Pedagogical gatherings in early childhood education: Mapping interferences in emergent curriculum

Abstract

In this article, the authors critically and generatively encounter emergent curriculum, drawing from their experiences working as pedagogistas in three different early childhood education centres in Western Canada. The intent is to engage with the concept of emergence as that which can bring ethical and political engagements with curriculum and pedagogy; complicating understandings of emergent curriculum as simply following the lead of children. The particular interruptive orientations that the authors bring forward include: possibilities for responding to and cultivating the conditions for emergence in ways that disrupt the managerial concerns of everyday practice; troubling the co-optation of emergence by human-centred consumptive practice; and unsettling emergence in conversation with settler colonialism and anti-blackness in the places and spaces of early childhood education.

Keywords:

• Early childhood education
• emergent curriculum
• place-based curriculum
• pedagogical orientations
• neoliberalism
• settler colonialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fikile Nxumalo

Fikile Nxumalo is an assistant professor of Early Childhood Education in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also affiliated faculty with African and African Diaspora Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. Her work is centred on environmental and place-attuned early childhood studies that are situated within and responsive to young children’s uneven anthropogenic, anti-Black and settler colonial inheritances.

Cristina D. Vintimilla

Cristina Delgado is an assistant professor in early childhood education at York University. Most recently, she was the pedagogista at Capilano University Children’s Centre. Her research interests address the ethical question of living well with others (human and more than human) within pedagogical gatherings.

Narda Nelson

Narda Nelson is a research assistant and pedagogista at University of Victoria Child Care Services and a member of the Common Worlds Research Collective and the Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory. Drawing on her Masters in Child and Youth Care and her background in Gender Studies, Narda takes an interdisciplinary approach to early childhood research with a particular focus on reimagining ethical futures with animals, plants, and waste flows in early childhoods.