Conversations with Zines, Pedagogy, and Pedagogies
In Summer 2024, the Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory invited educators, researchers, and others who are active in early childhood education in Canada to participate in our Zine Conversation Series. Inspired by the Experimental Methods & Media Lab’s (Rayner & Pasek, 2023) Zine Based Conferencing Guide, we proposed a process of crafting, exchanging, and working collectively with physical printed zines to story local pedagogies. Emphasizing our intention to incite a Conversation Series - a dialogue that returns and is sustained - we were interested in how the acts of creating, revising, travelling, receiving, and reading that zines require might spur necessary conversations about the possibilities for pedagogical work in ECE in Canada.
The Zine Conversation Series contributes to the Collaboratory’s ongoing work, where we have been inviting educators, pedagogists, and researchers across Canada to join us in tracing and experimenting with the contours, conditions, and complexities of early childhood education pedagogies in the 21st century. We have created and nurtured various initiatives and traces over time, including our writings, our ongoing conversations, and connected projects.
Important to the Collaboratory has been the need to articulate—both for ourselves and alongside others—the open question of how we define pedagogy, and what its relation is to pedagogies. Questions of how pedagogy and pedagogies are articulated, followed, invented, and foreclosed in different ECE contexts in Canada continue to be central to our intentions for the Zine Conversation Series. Our understanding of pedagogy and pedagogies, and how they intertwine, guided how we envisioned, built, and responded within the Zine Conversation Series. Our relation with pedagogy and pedagogies also shapes future trajectories and continued engagements with zines and the conversations they incited
Pedagogy and Pedagogies
To ground how we hope the Zine Conversation Series will linger, we offer an invitational synthesis of ideas we have been crafting over time—ideas that openly orient our thinking on pedagogy and pedagogies within the Canadian context.
Over the years, we have insisted on beginning with a disruption: challenging the pervasive notion that pedagogy merely provides a set of strategies for teaching and learning, confined solely to the domain of schooling. In response, we have proposed—and continue to develop—the understanding of pedagogy as a hypercomplex living knowledge (Vintimilla & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020; Vintimilla, n.d.). As such, pedagogy’s focus is not on prescribing methods, but on thinking with and posing questions to education and its multiple, intersecting processes. We can trace this focus and interest all the way back to its very initial roots in “paidagogia,” which emerged as that which reflects on and envisions education—its aims, inquiries, and processes. The onto-epistemological dimensions of education belong to pedagogy. These are dimensions that are always porous, not enclosed, always complex, and from which new questions and matters of concern emerge for pedagogy to consider.
For us, pedagogy is a living knowledge because it is always in movement. It is in movement because “it is deeply committed to reflect on itself” (Calaprice, 2019). This is why we join and are influenced by scholars who consider pedagogy as needing a plurality of interpretations of what is defined as pedagogical. As a collective, we cherish pedagogy’s multifaceted - polyhedral - character (Cambi, 2003) and we want to cultivate and intensify it. As a living knowledge, pedagogy requires being kept in motion, to be attended to and with. It requires being thought and articulated, avoiding being reduced to dogmatisms, applications, or models (Land et al., 2022). This is key for our intentions in the Collaboratory because pedagogy is articulated in rich pedagogies, crafted over time. This is, for us, the relation between pedagogy and pedagogies. This articulation happens in a highly relational manner as pedagogies emerge and are crafted in a co-compositional space where multiple elements (space, materials, bodies, temporalities etc) interrelate in the making of a singular educational experience (Vintimilla & Kind, 2023).
Opening the Zine Conversation Series
Our inaugural event, held in October 2024 and attended by those who created zines and those who received zines, pivoted around two questions: what does early childhood education need to engage with during these times? What does early childhood education need to respond to, inherit, and invent towards?
