The Monster in the Room: Safety, Pleasure and Early Childhood Education

Inspired by the work of Joseph Tobin and his book, Making a Place for Pleasure in Early Childhood Education (Yale, 1997), this article is about the necessarily uneasy and tenuous place of pleasure, desire and sensuality in early childhood education at a time when the field struggles to be identified as rule-governed and properly ‘professional’. With reference to focus group data from early childhood teachers and managers in Auckland, New Zealand, it considers what might be the comforts, and the problematic effects, of the contemporary demands for safety, and asks what kinds of pleasures are available to the modern ‘safe’ professional early childhood teacher.