Disruptive Pedagogies in the Early Childhood Classroom: Exploring Liminal Subjectivities

• In Event: 72.017 - Liminality and Twisted Normativity in Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives: This study is about one kindergarten teacher’s attempts to reframe classroom power relations by directly challenging the accepted definition of the ‘good’ teacher and adopting a ‘disruptive’ teacher liminal position when students can benefit from interactions that have not been labeled good, developmental, or acceptable. More specifically, the researcher/teacher attempted to create spaces for classroom entanglements that challenged stereotypic gendering of children, engaged differently with normative forms of sexual identity, and created liminal, unthought spaces for the acceptance of diversity and multiplicity with/for/in children. Finally, the research examined the ways both the teacher and those who are younger reacted within these liminal spaces.

Overview: For many early childhood teachers, interacting with children regarding contested issues is fraught with feelings of anxiety. For a small number of others, this knowledge has resulted in rethinking their approaches to sex, gender, and sexuality (Hughes & MacNaughton, 2001). This rethinking involves creating liminal spaces of otherness that are simultaneously physical and mental, locations that are neither here nor there, spaces in which contradictory sites are juxtaposed (e.g. heterotopias of deviation, Foucault, 1984). These hybrid locations become “other worlds lived retroactively” (Bhaba, (1994, p. 139).

Method: Queer theory and feminist poststructuralism, along with a reconfigured poststructural autoethnography (drawing from (anti)biographical works of Barthes, Derrida, and Cixous), were used as the framework to trouble the pre-existing systems of meaning that influence gender expectations in the early childhood classroom (Grieshaber & Cannella, 2001). The researcher constructed her own purposeful critical autoethnography, a journey of creating and living with/in liminal spaces of unrest and uncertainty (Ellsworth, 2004) that required engagement with notions that included for her, the unfamiliar, like: heteronormativity and the queer eye. In addition to creating more open classroom spaces for child initiated discussions and teacher reactions that countered dominant views of children as asexual, innocent, and ignorant, specific classroom conversations were held using children’s literature. Further, drawing from Bakhtin (1981) and Mizzi (2010), multivocal classroom teacher voices (from within the researcher) were created to open spaces for shifting identities as the teacher/researcher literally placed herself into personal locations that were identified as the good ‘developmental’ teacher, disruptive teacher, sexual being, and mother (examples included in paper) and used those identities to influence questions and conversations with children.

Data Sources: Common to qualitative inquiry, the researcher viewed herself as a data generator. Field and journal notes were taken daily over a four-month period, recording dialogue with children, reactions and behaviors in diverse learning situations, and researcher thoughts, feelings, and explorations.

Conclusions and Significance: Many young children have learned about gender as a result of being immersed into cultural ideologies that are saturated with hegemonic forms of femininity and masculinity; these saturations continue even in spaces that allow for challenges to this hegemony. However, when classroom spaces are created for juxtaposition and contradictions, some children (and the teacher) do try on, wonder within, and even become inhabitants of spaces that acknowledge sexualities and support multiplicities.

Authors

• April Larremore, Dallas Independent School District

• Gaile S. Cannella, Independent Researcher