In this colloquium, the authors of Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care, which was published 25 years ago, reflect on the book's core arguments about the ‘problem with quality’, the neoliberal origins of ‘the age of quality’ and the book's impact.

During recent years, the concept of translanguaging has increasingly been discussed in the context of multilingualism. According to García and Li this concept includes other modalities, such as body language and facial expressions (2014). In this article we explore whether it is possible to expand the concept of translanguaging further to include “affect” and “vitality” as conceptualized by Daniel N. Stern (2010). To explore this issue, we used two short episodes in which we captured the interactional processes of one-year-olds on film. In line with Stern, we propose the interactions between the children show a kind of non-conscious meaning-making and implicit relational knowing, involving a felt quality of affect and vitality that promotes the children’s abilities to participate, and their attunement to the affective states and rhythms of others (Lyons-Ruth, Bruschweiler-Stern, Harrison, Morgan, Nahum, Sander, Stern, & Tronick, 1998, Lyons-Ruth, 2000; Stern, 2010). This concept of affect and vitality expands the notion of translanguaging, as well as paving the way for what Erin Manning (2013, 2016) and Isabelle Stengers have called an “ecology of practices” (2005).

This article analyses the discourse and practices of quality assurance and quality control through the lens of neo-liberal governing as expressed in economic rationalities such as new public management, total quality management, public choice and human capital. As an alternative to this form of governing, an ethico-aesthetic paradigm is enacted, inspired by Spinoza's concept of 'affect' and Felix Guattari's and Gilles Deleuze's 'ontology of immanence'. This opens up to a reconstruction of the pragmatic scene of didactics as it border-crosses the discourse and practices of 'action at a distance', manipulating the classroom space from outside of the situation by measurements and procedures constructed by others. Moreover, it opens up to another construction of the human subject - a processual and event-centred construction of human subjectivity - which also opens up to leakages, movement, creativity and hope in the present.

How to give brain and body to the multiple pack that we already are or are becoming: how, in other words, are we to make sensible (auditory, visually and affectively) the time before I think and We think that we cannot plan, control or know, but simply experiment with, which is the time of the city and nothing else?' (Rajchman, 2010, p.39)These powerful words constitute the starting point for this article that argues that, within the context of early childhood literacy in a globalized and multicultural' world, we need to experiment with new ways of understanding identity and language through amalgamating early childhood pedagogy and didactics with aesthetics. Such an endeavour needs to take place beyond the indignity of speaking for the other' (Deleuze, 2004, p. 208) and beyond the constructed categories that have been attributed to children in the name of one or another minority group. Through vivid examples and theoretical movements taking place within the research project The Magic of Language' we propose to shift focus - from the identifying and categorizing of individuals, as well as from the epistemological violence performed in the name of recognition and linguistic representation - to aesthetic experimentation and to the place of experiments. A time of the city' is also a time of the place' and in this article we are arguing for the importance of aesthetic experimenting with that place.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is initiating the International Early Learning Study, a cross-national assessment of early learning outcomes involving the testing of 5-year-old children in participating countries. The authors use this colloquium to inform members of the early childhood community about this project and to raise concerns about its assumptions, practices and possible effects. The authors also invite readers' comments, to start a process of democratic dialogue and contestation.

During recent decades the idea of lifelong learning has become seen as the key dimension for growth, sustainability and inclusion, and the field of early childhood education has suddenly become a highly profiled area.  Economists, neuroscientists, psychologists, educationalists are all engaged in the topic of how high quality early childhood education and care can foster human skills and capacities, and remediate disadvantages.  This interest opens up discussions concerning how to meet the expectations that the new situation creates. Is it better to work with an academic and pre-primary educational program or is it more fruitful to work with a comprehensive program?  This way of making a dualism between these two approaces does not actually seem to be very effective.

To meet this new landscape and its expectations, but also to contest and make the present situation ‘problematic’, ontological, epistemological, ethical and didactical perspectives not so commonly used within the field of early childhood will be explored.   Starting from a pedagogy of welcoming and hospitality, that begins with listening, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s rhizomatic image of thought and Spinoza’s idea of "what a body can do" will be described in relation to an idea of subjectivity and learning as a relational field of potentiality.  A field that is open for creative processes and productions.  Pedagogical documentation and networking have proved to be important procedures for constructing such a pedagogy and for ‘liberating’ new potentials for learning.

The problems which the managerial state is intended to resolve derive from contradictions and conflicts in the political, economic and social realms. But what we have seen is the managerialisation of these contradictions; they are redefined as “problems to be managed”. Terms such as “efficiency” and “effectiveness”, “performance” and “quality” depoliticise a series of social issues (Whose efficiency? Effectiveness for whom?) and thus displace real political and policy choices into a series of managerial imperatives. (Clarke, 1998, p. 179)