Doing pedagogical conversations (with spirituality and fat) as pedagogists in early childhood education

Abstract

In this article, the authors respond to emerging articulations of the work of a pedagogist or pedagogical facilitator in early childhood education in Canada. This article is grounded in two intentions: we (1) share the tentative pedagogical conversations that we have as pedagogists who centre particular concerns, interests, and accountabilities; and we (2) launch our conversation from our desire to re-imagine how everyday pedagogies shape children’s experiences with spiritual knowings and children’s relations with fat. Sharing a narration from a pedagogical inquiry research project, we each offer a familiar developmental reading of the moment, gesture toward a partial re-engagement grounded in post-developmental pedagogies, and then weave our thinking with spirituality and fat together to complexify our propositions. We intentionally refuse to define the work of a pedagogist in a universalizable or technical manner. Instead, we argue that putting our pedagogist work into conversation draws our practices into uneasy, difficult, often contradictory relations and makes visible some potential futures (and their exclusions) we enact as we work to answer to the complex education spaces we inherit and re-create with educators and children.