Weaving pedagogy in early childhood education: on openings and their foreclosure

ABSTRACT

Arising from the question ‘How might we think of pedagogy in early childhood education?’, this article traces pedagogy’s histories, conceptual difficulties, inherent foreclosures, and contextual particularities. It argues that within the context of early education, pedagogy has become an obscure, sophisticated supplement of some sort rather than an indeterminate field of responsive, generative, and collaborative practice of interpretation, ethical critique, and invention. Thinking through the trilogy of repair, release, and return, we make three significant moves in the paper. First, we repair pedagogy from unfortunate and quite common misunderstandings. Second, we release early childhood education from the suffocating dominant narrative of child development as its primary source of intelligibility and moral legitimacy. Finally, we return to the idea of early childhood education as a pedagogical project and offer a series of interconnected propositions that respond to the conditions of our times. Overall, we argue that if early childhood education studiously attends to pedagogical thought, its problematic developmentalism might become obsolete.

KEYWORDS:

• Pedagogy
• early childhood education
• educational philosophy
• critical theory
• educational practices

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Our use of plantation as a concept does not attempt to trivialize the plantation as a colonial oppressive system on Black bodies. Rather, we use it recognizing the violence of both the plantation and child development as projects for governing subjects.