The scholarly conversation on preparing teachers to organize safer, more humanizing learning environments for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ+) youth generally does not intersect with conversations unfolding in the broader teacher education literature, specifically around what "practice" means in…

Thinking alongside feminist science studies scholars, in this article I contend with how early childhood education pedagogies do metabolisms. To conceptualize metabolisms as an activity is to centre the ethical and political practices, relations, knowledges, and vulnerabilities that flood bodies in contemporary times. I ask: What possibilities for…

This article engages in an autoethnographic analysis to offer an argument for the importance of bringing mad studies to pre-service early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs. Through both analysing reflections on two "maddening moments" during pre-service teaching as a mad-identified pre-service ECEC educator and discussing…

In recent years, a programme for young children called Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) has risen to simultaneous popularity and controversy. This article, written collaboratively by an education scholar and a drag queen involved in organizing DQSH, contextualizes the programme within the landscape of gender in education as well as within the world of…

This article works with autobiographical methodologies such as those proposed and propagated by Madeleine Grumet and William Pinar (1975, 2004) to examine and critique the role that an emphasis on learning plays in early childhood teacher education. The authors are an instructor and a student in a course called Foundations in Early Childhood…

One of the key tenets of critical literacy that I operate from is that it works to disrupt normalized social practices. In keeping with this tenet, I have crafted this paper in such a way that it somewhat disrupts the normalized format of academic writing by creating an audit trail comprised of artifacts that represent significant moments in my…

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…

Early childhood writing curriculums typically focus on skills and encouraging interest. What children are asked to write is rarely closely examined. Through a self-study of my first and second grade classroom, in this paper I look at the implications of genre when teaching young children. I first identify some of the problems of a popular personal…

Foucault's notion of heterotopia offers a novel way to understand teachers' conceptualizations of childhood, in juxtaposing adult memories of childhood with their present context of teaching children. Memory writing prompts were given to 41 early childhood teachers, and the resulting written narratives were analyzed as heterotopic spaces. The…

In this article, I (1) argue for approaching processes, events-in-the-making, by means of process categories--to learn, to teach--not by means of categories that denote differences in state and (2) exemplify doing and writing research consistent with process philosophy. To understand process we must not think, research, and write them in terms of…

This article examines the origins, uses, and effects of the rhetorical construct of "work" in the Montessori method. Grounded in analysis of classroom interactions in a Montessori primary (3-6-year-olds) classroom, I argue that Montessori's conception of work substantially revises prevailing assumptions about the nature of childhood, the roles of…