Centering Black life in Canadian early childhood education

ABSTRACT

This paper is a response to multiculturalism’s reductionist and othering constructions of Black presence in Canadian early childhood research and practice. We engage in possibilities for creating movement away from multiculturalism as the primary way of responding to anti-Blackness in Canadian early childhood education. We put forward orientations that emerge when we imagine the abolition of Canadian early childhood education pedagogies and curriculum that are shaped by neoliberal multiculturalism. We organize our abolitionist praxis in relation to what kinds of stories and modes of storytelling of Black life might be needed in early childhood education in Canada. We focus our attention on three interconnected pedagogical orientations: storying abolition geographies, storying Black ecologies, and storying Black aliveness.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood
• curriculum
• pedagogy
• race and ethnicities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The phrase ‘Black Gathering’ is taken from Sarah Jane Cervanek’s (2021) book of the same name; a beautiful engagement with the ways in which Black artists and writers create gatherings for Black people that unsettle modernity’s property-making relations with the more-than-human world – fugitive modes of Black living that are powerfully resonant with the relational attunements of this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fikile Nxumalo

Dr. Fikile Nxumalo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching & Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, where she directs the Childhood Place Pedagogy Lab. Her research focuses on developing anti-colonial environmental and place-based education.

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw

Dr. Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw is Professor of Early Childhood Education in the Faculty of Education and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Research in Curriculum at Western University. Her current research traces the common world relations of children with places, materials, and other species.