Reflexivity is recognized as an important constituent in how teachers build their professional knowledge and develop their pedagogical practice. However, less is known about the function that emotions play in the reflexive process and how these emotions can act as a catalyst to mobilize action that can create spaces for small activisms. Implicit activisms are here understood to involve small-scale gestures, such as speaking against discrimination, that can support notions of social justice. In this article, a reading of emotions is undertaken to explore how emotions such as discomfort can influence the speed and type of reaction for an early childhood specialist teacher during peer-to-peer mentoring. The concept of emotional geography is used to understand the way emotions relate to the distancing of others in one teacher’s professional life and mobilize small-scale activism that can be interpreted as politically motivated.

This article asks the question of what documentation is doing, rather than what documentation means in the context of early childhood education. By focusing on the documentation of a young child’s playful exploration with water that inhabits a classroom wall, new materialist theories are put to work to ponder documentation’s agentive capacities and intra-activities. What is argued is that documentation is inviting powerful creating and resisting actions that offer senses of belonging for a child. Consequently, it is proposed that teachers both shift from and overlay matters of fact and matters of concern. The implication is that documentation can be put to work in influential ways when its actions (rather than meanings) within spaces are foregrounded. This article offers original contributions to contemporary debates regarding agentive readings of documentation practices that can influence forms of ethical and flourishing pedagogies in a policy climate that can otherwise confine.

Underpinned by Le Guin’s (2019) conceptualisation of bag ladies along with feminist materialism and posthumanist ways of thinking and doing, the authors examine the ways in which their bag lady storytelling became entwined with an online reading and ultimately kinship.

No abstract

No abstract