Professional ruptures in pre-service ECEC: Maddening early childhood education and care

Abstract

This article engages in an autoethnographic analysis to offer an argument for the importance of bringing mad studies to pre-service early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs. Through both analysing reflections on two "maddening moments" during pre-service teaching as a mad-identified pre-service ECEC educator and discussing relevant mad studies literature, I aim to forward an argument for the criticality of maddening pre-service ECEC programs and pedagogies. I argue that mad studies can provide ruptures to normativities ingrained in the developmentalist curricula and pedagogies in pre-service ECEC post-secondary programs and offer new ways of thinking of children, educators, and ECEC outside of developmental and normative tropes of early childhood educators (ECEs). As such, I examine how a maddening pedagogy in pre-service ECEC can bring affect into the classroom and disrupt how sanism functions through the knowledges and normativities prioritized within pre-service ECEC.

Keywords:

• Mad studies
• early childhood education
• pre-service education
• autoethnography
• curriculum

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Carla Rice, Fady Shanouda, Rachel Berman, Mark Castrodale, Alana Powell, and Bronte Shay for looking over previous versions and offering thoughts. I would also like to thank all the anonymous reviewers for the generous and kind feedback, which strengthened my paper, as well as the support of the Curriculum Inquiry editorial team.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 There are contested definitions of mental illness. In this article, mental illness denotes the pathologization of behaviours, sensations, emotions, and thoughts that are deemed pathological and deviant through diagnostic criteria, such as that of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), a manual referenced in pre-service training courses on disability in ECEC.

2 “Mad” is an identity term that represents individuals who identify with mad pride movements and resistances to psychiatry (Beresford, 2020). It is important to note that not everyone who is diagnosed with mental illness employs the identity marker mad and that mental health and mad activism is ever growing in its inclusivity and concern for different approaches and identities within mental health activism (Beresford, 2020). With my students, I identify as mad while also using the term psychiatric survivor to describe my encounters with psychiatric “care,” acknowledging that there is contention over employing “mad” as an identity term.

3 I’d like to thank Agnieszka Wozniak-Molar, RECE, PhD, for this note and mention that this is discussed within Davies (2022) and Davies et al. (2022).

4 I discuss this leave, my criticisms of developmental psychology in pre-service ECEC, and how I encountered mad studies in Shanouda (2021).

5 I discuss this leave and my “coming out” as mad in Davies (2022) as well.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially funded by SSHRC Explore #430668.

Notes on contributors

Adam Davies

Adam Davies is an Assistant Professor in Family Relations and Human Development at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. Adam’s research interests involve critical disability studies, mad studies, critical masculinities studies, early childhood education and care and queer theory. Adam’s recent publications can be found in Fat Studies, Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, and Sex Education. Adam is an Ontario Certified Teacher and Registered Early Childhood Educator.