These two questions reflect Collaboratory concerns with pedagogy - they are interested in the relations, knowledges, grammars, ecologies, bodies, subjectivities, and ethics that are made possible and impossible in current conditions in ECE in Canada. Because these questions orient to pedagogy, they study ECE as an educational project - a project of world-making that we inherit, are implicated in, and can create otherwise (Vintimilla, 2023).
Zines, we proposed, might share pedagogies: insofar as they can story what happens in situated educational experiences. They do not, however, inherently instigate an engagement with pedagogy, even when they share pedagogies.
As a living knowledge, pedagogy asks us to read zines for their difficulties and defamiliarizations, for how they obligate and implicate, and for what they can and cannot envision towards responding to unjust, shifting, and at times bewilderingly complex worlds with children in ECE.
Zines and Pedagogies
Over 6 months, Zine Creators generated 15 zines with support of two Research Assistant collaborators. ECPC Zine Conversation Series advisory committee members offered entry points to work with during the zine-making process.
Prior to zines being mailed out to the zine ‘engager’ participant group, we put effort into getting to know them and what they offer. A subsequent decision was made to return to the Collaboratory contention that zines might share pedagogies, in keeping with our ethos of remaining diligent as a necessary component for continued alignment with how the Collaboratory figures pedagogy. The narratives, questions, proposals, and interjections these zines perform and advance presence moments and ecologies that sketch the terrain of ECE in Canada. While not all stories of education are pedagogical, nor all educational experiences matter pedagogically, we wondered how to converse, collectively, with and across the zines to get a better sense of how pedagogy happens - its deferrals, revivals, failures, and endurances - in ECE in Canada?
Next, the zines were printed, bound, and mailed to all participants. A small note was included in each of the mailed packages, to signal a necessary return to the Collaboratory’s commitment to understanding pedagogy and pedagogies as entangled but singular concepts: pedagogies are more than a critique of early childhood concepts or moments that were experienced; engaging in processes that create specific pedagogies asks what kinds of subjectivities might emerge and how these processes might open possibilities for new ways of knowing, being, and relating; we want to follow any disconsensus in how we understand pedagogy, including how interjections from activism, advocacy, and/or self-reflective projects do and do not connect or interfere in creating pedagogies.
On March 27, 2025, all participants gathered for a full-day virtual conversation. Together, we thought with the question “how do we read the zines to understand what becomes possible and impossible for pedagogy?”. Among other considerations, we read the zines for how particular relations with pedagogy were foregrounded in how the zines worked with knowledge (underlying logics), systems (governance, inheritance), subject formation, and processes.
More specifically, we discussed how the zines, as connected artefacts, make visible how questions, tensions, incommensurabilities, affinities, and problems for pedagogy matter in ECE in Canada.
Sharing Zines + Ongoing Conversations
By sharing the zines here, on the Collaboratory’s website, we aim to continue to invite dialogue concerned with creating ECE as a pedagogical project, with the intention of working together to respond well to the difficult, messy, speculative, and inventive work of creating relations, practices, and worlds with children.
Alongside this intention, we want to continue to push and provoke how the Collaboratory works with pedagogy and pedagogies. As part of a commitment to nurturing practices of radical experimentation, it is important to note that reading the zines for how they meet with pedagogy is a particular practice.
Each zine is situated, singular, and created towards advancing a conversation. Accordingly, the zines should not be read as (and were not created to be) exemplary representations of practice or faithful accounts of ‘good’ encounters in ECE. The complexities of dialogue and exchange are threaded through the zines and their creation processes. They are not showcased as stand-alone documents nor are they idealized models of how ECE, pedagogy, and zines might collide. Zines are not summative records or cumulative retrospectives. Now that the Conversation Series has ended - our intention remains solidly outside status-quo logics of endorsement or the neoliberal requirement to justify a project via quantifiable use-value metrics of its outputs. We share and sustain conversations publicly now with the zines because we are compelled to continue thinking together about how the zines nourish and unsettle possibilities for pedagogy and pedagogies in ECE.
