One of the delights of working in the field of early childhood education is that it is so diverse that many disciplines connect with issues in the field. I want to indulge my delight by playing with some fragments of knowledge, from a number of settings I move amongst, in a Boffin-like fashion; to gather them together in order to analyse where we seem to be in early childhood education in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Gwen Gawith, a creative New Zealand educator, wrote a book for students called Power Learning (1991). In it, she describes four categories of learner: The Boffin, The Butler, The Builder, and The Baker. It is The Boffin who caught my eye. Boffins, Gawith says, 'delight in unrelated fragments of knowledge for knowledge's sake; interesting things happen when Boffins learn to put these fragments into a framework and analyse them' (ibid: 9). I propose to play with some fragments in this paper and then try my hand at some 'connected knowing' (Smith, 1991).
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ACCESS Archive
Boffins in early childhood services
Vol 11, Number 1, p.22