Dialogue 2: Enacting Pedagogical Resistance in Early Learning Contexts

• In Event: Beyond Histories of Compliance in Early Childhood Education: Centering Disability and Cultivating Freedom

Abstract

If we recognize how histories of ableism structure everyday interactions in early educational settings—positioning some children as worthy and able while pathologizing others—how might we pedagogically resist such dehumanization? Contributors will share ways early educators have sought to pedagogically resist ableism and counter the erasure of disabled ways of knowing and being, including: (a) Examples from participatory qualitative research in which an early elementary teacher’s resistance to traditional understandings of literacy (i.e., reading and writing print) and introduction of multimodal tools (e.g., Canva, movie-making software, Google Slides) supported shifts in one neurodiverse young child’s perceptions of himself and his sense of belonging; (b) Examples from three years of practitioner-based research that show how the Disabled Educators Curriculum Collective developed understandings of community, accessibility, and disability identity with young children as they taught histories of disability activism ; and (c) Examples of pedagogical narration (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015) within an Australian outdoor kindergarten that position disabled young children as always already in relation with people and place, even amid “on-going settler colonialisms” (Nxumalo, 2019, p.iii).

Stovall (2018) wrote that liberatory pedagogical approaches seek to “end repression while simultaneously supporting the capacity of historically oppressed and marginalized peoples to think and create” (p. 52). In this dialogue, participants and contributors will collaboratively imagine liberatory pedagogical approaches in their own realms of influence, creating space for multiply-marginalized young children to live out their full selves. In doing so, participants and contributors will grapple with the histories of ableism that intersect with settler colonialism, oralism, and linguicism, and learn from the ways disabled communities - past and present- have resisted oppressions. For instance, what can the leadership of Black disabled activist Brad Lomax’s efforts to connect disability rights organizers and the Black Panthers during the 504 sit-ins (Thompson, 2020) teach us about coalition-building as we pedagogically resist ableism in the field? How can texts like A Day with No Words (Hammond, 2023)—a picturebook that rejects narrow conceptions of language and communication and positions Autistic identity as a natural part of human diversity - support early educators in pedagogically resisting disability erasure in the classroom? How do we resist disability erasure in ways that honor children’s connections with the natural world, knowing how colonial logics endure in early childhood special education (Handy, 2024) and that most Indigenous languages do not have a word for disability that carries the deficit connotation perpetuated by the Global North (Krawek, 2022)? This dialogue will focalize pedagogical resistance to both the erasure of disabled knowledge and to the ableist histories that structure young children’s everyday meaning-making today. Together, contributors and participants will reflexively generate hopeful possibilities for transforming pedagogical processes in solidarity with multiply-marginalized children.

Authors

• Devanshi Unadkat, San Diego State University

• Caroline Cuenca, University of San Francisco

• Kathryn Meyer, Binghamton University - SUNY

• Rosie Tuffour-Mercedat, Independent Scholar

• Elizabeth Barcay, Boston University

• Brianna Doherty, Independent Scholar

• A.R. Shearer, Independent Scholar

• Jasmin Stoffer, Independent Scholar

• Ame Christiansen, University of Melbourne