Pedagogical Narrations and Leadership in Early Childhood Education as Thinking in Moments of Not Knowing

This article draws on the experiences of twoeducators to reimagine traditional framingsof pedagogical leadership. In the field of earlychildhood education, pedagogical leadershipcarries conflicting conceptualizations and isoften associated with an “expert” who willdictate indicators of quality, suggesting certaintyand fixed ways of practicing. Educators are oftenreluctant to take on leadership roles that seemantithetical to their collaborative caring practices.In our work together in the Investigating QualityProject and in using pedagogical narration as atool for generating critical dialogue, we explorealternative images of pedagogical leadership.Through sharing our stories, we offer a modeof thinking about pedagogical leadership thatembraces relationality and uncertainty andinvites a culture of dialogue.

Section: A Troubled Tale Of Pedagogical Leadershipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Working Together In the Investigating Quality Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Uncertain Tale: Alternative Conceptualizations of Pedagogical Leadership

Atkinson¹,

Biegun²

2018

“…(p.173) Within a room in which the pedagogical narrations I have written sit upon our walls and shelves in open invitation to others to read and think with, how can I make more broadly visible to the hundreds of adults who come into this family drop-in the values, beliefs, philosophies, discourses, and pedagogies I intentionally choose to practice with, and why? My displaying of pedagogical narrations, along with my desire to make my choices in practice more visible, is not done with the intention of making others think the same way I do, but rather "for stirring the wind of thought" (Berger, 2015) within us, expanding our perspectives and generating ongoing, critical dialogue and debate about important issues such as race, class, gender, and age.…”

Section: Journal Of Childhood Studies Ideas From Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Within a Room

Wanamaker¹

2017

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>In the face of an injustice toward a child, what is the responsibility of an early childhood educator? What are the risks if we speak out? What are the risks if we remain silent, if we do nothing? “Courage, Hannah Arendt (1958/1998) suggests, which we often think of as a quality of the ‘hero,’ is already present in the willingness to act and speak, to insert oneself into the world and begin a story” (Berger, 2010, p. 73). </span></p><p><span>“Lynne is conscientious in her work but she is shy.” I find it quite interesting that this comment/label written about me on my report card </span><span>52 years ago by my kindergarten teacher entered my thoughts out of somewhere while I was contemplating how to tell this particular story about taking risks in my practice as an early childhood educator, and how I let go of normal. If indeed I am normally shy, I most </span><span>definitely let go of my personal and professional normal in a family drop-in program in which I am the only early childhood educator-facilitator. It happened one busy morning in front of parents, grandparents, care providers, and children from infancy to five years old. </span><span>People had been engaged in relation with each other and the mostly unconventional materials in the intentionally unstructured, untimed, and nontraditionally run program that is situated within a room in an urban elementary school. </span></p></div></div></div>

“…Gathering pedagogical documentation, we generate narrations as collaborative critical encounters with the uncertain complexities of practice and pedagogy (Berger, 2015;Hodgins, Kummen, Pacini-Ketchabaw, & Thompson, 2013). We take seriously the view that pedagogical narrations are "a process by which educational experiences in early childhood settings are narrated and made visible in the public realm" (Berger, 2010, p. 58).…”

Section: Moving With Pedagogical Narrationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Movement/ing Provocations in Early Childhood Education

Land¹,

Danis²

2016

Nicole Land is a PhD candidate, sessional instructor, and research assistant in the School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria, where she also works with early childhood educators as a pedagogical facilitator. Drawing on feminist science studies and feminist new materialist perspectives, she is interested in attending to, and experimenting with, how fat(s) and muscle(s) can be practiced, move, and matter in early childhood education. Email: nland@uvic.ca Ildikó Danis is an early childhood educator at University of Victoria Child Care Services. She has a degree in early childhood special needs education from Georgia State University, Atlanta, and experience in the Canadian, US, and Hungarian educational environments. Her interest in the complex and inclusive ways of forming "natural childhoods" spurred her curiosity about children's relations with place and everyday, natural materials. Her focus on child-material relations and movement pedagogies is motivated by a commitment to attending to stories and events that evolve by chance in the themes of children's relations with other species, with the material world, and with place. Email: idanis12@uvic.ca (Rotas, 2015), engaging the tensions, productivities, and pauses of movement. We anticipated an abundance of movement within our indoor space and discussed how we might engage (with) running bodies or draw exuberant explorative movement into intentional engagements within the space. We were startled by how deeply difficult movement can be and how demanding movement is of our pedagogical response-ability (Haraway, 2015). Movement/ing Provocations in Early Childhood EducationAs part of an ongoing inquiry-based research project into pedagogical practices at a child care centre in British Columbia, Canada, a collective of educators, researchers, children, and families have been imagining how early childhood education pedagogies and practice might adequately respond to, or engage with, the complex, contested, and politicized worlds of contemporary childhoods. We-Ildikó (an early childhood educator) and Nicole (a doctoral student pedagogista)-position our pedagogical practices within a commonworlding ethic (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor, & Blaise, 2016) and cultivate a sustained engagement with "the broader, relational contexts that children inhabit as integral parts of the universe" (Blaise, Hamm, & Iorio, 2016, p. 2). Our inquiry work launches from a politicized attention to the contested ethical dimensions of pedagogy, wherein a necessity to confront ongoing settler colonialism (Clark, PaciniKetchabaw, & Hodgins, 2014;Nxumalo, 2016), a concern with the infiltration of neoliberal paradigms within education (Ashton, 2014;Osgood, Scarlett, & Giugni, 2015), and an impulse to be response-able to contemporary Euro-Western anthropogenic forces (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015) inform our practices.In the furniture-free space of the child care centre, we began to put our pedagogical practice to work with movement. Engaging with Drawing on an inquiry-based project focu...