Laboring "With" Colonizing Presences in Early Childhood Education

• In Event: Confronting Settler-Colonialism in Early Childhood Education: Building Anticolonial Pedagogies for Social Change

Abstract

It has been stated, as we continually face the conditions of a pandemic, we are living in ‘unprecedented times’. This, for many, is a forced disruption. However, it may also provide an opportunity for reflection—particularly in the field of early childhood education (ECE), this provides openings to examine where we sit pedagogically in acceptance of educational responsibility. Part of this responsibility involves a recognition that the legacy of ECE in North America is bound to colonization. This paper, as a type of conceptual literature review, explores the following question: What is the purpose of education? How do we live well with historical and present injustices that are continuously entangled? Moreover, this paper outlines how a system of ‘rescue’ is rooted in narratives that came from the Enlightenment. Pedagogies created to colonize Indigenous people continue a wide reach in all aspects of educational systems (Donald, 2012; May et al., 2016). This paper examines the meta-narrative translated globally through neoliberal thinking and has become part of dominant discourse, pedagogy and practice in the field of ECE (Clarke-Vivier & Stearns, 2015; Moss, 2014). 

As Foucault (1983) posited, “everything is dangerous”—if this is indeed the case, “then we always have something to do” (p. 231). In this paper, I inquire if one can ‘weaken’ neoliberal and settler-colonial systems through thinking and doing otherwise. What are the alternative narratives we might add to our “Carrier Bag ” (Le Guin, 1989, p. 165)? Is it possible to “unscript pedagogies” (Panel-Author, 2017) that we have marinated in for centuries?  Centering Indigenous pedagogies and perspectives allow for “living resistance” that disrupts settler mythologies and offers alternative narratives through acts of “restorying” (Sium & Ritskes, 2013; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Panel-Discussant, 2015). ECE must also live through the awareness that the past, present and future cannot be separated from each other through efforts to create something new.

Transformative change, then, begets a state of continuous movement: not the closure that comes from achieving a new and desired but static state of being, but the open-endedness of constant becoming. This is transformational change as a long-term project, capable of taking unexpected directions (Moss, 2014, p. 10).

If our desire is to live ‘with’ educational responsibility, then we must commit to ‘be and labour with’ alternative ways of thinking and doing within educational pedagogies and practices in the field of ECE.

Author

• April Martin-Ko, The University of British Columbia