Towards ‘refiguring presences’ as an anti-colonial orientation to research in early childhood studies

Abstract

In this paper, I craft a methodological orientation for attending to the intricacies of everyday place encounters in early childhood settings with particular attention to settler colonialism and more-than-human entanglements. Drawing from my work with children and educators in childcare settings located in what is now British Columbia, Canada, I use refiguring presences to describe this research methodology, and its particular attention to unsettling everyday place relations in early childhood pedagogies within the context of settler colonialism. I situate refiguring presences in everyday material-discursive impacts in an effort to open up the potentialities and boundaries of political engagement in early childhood studies. I experiment with refiguring presences in relation to what I see as its most important elements. These elements include attending to colonialisms in everyday encounters, restorying contested places, foregrounding more-than-human relationalities and (dis)entangling researcher subjectivities.

Keywords:

• Anti-colonial methodology
• more-than-human
• place stories
• everyday encounters
• early childhood studies

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge helpful comments from the anonymous reviewers on an earlier version of this paper.

Funding

This work was supported by a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Notes

1. Pedagogical narrations are typically used as a way to make children’s learning visible (Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2010; Rinaldi, 2006). They can take the form of: anecdotal observations of children, children’s works, photographs that illustrate a process in children’s learning, audio and video recordings of children engaged in learning, and children’s voiced ideas. An important part of pedagogical narration is openness to multiple perspectives. Accordingly, educators include their critical reflections and invite their colleagues, the children, and the children’s families to add their thoughts, challenges and possibilities for further collaborative knowledge-making (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Nxumalo, Kocher, Elliot, & Sanchez, 2014).

2. The story that opens this paper is taken from a pedagogical narration prepared by one of the educators that I worked with in my role as a researcher and pedagogical mentor in a group of childcare centres for children aged three to five years. An important part of this role was to encourage educators to engage with the intricacies and messiness of settler colonial places in the everyday lives of children. The focus of this particular pedagogical narration emerged from our discussions on everyday forest encounters and the possibilities for meaningful non-appropriative presences of Indigenous perspectives in curriculum.

3. I worked closely with educators and children as a pedagogical mentor in four early childhood group care centres for three years. This role included engaging educators in discussions intended to open possibilities for critically attuned pedagogies; including contesting, politicizing and contextualizing understandings of educational practices with young children. I spent several hours weekly in each of the childcare settings making written, video and photographic observations of everyday moments in each centre. I was also actively involved in working alongside educators with children – engaging in planned and unplanned pedagogical provocations and encounters.

4. In this paper, I use the term Indigenous in different ways. I refer the term broadly to refer to differently located critical Indigenous peoples, methodologies and knowledges. I also use the term Indigenous within the specific context of what is now Canada to refer to First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples. Within the locality of the place where this research is situated in British Columbia, the First Nations here are the Coast Salish peoples. First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples comprise many nations and clans with multiple situated specificities, differences, dynamisms and interconnections. One such interconnection is an understanding of relationality as not limited to the human, but as encompassing always-already responsible, entangled and reciprocal relations with land/place and all of its more-than-human inhabitants (Simpson, 2011; Watts, 2013).

5. The forests of British Columbia are an intrinsic part of the ancestral lands of the Indigenous peoples of this place – encompassing complex relationalities and cosmologies. However, while the focus of this article is on children’s forest encounters, I work from an understanding of the ‘urban as storied Indigenous land’ (Tuck et al., 2014, p. 8). In this regard, all of the spaces in the urban and suburban childcare settings where I worked are intimately entangled with settler colonial relations. This includes the classroom buildings, the land, the pedagogical materials we worked with (such as paper and paint), the flows of water through pipes, and all assembled human and more-than-human bodies.

6. Taking inspiration from both Indigenous knowledges and new materialist ontologies, I use more-than-human to refer to all that exceeds the human and participates in world making; forests are but one example.