Troubling gender binaries in early childhood education: Disrupting epistemic injustice through non-binary autobiographic writing

• In Event: Advancing Gender and Racial Justice in Early Childhood Education: Persistent Challenges and Promises

Abstract

Purpose and objectives: This presentation aims to engage with autobiographical life writing in education through Pinar’s (1994) currere approach, emphasizing non-binary life-writing and autobiography in early childhood education. I will argue that autobiographical life-writing approaches in education can provide non-binary educators in early childhood education with an opportunity to challenge the common erasure and epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007) that non-binary educators experience within the early years.

Theoretical Framework: I will draw from queer theory (e.g., Butler 1990), including queer theory in education (Allen & Rasmussen, 2015; Pinar, 1998) and early childhood education (Blaise & Taylor, 2012), to problematize how binarized notions of gender that are propagated within early childhood education – often erase the subjectivities of non-binary educators through the reliance on often gender essentialist and binary theories from developmental psychology dominant in early childhood education. Queer theory challenges how binaries are produced, illustrating how power and knowledge are intertwined and therefore propagated taken-for-granted notions of ‘truth’ (Foucault, 1990). While self-writing and autobiography provide a means to (re)narrative life events and subjectivity, the analysis of the subject and the ‘I’ move towards the discourses that create binary gendered subjectivities as intelligible while invisibilizing non-binary subjectivities in early childhood education and marking them abject.

Methods and data sources: This presentation draws from autobiographical writing – written over several years – by the author as a non-binary educator in early childhood education and faculty in post-secondary early childhood education. This writing emerged as individual and personal reflections as the writing shifted from identifying as a cisgender queer man towards identifying as and with non-binary pronouns and identities. These writings engage with the educational experiences of the author as they navigated working within post-secondary early childhood education as a faculty and coming out as non-binary. These writings further engage with reflections regarding the author’s educational and schooling experiences, which draw from Pinar’s (1994) currere approach, which involves shifting temporalities of reflections upon educational and teaching experiences. These reflections loosely followed currere’s 4-stage approach, including reflections on the past, present, and imagined future of the author’s educational and teaching experiences.

Results: Results engage with how the non-binary educators in early years education are erased, and constituted as inferior, or even pathological, in early years settings. The autobiographical writing engages with a contextual-specific analysis of how non-binary educators are dismissed and gaslighted as knowledge holders in early childhood education professional practices and post-secondary education programs in Ontario, Canada, perpetuating epistemic injustices (Fricker, 2007). The presentation will engage with the epistemic possibilities and potentialities for creating affirming and epistemically just spaces for non-binary educators in early childhood education.

Scholarly significance of study: Little to no academic writing and literature currently exists regarding the experiences of non-binary educators in pre-service and in-service early childhood education programs (Author). This presentation calls for attention towards belonging in early childhood education and care (Epley & Souto-Manning, 2023) emphasizing the subjectivities and experiences of systemically marginalized early years educators (Author).

Author

• Adam W.J. Davies, University of Guelph