Beginning in October 2024 and continuing until March 2025, the participatory Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory Zine Conversation Series is unfolding through synchronous online gatherings spurred by the creation and exchange of zines that share local pedagogies crafted by educators, researchers, and other stakeholders in early childhood education in Canada.
How can I participate in the Zine Conversation Series?
All roles for the Zine Conversation Series are now full and registration has been closed.
We look forward to sharing digital versions of completed zines following the conclusion of the Zine Conversation Series in April 2025.
What is the Zine Conversation Series?
We imagine the Zine Conversations Series as hybrid ‘conference’ project that brings physical printed zines together with digital dialogue as we think, collectively, about how we might craft timely, diverse, and ethical pedagogies that answer to the intricacies of children’s contemporary worlds. Through exchanging zines that story local pedagogies as they unfold in everyday spaces in Canada, we want to work together to imagine how we might initiate, sustain, and re-invent educational processes that see ECE as a project of building a life - of worldmaking - together with children. All participants will receive 10 printed zine copies via Canada Post regular mail. Zines will share stories of local pedagogical work created by Zine Conversation Series participants. Working with the zines, we will open a participatory dialogue to think together about creating ECE as a pedagogical, educational space ready to respond to the difficult, messy, speculative, and inventive work of creating relations, practices, and worlds with children.
What is the Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory?
Since 2016, the Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory (ECPC) has worked to foster a hybrid and generous space where educators and pedagogues trace and experiment with the contours, conditions, and complexities of early childhood education pedagogies in the 21st century in Canada. Pedagogical work, for the ECPC, orients towards a collective, ongoing, and answerable project of creating more livable worlds with children. Against an increasing trend of conceptualizing pedagogy as a methodology for applying various learning philosophies and their concurrent practices, curriculum, and vision for the future, the ECPC does “not propose that early childhood education prepare children for life. Instead, we see early childhood education as a space for making life” (Vintimilla & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020, p. 637). Because we are committed to an ethos of thinking pedagogy as responding to the particular contexts we each inherit while generating local, inventive, speculative, and care-full curriculum-making, we intentionally push against established, status-quo knowledges (including child development, neoliberal capitalism, ongoing settler colonialism, anthropocentrism) and practices (such as universalized curriculum, quantitative assessment, and romantic conceptions of child-centered inquiry).
The Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory Zine Conversation Series is co-organized by Nicole Land, Cristina Delgado Vintimilla, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kathleen Kummen, Denise Hodgins, and Narda Nelson.
The ECPC Zine Conversation Series is supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Connection Grant.
For more information on the ECPC, please see our writings, our ongoing conversations, and connected projects.
Please contact Nicole Land with any inquiries.