Unsettling Representational Practices: Inhabiting Relational Becomings in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

This article seeks to unsettle representational practices enacted through dominant multicultural pedagogical approaches in the early childhood classroom. Drawing from a research study in early childhood centers that investigated practitioners' and children's negotiations of racial difference, I explore how multicultural pedagogical approaches in early childhood spaces present a risk through the potential for static representations of difference and diversity. I argue that these approaches potentially reproduce inequalities and delimit ways of engaging with difference and diversity through prescribing identity and dampening capacities for certain bodies in certain spaces. I offer possibilities for movements away from pre-defined and prescriptive approaches toward complexified approaches that require close attunement to the emergence of material-discursive assemblages. Attention to relational becomings has the potential to open possibilities for socially just early childhood pedagogies that enact a micropolitical engagement with the material-discursive entanglements of everyday encounters.

KEYWORDS:

• becoming
• childhood pedagogy
• material-discursive
• multiplicity
• social justice

Notes

I use more-than-human to refer broadly to all that exceeds the human, including non-human matter, relations, meanings and understandings. In this understanding both the human and non-human are active co-constitutive participants, and the human is “no less a subject of ongoing cofabrication than any other socio-material assemblage” (Whatmore, 2006, p. 603).

I borrow the term viscosity from Saldanha (2006) to refer to the “sticky” effects of the intermingling of molar fixities and molecular becomings or flows in particular spaces. Molar fixities act to constrain bodies causing “temporary thickenings of interacting bodies, which then collectively become sticky, capable of capturing more bodies like them. … Under certain circumstances, the collectivity dissolves, the constituent bodies flowing freely again” (p. 18).