Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory

Scholarship in early childhood in recent years has showcased far greater interdisciplinary conviviality. Researchers in child studies and education have thus invited in broader conversations that attend to work that has been happening at the edges of a bounded discipline. The Disrupting Early Childhood speaker series hosts an ongoing programme organized with the intention of bringing into discussion novel scholarship that is extending the pedagogical imaginary of early childhood.

The series began in 2019-2020 with a programme featuring three speakers who engage the field from wide ranging theoretical vantage points. These talks inaugurated a series designed to attend to the ways early childhood research and pedagogy is implicated in responding to the questions of our times.

The Materiality of Play: Early Childhood Education Research in Diffractive Dialogue with Dance as an Artistic Practice

Tatiana Zakharova and Justine A. Chambers

Monday April 19, 2021 | 1:30-3:30 PM

Interest in play is experiencing a renaissance, with much been written in academic journals and discussed in professional and social media. Tatiana Zakharova, an emerging scholar pursuing her doctorate at Western University (London, Canada) is among those interested in play. With a background in design, Tatiana looks at materiality of play through the feminist practice of “misreading to produce a reading” (Jagodzinski, 1992, p. 172). That is, instead of holding up play as an entity and an idea so solid that it even has a public “profile” that needs raising, Tatiana’s proposition is to tease play apart into moments that may be entirely insignificant or subject-forming, that may be joyous or violent, that may open possibilities or may be propping up chaos and indeterminacy. This talk will be in dialogue with Justine Chambers who will engage with Tatiana’s propositions in diffractive ways from her perspective as a dancer, choreographer and mother.

Tatiana Zakharova introduces her research on play and Justine Chambers introduces her artistic practice. Together they present a dialogue as an invitation to reimagine our relations to play.

Tatiana Zakharova is a playground designer, and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the Faculty of Education at Western University (London, ON). In her multidisciplinary work, Tatiana thinks with feminist post- human scholars to trouble the notion of play as a means of progress, imagining instead relationship-attuned play as worlding. With gratitude, Tatiana lives, walks, plays, and writes on the traditional territories of the Anishnabek, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), and Ojibway/Chippewa peoples.

Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Skwxwú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her movement-based practice considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation, and the body as a site of a cumulative embodied archive. Privileging what is felt over what is seen, she works with dances that are already there–the social choreographies present in the everyday. Chambers is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.

The Sonic Frequencies of Childhood: Empire and the Asymmetries of Innocence

Hannah Dyer (Child and Youth Studies, Brock University) and Casey Mecija (Communication Studies, York University)

Wednesday January 13, 2021, | 2:30-4:30 p.m.

The queerness of childhood possesses a sonic dimension. When attuned to the child’s sonic enactments of affect and ideation, there is the potential to ethically respond to the traces of history that constitute their realities. Drawing theory and method from critical child studies, Filipinx studies, queer theory, and performance studies, this presentation asks how the transmission of sound shapes geopolitical borders and their childhoods. Moving between diverse scales and sites, including YouTube videos and vocal performances, we explore the queer dimensions of children’s sonic utterances. Of concern here is the psychic life of empire as it poses conflicts for children’s symbolic expression. Linking past to present, we will listen to examples of sound as a modality that undermines the hetero-patriarchal production of childhood in the name of imperialism. Two central arguments guide our thinking: 1. Sound can lead us into the affective excesses of children’s experiences. 2. The child’s creative performance (as symbolization of ambivalence/loss/optimism) helps them to re-sound the adult’s world they have inherited. Towards the goal of locating epistemic significance in the agentic capacities of sound, we grasp at colonial histories of race, social constructions of childhood, and the asymmetries of childhood innocence.

Dr. Hannah Dyer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Child & Youth Studies at Brock University and holds a PhD from the University of Toronto. She is a cultural theorist of childhood with concentration in art/aesthetics, social conflict, queer theory, settler-colonial studies, and psychoanalysis. She is interested in how aesthetic and expressive cultures of childhood reframe relationships to political crises, historical traumas and social debates about belonging. While taking the child’s material vulnerabilities and pressing need for care into account, this work also emphasizes fantasy and futurity. Her book, The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood: Asymmetries of Innocence and the Cultural Politics of Child Development (2020, Rutgers University Press) extends these lines of analysis.

