This article offers an extension to the use of pedagogical narrations by con-sidering it as a methodology for post-foundational child studies research. The author contends that pedagogical narrations have evolved into a methodological approach that is able to attend to the complexity and plural-ity of childhood. The article begins with a brief review of the evolution of child studies and some of the legacies of modernism that continue to impact childhood research today. This is fol-lowed by an overview of how the process of pedagogical narrations has served to resist particular modernist assumptions. It concludes with an exploration of how this process holds the potential to blur the boundaries between such dichotomous binaries as child/adult, theory/practice and mat-ter/discourse and open up spaces and dialogue for an ethical approach to childhood research.
Based on material discussed more fully in Chapter 4 of the author's Ph.D. dissertation (Hodgins, 2014), this article shares ordinary classroom stories of child-doll encounters that occurred during a collaborative research study that explored how children, educators, and things emerge as gendered caring subjects within early childhood practices. The historical and current dominance of dolls in early childhood practices and their links to gender and care make dolls such a significant material to think-with. Following Donna Haraway, this article works to unstick early childhood pedagogies from individualist and child-centred pedagogies, and rethink the apolitical and developmental logics that underpin "doll early childhood pedagogies". Through thinking-with dolls, new trajectories for dolls in the classroom are created. These trajectories highlight children's relations with/in the world situated within practices in, near, and far from the classroom, and the becoming of gendered caring subjects as a materialsemiotic entanglement rather than a performed or predestined linear development. Implications for caring pedagogies are considered, including the necessity for making visible the interconnectedness of gender and care, tracing how (particular) practices come to matter, and responding within the complexity of knotted webs of relationality.
Abstract:In this paper we think with the specificities of paint to tell stories about entanglements of settler colonialism and paint and painting in early childhood art education. We see to become implicated (Razack, 1998) within settler colonialism in the context we now call Canada. We paint a messy non-linear picture of our work with children through a process of storytelling. Through complex pictures of how we are attempting (even if partially and imperfectly) to respond and stay with the trouble our stories bring forward, we gesture toward hope and decolonizing strategies. Our work takes inspiration from contemporary artists and from anti-racist and Indigenous scholars.
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