Manifesting living knowledges: A pedagogists’ working manifesto

Abstract

In this paper we present a working manifesto that emerged from our projects with pedagogists – a new professional figure in the Canadian early childhood education context. Drawing on feminist scholars’ work, we offer this manifesto as a feminist call to actively think against the anti-intellectualism sustained by existing structures in early childhood education, and as a response to the urgent need to think about early childhood education in more complex, pedagogical, political and ethical ways.

Keywords:

• Working manifesto
• pedagogists
• pedagogy
• early childhood education

Notes

1 Manifestos are prolific in the social sciences and humanities, including education (see Ahmed, 2017; Bear et al., 2015; Biesta & Säfström, 2011; Gibson et al., 2015; Haraway, 2003; Latour, 2010). We join these authors to manifest a vision for pedagogists in early childhood education. At the same time, we want to acknowledge and refuse the viler use of manifestos for anti-Semitic, fascist, and terrorist purposes (e.g., in Norway in 2011 and New Zealand in 2018).

2 Pedagogical prospective(s) is our translation from Spanish prospectivas pedagógicas and Italian prospettive pedagogiche into English to speak about the yet to come that can be envisioned but not mastered.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cristina D. Vintimilla

Cristina D. Vintimilla is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at York University. She is also a pedagogista within the Italian tradition. Cristina’s area of research is pedagogy as living knowledge and as that which thinks and troubles education as a normative project. Cristina is particularly interested in the intersection between pedagogy and the arts as a generative conversation for imagining alternative educational worlds.

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw is a professor of Early Childhood Education in the Faculty of Education and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Research in Curriculum at Western University in Ontario, Canada. Her writing and research contribute to the Common Worlds Research Collective (tracing children’s relations with places, materials, and other species), and the Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory (experimenting with the contours, conditions, and complexities of 21st century pedagogies).

Nicole Land

Nicole Land is an assistant professor in the School of Early Childhood Studies at Ryerson University. Thinking with early childhood educators and children, her work is curious about the inherited and inventive relations we might create with fats, muscles, and movement. Nicole and collaborators share questions and provocations from their work at Moving Pedagogies Blog.