Dr. Casey Mecija is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and holds a PhD from the University of Toronto. Her current research theorizes sounds made in and beyond Filipinx diaspora to make an argument about a “queer sound” that permeates diasporic sensibilities. Her work suggests that media production enables diasporic people to create forms of belonging that defy racialized ascriptions born from racism, colonialism, and their gendered dimensions. She is also a musician and filmmaker, whose work has received a number of accolades and has been presented internationally. Casey has a history of employment in radio and television production, and co-founded “From Song to Studio”, a mentorship program with Regent Park School of Music.

The Vitality of Touch and the Aesthetics of Educational Encounters

Sharon Todd (Maynooth University, Ireland)

Thursday, September 10, 2020 | 3:00pm - 5:00pm

In light of the current pandemic, the idea that touch is vital to education seems to verge on the border of obsolescence. However, given that education transpires through encounters students have with the world, be these through tablets, computers, textbooks, persons or other forms of materiality, there remains an undeniable sensory dimension to education that is indeed vital for practices of teaching in these times. In particular, I link the dynamics of touch – as both a touching and being touched by – to an aesthetic understanding of educational encounters. To do this, I turn first to Aristotle’s understanding of touch as central to life itself in order to contemplate how it is not merely one of the senses but signifies as the primary mode of all bodily contact with the world. This vital aspect will then be examined in relation to the specific ways bodies experience contact, through their membranes, morphological make up and their movements. Here, I draw on a number of philosophers and theorists (such as Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Juhani Pallasmaa and Erin Manning), and a recent installation entitled The Boarding School by Danish art collective Sisters Hope to demonstrate how the vitality of touch operates through those very practices we call educational.

Dr. Sharon Todd is Professor of Education and member of the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy at Maynooth University, Ireland. She has published widely in the areas of embodiment, ethics, and politics in education and is currently writing a book for SUNY Press tentatively titled, The Touch of the Present: Educational Encounters, Becoming, and the Politics of the Senses. Her work has been informed by continental philosophy, feminist theory, aesthetics, and Buddhist scholarship. She is author of Learning from the Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis and Ethical Possibilities in Education (SUNY, 2003) and Toward an Imperfect Education: Facing Humanity, Rethinking Cosmopolitanism (Paradigm, 2009). Her co-edited volumes include Re-imagining Educational Relationships: Ethics, Politics, Practices with M. Griffiths, M. Honerød and C. Winter (Wiley, 2014); Philosophy East/West: Exploring the Intersections between Educational and Contemplative Practices with O. Ergas (Wiley, 2015).

Imagination and the Unforeseeable in Early Childhood: A Dialogue on Intermedial Imagination, Choreographic Movements and Becomings

Sylvia Kind (Capilano University) and Lorenzo Manera (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia)

Tuesday, July 21, 2020 | 3:00 pm-5:00 pm

Sylvia Kind and Lorenzo Manera will engage in a phenomenological dialogue about imagination and the elements that constitute an intra-active relationship between medial environments, children and adults. Both speakers will bring to the dialogue their situated perspectives on educational spaces and intermedial imagination. This dialogue will invite the audience to consider innovation, unpredictability and creative invention as the main aspects that contribute to the aesthetic experience in medial environments. This dialogue is particularly interested in pointing out how such elements are key for both children’s aesthetic and pedagogical experiences and for the cultivation of imagination understood as the engagement with the unforeseeable.

Sylvia Kind, Ph.D. is a faculty instructor in Early Childhood Education at Capilano University and an atelierista at the Capilano University Children’s Centre. Her work is motivated by an interest in young children’s studio practices, their lively material improvisations and collective experimentations, and in developing understandings of studio research in early childhood contexts. She has co-authored the book Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education, co-edited Drawing as Language, and has written several journal articles and book chapters on studio practices in early childhood.

Lorenzo Manera, is currently a research fellow in Aesthetics and Pedagogy in the Department of Education and Human Sciences of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, under the tutorship of Professor Annamaria Contini. He is a member of the Italian Society of Aesthetics, and Executive assistant for the PhD in “Reggio Childhood Studies”, promoted by the Department of Education and Human Sciences of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and Fondazione Reggio Children-Centro Loris Malaguzzi. His latest publication is titled “Relational spaces in Architecture, Aesthetics and Education: The Italian neo avant-garde architecture and the case of the Reggio Emilia Approach”.

