While early childhood education (ECE) in Ontario has always had a vibrant social activist community, it is characterized by tensions within and between individuals and institutions at the minor (childcare centres, post-secondary ECE programs) and major (mainstream media, public policy) levels. ECE activism is further complicated by the fact that it often feels impossible/unsustainable within our existing patriarchal, neoliberal political structure. In this paper we, four ECE activists and leaders, turn to feminist care ethics (FCE) to reflect on our own activism experiences and imagine a different way of doing and sustaining activism in ECE. We insist that activism be understood as a relational process that bridges major and minor spaces (and everything in between) in a way that cares about, for, and with all those involved. We enthusiastically invite other to join us on this journey, exploring and navigating the beautiful awkwardness, discomfort, tension, and possibilities in caring for and with each other in major and minor political spaces.

The stubborn dominance of objectivity in child observation in pre-service early childhood education warrants letting go of as we confront its limitations as outdated, problematic, Eurocentric, neo-liberal and even racist. In the context of recent aims to establish ‘critically reflective’ practices, such as ‘pedagogical documentation’ and ‘collaborative inquiry’ as the ‘new way’ to ‘do’ early childhood curriculum planning in Ontario, Canada, the authors are concerned that the hard work of naming and creating conditions to ‘think together’ with concepts of subjectivity has been missed and misunderstood. The risk of missing this shared thinking and not persevering in the struggles of subjectivities, especially in curriculum courses and placement, underestimates and ‘under-minds’ the intellectual capacity of students and positions theory as neutral in its relation to practice. How, then, does one take up subjectivity and recognize its affordance in building the intellectual and relational capacity of pre-service students? What conditions need to be created to lead with critical thinking and engage in subjectivities in the context of early childhood education pre-service programs? Drawing on critical educational perspectives, the authors work to define subjectivity in the context of early childhood education; identify the conceptual barriers that they have encountered in their work as a professor and a field liaison; and propose potentially generative conditions for pre-service programs.

In this conceptual article, I argue that there is a difference between codified ethics and the ethical. I begin by situating code of ethics in the broader professionalization movement in early childhood education. Drawing upon Gunilla Dahlberg and Peter Moss (2005), I discuss the dematerialization of early childhood educators (ECEs) and the instrumentalization of early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Ontario through the implementation of the Code of Ethics by the College of Early Childhood Education ( 2017). Thinking with Eve Tuck’s (2018) question of “How shall we live?” (p. 157), I take up a critical invitation from Sharon Todd (2003) to consider how codified ethics in education may be rethought “as a relation across difference” (p. 2). I work conceptually with the imagery of nodes from the film Sleep Dealer by Alex Rivera (2008) as an aesthetic device to examine the effect of codified ethics on ECEs. Finally, in conversation with Joanna Zylinska (2014) and Tim Ingold (2011), I re-frame instrumentalized nodes/codes of ethics within the complexity of knots and meshworks to recover the ethical in early childhood education. I offer this piece as a warning that solely relying on codified ethics completes the transformation of the ECE into a worker technician and may be leading us toward a dystopian future and as a call to activism to engage in the complex ethical work required in the small everyday spaces of the early childhood classroom. Keywords: early childhood education, codified ethics, ethical, nodes, dematerialization, instrumentalization

In this paper, we reflect on our process of preparing for a salon presentation at the York Graduate Students in Education re: conference. We describe our choice of a salon format to open a critical and interdisciplinary dialogue about the ways we struggle with metaphor as white settlers. We share the content of our salon discussion and explore how metaphor can manifest as an act of transformation in early childhood education. Specifically, we conceptualize our metaphor of early childhood praxis as a Frankensteinian monster, pieced together from mostly psychological theories of child development into a harmonized body of knowledge. As we describe our preparation for the salon, we attend to our inspiration for engaging in aesthetic invitations for dialogue through creative writing, spoken word, mixed media collage, and audio/visual recording. We end with an invitation for continued dialogue on the use of metaphor and its cautions.