Place Narratives: Reimagining Early Childhood Pedagogies

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 58
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Scholarship: Confronting Forms of Oppression in Early Childhood Pedagogies

Abstract

As a settled country, Australia’s education system has been built on colonial logic, ideals and knowledges that privilege western, linear ways of knowing that do not attend to the complexity of children’s meaning making. Engaging with Aboriginal cosmologies in curriculum and pedagogy are often silenced and rendered invisible (Martin 2007). In contrast, Aboriginal worldviews focus on relationships (not exclusively human ones), relationality and circular ways of knowing (Martin, 2016). Traditional early childhood practices and pedagogies are infused in colonial logic that situates teaching in learning in narrow perspectives. I share place narratives that work to foreground local, Aboriginal ways of knowing in early childhood education as a way to (re)imagine practices that move beyond dominant Western paradigms.

Author

• Catherine Hamm, Victoria University - Melbourne