Diffractive Interferences in Emergent Curriculum

• In Event: 45.064 - Ethical and Political Engagements With Emergent Curriculum in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

The paper will address how emergent curriculum could stand in contrast to, and be an important site of resistance to, standardized and theme-based curriculum in early childhood education, including increasingly regimented modes of governing in the classroom. In other words, we will show how emergent curriculum has the potential to create important cracks in the increasingly normalized techniques of framing early childhood education as a preparatory site for already pre-determined desired subjects of neoliberal economies (Brown, 2015; Henriksson, 2009; Sonu & Benson, 2016; author1, 2011). The paper will include specific examples of how educators might be invited to enact transformational and collaborative pedagogical practices that take seriously children’s theories and curiosities.
Despite these vital contributions of emergent curriculum, in our work as pedagogistas, we have experienced multiple pedagogical encounters that give us pause in regard to the ways in which emergent curriculum has been taken up. To destabilize and complexify the theory-practice of emergent curriculum in early childhood education, we draw on the work of curriculum theorists who have already provided us with invaluable conceptual and pedagogical tools for putting forward reconceptualizations of emergent curriculum in early childhood education. We turn to selected recent scholarship on the connections between curriculum and decolonization to interrogate the decolonizing potentiality of specific place-based curriculum encounters. We also situate decolonial curriculum as that which attends to both racisms and settler colonialism, and reconsider how decolonizing emergent curriculum necessitates serious efforts to cultivate different modes of relationality beyond human-centric or child-centred relationality. We are referring here to the intrinsic inter-connectedness between humans and the more-than-human world, as articulated by multiply located Indigenous knowledges (le Grange, 2016; Cajete, 2000; Watts, 2013).
Overall, we are interested in the ways in which everyday curriculum-as-lived might include attunements to the ‘lived’ as that which does not necessarily emerge from children, as well as those that require educators to make difficult decisions about how to take up emergence in practice, including decisions about what belongs in young children’s curriculum-making. This includes curriculum that explicitly situates young children’s learning within current conditions of late capitalism and its entanglements with the settler colonial, racist structuring and rampant extractive consumerism of everyday life. A key point that we are making in this paper is that it is not enough to create conditions for emergence. With pedagogical responsibility in mind, we seek modes of sustaining emergence through subsequent and multiple processes of lived curriculum-making that educators decide to sustain.

Authors

• Fikile Nxumalo, The University of Texas at Austin

• Narda Nelson, University of Victoria

• Cristina Delgado Vintimilla, York University