Home or Homelessness: A Diffractive Re-Articulation of Teacher Otherness

• In Event: Unpacking “Home”: Confronting Racism and Other Oppressions in Early Childhood Contexts

Abstract

This presentation engages with the effects and affects of teachers’ conceptions of home in the face of contemporary experiences of migration. It theorizes relational treatments of the Other in early childhood settings from the perspective that such relationships are driven by teachers’ underlying attitudes and orientations towards Otherness, familiarity, and the self. Theorizing home, or homelessness, as an inner sense, the presentation draws on Kristeva’s (1991) poststructural, philosophical notion of the Other as a constant state of becoming, where all of us are foreigners even to ourselves. The presentation offers a critical entry point towards rethinking attitudes of openness and acceptance to and of children and families of minority groups. Recognising that ‘the foreigner lives within us’ presents a humbling and hopeful disruption to hegemonic expectations and strategies of sameness and difference in early childhood settings.
The contribution of this presentation to our symposium is through the influence of teachers’ sense of home on practices and pedagogies. Teacher’s orientations and pedagogies towards racial and migratory injustices, necessarily shaped by the histories, realities and ongoing constructions of their own continually forming and complex identities, deserve crucial attention as they directly impact those of the young children in their settings (Srinivasan, 2016).
The presentation adopts a Baradian (2014) approach to diffractively re-articulate teachers’ ways of knowing, being, and intra-relating. It confronts dominant marginalisations of children’s and families’ racial, ethnic, cultural and other diversities including with human and more-than-human things, beings and matter (Braidotti, 2022). Recognizing that understandings of home cannot be universalized, even though diverse viewpoints and experiences may be similar, and even perhaps simultaneously opposing, this presentation opens up to conceptions of home as never static, and always risky and potentially exclusionary, marginalizing and othering in some ways. The presentation argues for multiple (re)articulations of ways in which teacher orientations affect the experiences of the young children with whom they spend their days.

Author

• Sonja Arndt, University of Melbourne