(Re)Storying Encounters With Anti-Blackness In Early Childhood Education: Thinking With Refusal

• In Event: Speculative Methodologies and Anti-Racist Curricular Practice: Building Curricular Futures Beyond Anti-Blackness

Abstract

Objectives
This paper engages with speculative refusals in thinking with the daily experiences of Black early childhood educators. Extending our previous writings (Author, 2021; Authors, 2022), we refuse early childhood education’s foundation on anti-Blackness and refuse its insistence on failing to acknowledge Black livingness. We inquire into how early childhood education might attend to the textures and excesses of Black livingness beyond dominant registers of despair and recognition. Drawing on a series of conversations with Black early childhood educators, we ask; what places might we search, what stories might we tell, and what might we need to remember in order to imagine glimpses of Black freedom in early childhood education?

Theoretical Frameworks
We work with Katherine McKittrick’s (2022) analytics of opacity, Rinaldo Walcott’s (2021) glimpses of Black freedom, and Christina Sharpe’s (2016) praxis of the wake. Our intention is to creatively (re)story the early childhood education archive (always already founded in anti-Blackness) and reimagine it by attending to Black life, and, through this process, imagine capacious and lively registers. Despair is one of two registers in the scant Euro-American literature that describes the conditions Black early childhood educators experience daily. Often combined with a second register: recognition. Educators are often portrayed as victims of a violent system; their daily practices are reduced to the struggle of countering covert anti-Black racist practices so that they can be recognized as educators (Stirling-Cameron et al. 2023). We refuse the registers of despair and recognition because they maintain the Euro-American concept of humanity which Black life is inherently unable to fully occupy and within which it is unable to succeed.

Modes of Inquiry
Our refusals of early childhood education’s rejection of Blackness (re)story early childhood education’s archive on Blackness. As Christina Sharpe (2016) suggests, refusing anti-Blackness also “demands to imagine otherwise; to reckon with the fact that the archive, too, is invention” (p. 46). We engage in this (re)storying errantly. We think, rethink and creatively (re)story narratives from three focus group conversations with 16 Black educators working in early childhood centres and kindergarten programs in Toronto, Canada. We include insights gained from returning to participants with our creative analysis including discussions on potentials for more complex, nuanced, and protective representations of their work and subjectivities.

Conclusions & Scholarly Significance
We offer creative text as an invitation, with the hope that the audience will engage not for what the text definitively means, but for what it might evoke. Thus, the creative text can be seen as a speculative, artistic and affective work—one that aims to provoke otherwise thinking, feeling, and acting. For us, reading through opacity is a way to avoid the prevailing sense of hopelessness found in early childhood literature, to refuse the prevalent register of despair. This approach encourages us to consider what stories we are capable of sharing and emphasizes the importance of caring about when and how we tell stories pertaining to Black educators’ experiences.

Authors

• Fikile Nxumalo, University of Toronto - OISE

• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Western University