Sympoietic Pedagogies in Early-Years Teacher Education: Troubling Authority and Material Bodies

• In Event: Disruption: Challenging Early Childhood Teacher Education

Abstract

In early years’ practices, deeply important beliefs and assumptions about who or what has authority and who or what should create the boundaries of everyday activity often go unquestioned. This produces different kinds of epistemic injustice in respect of children and those who work with them, as well as through the materialities of early childhood and training settings, including higher education. This paper thinks from the posthumanist position that knowing is a direct material and affective, intuitive, making, moving engagement with bodies, including texts, and examines how sympoietic pedagogies of enquiry-making-with (Haraway, 2016) in an early years teacher education course in South Africa generate new ideas about the concept of authority, thereby expanding the notion of democratic education.

Authors

• Karin Saskia Murris, University of Oulu

• Joanna Haynes, Plymouth University