The Queerly Magical Child

Dr. Rebekah Sheldon (Indiana University Bloomington)

Thursday, February 27, 2020 | 3:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

In their field-making introduction to Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley argue that ideas about childhood innocence not only regulate children toward heternomative outcomes but also enable the queerness of children. “The figure of the child is not anti-queer at all,” they write. “Its queerness inheres instead in innocence run amok.” Bruhm and Hurley read across canonical British and American novels to discover the figure of the queer child that grows laterally around that innocence. Continuing their line of inquiry, this project turns to the genre of young adult science fiction and fantasy. These genres have long forged an association between childhood and wonder, but rarely has the ostensible “magic” of childhood been approached theoretically. In this presentation, I read the magical child as a queering of rationality through the trope of epistemological innocence.

Rebekah Sheldon is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington, where she teaches queer theory, childhood studies, and science fiction and fantasy studies. She is the author of The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe (U Minnesota 2016).

Thinking metabolically with shivering, sweating, and feminist science studies in early childhood education

Dr. Nicole Land (ECS, Ryerson University)

Tuesday, January 28, 2020 | 12:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Metabolisms matter in early childhood education. From nutrition regulations to naming muscular energy as children’s ‘wiggles’ or ‘behavioural problems’, we get to know metabolisms through particular knowledges and as specific relations in our everyday practices. In this presentation, I propose that the metabolic logics that we make possible within early childhood education cohere within a particular citational history and are enacted in our bodied relations with children, food, muscles, fats, and biochemicals. Following Hannah Landecker, a feminist science studies scholar, I grapple with what metabolic relations might become possible when we take “metabolism as a methodological prompt” (2019, p. 542) in early childhood education. Thinking with feminist science studies scholars who trace the tangles of how bioscientific knowledges come to matter in situated spaces, including Angela Willey, Deboleena Roy, and Victoria Pitts-Taylor, my central proposal in this presentation is: what possibilities for doing bodies – fats, muscles, glucose – might we open toward if we take metabolism as a pedagogical question in early childhood education? Put differently, I argue that how we do metabolisms is a high-stakes ethical and political problem in early childhood education. I take up this proposition through two threads: first, thinking with moments from pedagogical inquiry research with children and educators, I trace how we participate in both status-quo and unfamiliar metabolic relations while shivering and sweating. Then, I layer onto these moments a question of how we might craft pedagogical relations with feminist science studies and biological knowledges that answer to the complexities of 21st century worlds. I offer some speculative proposals for how thinking metabolically might nourish tentative relations between bodies, biopossibilities (Willey, 2016), biological knowledges, and feminist science studies in early childhood education.

Nicole Land is an Assistant Professor in the School of Early Childhood Studies at Ryerson University. In her collaborative pedagogical inquiry work with early childhood educators and children, Nicole works to reconfigure and reinvent movement pedagogies by thinking with post developmental perspectives to unsettle instrumental, utilitarian, and universalized approaches to moving. Attending to metabolisms, muscles, fats, and more-than-human entanglements, Nicole positions bodying as an active, ongoing, knotty activity that draws us into different relations with flesh and movement, and orients toward otherwise corporeal politics and futurities. 

Paulo Freire and Early Childhood: Notes on the significance of a non-chronological childhood in education

Dr. Walter Kohan (University of Rio de Janeiro-Brazil)

Thursday November 7, 2019 | 2:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Paulo Freire is not usually associated with the education of childhood. Commonly, he is seen as a scholar who offered remarkable insights and propositions regarding the education of adults. Nevertheless, at the same time, he seems to have given extraordinary significance to childhood. Indeed, Freire had an array of conversations with children. One of these dialogues is part of his more intimate autobiographical works (Letters to Cristina). There, he affirms more than once, that his main ideas concerning education have been inspired by the way he was introduced into the world of letters and words by his parents in Recife. Thus, Freire gives a high importance to chronological childhood. This presentation, however, will focus on how non-chronological childhood is an even more crucial category in Freire’s thought, as a political condition for educators of all ages. In order to present these ideas, we’ll offer some elements to put into question the relationship between time and childhood and how early childhood might be considered not only—or not mainly—as what ought to be educated by the educator but what educates the educator and what the educator should keep alive in herself to educate people of all ages. In such a way, a new politics of early childhood inspired by Paulo Freire might emerge.

Dr. Walter Kohan Since 2002, Dr Kohan has been a Full Professor of Philosophy of Education at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). He is a Senior Research member for the National Council of Scientific and Technologic Development (CNPQ, Brazil) and within the Foundation for the Support of Research of the State of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ, Brazil). Since 2003, he has been the Director of the Center of Studies in Philosophy and Childhood (State University of Rio de Janeiro, www.filoeduc.