldwork observations, including observations of social media, mainly Facebook. It also used various types of interviews, as well as documentary sources and cultural artefacts. The data generation occurred over a three-month period, involving seven main and thirteen peripheral participants.

The findings demonstrate paradoxical tendencies. On the one hand, different situations and participants’ accounts positioned them in the ideology of West idealisation. This denotes how they eulogise the West in various ways. My analysis focuses on epistemic, material, and ethical idealisation. The evidence presented in this thesis shows that idealisation of the West has engendered an inferiority complex and a state of subordination to the West. This limits the knowledge production in the non-West in the sense of restricting alternative knowledge practices, serving to strengthen the inefficiency and deficiency of the local early childhood education system. On the other hand, data also indicates participants’ demonisation of the West. Their rejection of certain Western cultural aspects as well as their constructions of gender and secularism as Western products had an impact on the type of content of provision, the arrangement of activities, and their conducts with children. That is translated into an unwelcoming attitude towards Western content along with global forces and stressing the local cultural attributes and religious education. The findings also reveal educators’ simultaneous adherence to both monolingual language use and translanguaging. Such language ideologies, according to the findings, produce ambivalence and generate a zerolingual state which proved to largely shape and inform a variety of communicative practices within the research settings of this study.

This thesis accentuates how those ideologies interrelate and enact ties of universality versus authenticity, the local versus the global. Through such linkages, they yield practices that are not the exclusive product of a single ideology. In light of these findings, it is clear from this study that taking ideologies into consideration is fundamental to understand the link between early childhood education practices and the social world. More specifically, their impact on early childhood education practices, and in particular language practices in the specific context of this study, to which scant attention is directed.