We hope that you will insist on reading the zines for how they matter for pedagogy—be uncompromising in reading the zines for how they grapple with questions of subject formation, knowledges, orientation, relations, labour, speculation, and figuring out the work of making a collective life.
Reading the Zines
Thank you for your engagement and consideration! We invite you to read the zines together, positioning the zines as artefacts from a collective project in a collective field that must, therefore, be read through and alongside one another and through and alongside how this field and its collectives are constructed.
Propositions and Questions:
Read outside of familiar practices of affirmation and consensus—resist frames of reference such as “liking” and “not liking” what we see in the zines, and foreground pedagogy and its concerns with figuring out how to live well together as an anchor for engaging with the zines.
Consider these zines as artefacts, texts, and/or moments—how do we read situated and emplaced educational experiences for how they are rich in their partiality and specificity?
Ask how the zines engage with knowledge—study how different zines create different problems for inherited knowledge hierarchies in ECE (including taken-for-granted conceptions of theory, practice, quality, or truth)?
Discern how zines do interdisciplinarity—as pedagogy’s mode of engagement par excellence—what do different interdisciplinary collections make possible for thinking pedagogical concerns when aesthetics, language, interlocuteurs, and situated relations intersect?
Study the zines together, as an almost ‘meta’ practice of reading—refuse to see each zine as an isolated, completed, finessed document to be read from start to finish in its entirety. Resist familiar linear rhythms of engaging one zine before moving to another. Read slowly; we do not yet know how to read these zines. You might follow threads that matter across the zines, read one page from a single zine and carry it with you for days, and return, differently, to moments in varied zines. Rather than seeking a comprehensive landscape or conclusion from each zine, speculate how the zines, read together, create possibilities for asking pedagogical questions of educational contexts.
The zines are organized alphabetically by the Zine Creator’s last name. The zines address authorship and titling in intentionally different ways, and our imperfect method for centering these differences is to name the zines numerically. As a citational practice that acknowledges the specificity and labour within each zine, please name the particular zine’s author and zine title if referencing a zine.
Zine One (Agarwal, M)
Zine Two (Blaisdell, W)
Zine Three (Cullen, M)
Zine Four (Donison, L)
Zine Five (Ellis, T)
ZIne Six (Humphrey, T)
Zine Seven (Johnston, L)
Zine Eight (Kenneally, N)
Zine Nine (Lussier, C)
Zine Ten (Menon, N)
Zine Eleven (Rickard, J)
Zine Twelve (Riley, K)
Zine Thirteen (Russumanno, P)
Zine Fourteen (Snyder, M)
Zine Fifteen (Zakharova-Goodman, T)
Plain-text versions of the zines are available here.
Technical Information
The Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory Zine Conversation Series was organized by Nicole Land, Cristina Delgado Vintimilla, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kathleen Kummen, Denise B. Hodgins, Narda Nelson, Tesni Ellis, Malvika Agarwal, and Paolo Russumanno.
The ECPC Zine Conversation Series was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Connection Grant.
References
Land, N., Vintimilla, C. D., Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Angus, L. (2022). Propositions toward educating pedagogists: Decentering the child. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 23(2), 109-121. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949120953522
Rayner, S. & Pasek, A. (2023). Zine-based conferencing: A guide. Experimental Methods and Media Lab/ Low-Carbon Research Methods Group. Trent University.
Vintimilla, C.D. (2023). Critique, estrangement and speculative envisioning: Pedagogical thinking and otherwise educational worlds. Philosophical Inquiry in Education, 30(1), 16-25. https://doi.org/10.7202/1099899ar
Vintimilla, C. D., & Kind, S. (2021). Choreographies of practice: Mutualities and sympoetic becomings in early childhood teacher education. In H. Park & C. Schulte (Eds.), Visual arts with young children (pp. 33-46). Routledge.
Vintimilla, C. D., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2020). Weaving pedagogy in early childhood education: On openings and their foreclosure. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 28(5), 628-641. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2020.1817235