Reconceptualizing the Making and Taking of Early Childhood Public Spaces

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

As this year’s conference theme states that meaningful educational research emerges in within a “wide variety of public spaces”, the objective of this symposium is to interrogate the ways in which early childhood emerges within and is produced by these spaces. In five papers, an international collective of scholars employing varying philosophical, theoretical, and methodological perspectives ask: What are the public/shared spaces of early childhood? How and for what purposes are they generated, hybridized, regulated, and/or surveilled? What are the political-material consequences for young children, teachers, and researchers? Through these inquiries, shared classroom space, the liminal space between schools and communities, children within city spaces, and the conceptual and practical spaces of research with young children are traversed.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Critical Perspectives on Early Childhood Education

Chair

• Jenny Ritchie, Victoria University of Wellington

Papers

• (Re)making Shared Space in the Early Childhood Center: Collective Practices in Assemblage - Casey Yvonne Myers, Kent State University - Kent; Rochelle Hostler, Kent State University

• Cyborgian Ethnography With Children and Spatial Literacies - Päivi Helena Jokinen, University of Oulu

• Taming Childhoods in Public Spaces - Marek Tesar, The University of Auckland

• Who's Afraid of a Running Child? - Pauliina Rautio, University of Oulu

• Surveillance of Childhood Participatory Research Spaces - Kylie Smith, University of Melbourne

Discussant

• Jenny Ritchie, Victoria University of Wellington