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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

In Canada and the US, early childhood education (ECE) is embedded within settler-colonial social structures that generate inequalities among, and between, Indigenous and non-Indigenous children and teachers. In order for ECE as a field to become ‘unsettled’ in today’s educational context on Turtle Island, practical, creative, and culturally attentive strategies for anti-colonial teaching and learning must be actively imagined, sought out, and enacted. Although ECE is not innocent of—nor immune to—the effects of settler-colonialism, early learning environments offer myriad opportunities for decolonial interventions predicated on foregrounding Indigenous Knowledges (Nxumalo, 2016; Hare, 2011; Underwood et al., 2019). This panel session offers multiple perspectives on the ways in which early childhood educators can actively confront settler-colonialism through pedagogies committed to social change.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Critical Perspectives on Early Childhood Education

Chair

• Harper Benjamin Keenan, University of British Columbia

Papers

• Gender Unsettled During Storytime: Critical Literacy Practices to Disrupt Settler-Colonialism in Canadian Kindergarten Classrooms - Cayley Burton, The University of British Columbia

• Unsettling Scenes and the Geographies of Racialized, Dis/abled Childhoods - Tran Templeton, University of North Texas; Margaret Frances Harvey, University of North Texas

• They Come From the Land: Situating Early Childhood Education and Care as a Place-Based Practice - Nicole Ineese-Nash, Ryerson University

• Laboring "With" Colonizing Presences in Early Childhood Education - April Martin-Ko, The University of British Columbia

Discussant

• Fikile Nxumalo, University of Toronto