Narrative methods in the nursery: (re)-considering claims to give voice through processes of decision-making

From a feminist post-structuralist position I recount and reflect upon using narrative methods in a recent study with a sample of nursery workers in London. Firstly, I offer a critical reflection of feminist concerns to undertake research in emancipatory and recipricol ways. The decision-making that took place at various stages of the study is explored to consider the tensions and ambiguities that come to characterise feminist post-structuralist approaches to narrative research. The paper concludes by arguing that there is still an important need to hear the stories of marginalised groups. However, to overcome concerns that ‘giving voice’ is unethical, arrogant, and partial then heightened transparency about decision- making and representation is vital

In pursuit of worldly justice in early childhood education: bringing critique and creation into productive partnership for the public good

This chapter attends to a critical analysis of the ways in which the early childhood education workforce in England experiences a series of fundamental social injustices. Through a decade or more of research framed by a concern with social justice the ways in which government policy and therefore public discourse frames the workforce has been addressed. This body of research revealed that the workforce is presented as holding a contradictory position: as both saviour of society and shambolic. This troubling construction, which continues to persist, has provided the justification for endless national strategic plans and workforce remodelling projects. The ECE has undergone unprecedented reform for over 20 years and during that time structural injustices (i.e. low status, poor pay and unfavourable working conditions) persist. However, this highly gendered and classed workforce maintains its commitment to the youngest children (their families and local communities), and it is through increased education that this workforce has found creative ways in which to circumvent and rework neoliberal apparatuses (curriculum diktats, inspection regimes and other accountability measures) to ensure that it contributes to the public good through practices of worldly justice

Pets that have ‘something inside’: the material politics of in/animacy and queer kin within the childhood menagerie

In this paper, we seek to unsettle and extend understandings of what constitutes the contemporary family in Western minority world society and consider the material politics that follow from such a reconceptualization. We do this by offering a situated exploration into the caring relations and shared biographies that routinely evolve between children, other than human animals and toys within the family home. An emergent field of scholarship (Hohti and Tammi 2019; Taylor 2011; Malone 2015) reveals child−animal relations to be charged with various pedagogical and ideological assumptions, which we argue are partly exported to the relations that form between children and their toys. We undertake a close examination of the relationalities between humans and a range of toys as a means to explore the ways in which care and liveliness materialize in childhood play and what this means for our conceptualizations of ‘the family’. We put to work the idea of queer worlding (Haraway 2008; Osgood and Andersen 2019) and animacy (Chen 2012) alongside Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017, 2011) feminist ethics of care. We then specifically focus on the materiality of robotic toys to illustrate some crucial connectivities and erasures to examine how the queer human−animal and animate−inanimate boundaries are reworked and negotiated in childhood play. These processes create a shift in understanding what matters in children’s lives and how materiality and affective forces co-constitute the posthuman family. This paper engages critically with the ambivalences and tensions that emerge within the domestic menagerie and extend to a planetary scale in ways that are inherently political

Young women negotiating maternal subjectivities: the significance of social class

In this review article, we explore discursive configurations of motherhood and the ways in which class informs how young women engage with these in the construction of their biographies. Our theoretical starting point is principally sociological; we contend that the meanings and identities associated with 'the maternal' have been transformed by the impact of neo-liberalism, and that these produce dilemmas for young women as they constitute themselves as learners and future workers. This article reviews contemporary literature which engages with the ways in which the maternal is a key feature in the (re)making of classed and gendered identities

Storying diffractive pedagogy: reconfiguring groupwork in early childhood teacher education

This paper aims to investigate the affective flows and material intra-actions that unfold in micro-moments in Early Childhood Teacher Education (ECTE) within observations of student teachers’ cooperative work. Putting to work Haraway’s SF philosophy (1997, 2004 and 2016) we work towards reconfiguring the primacy of critical reflection, and the cultivation of reflexive practitioners by troubling pedagogical practices such as groupwork that claim to generate critical reflexivity. We ask what else gets produced during groupwork and argue that diffractive pedagogy might open up possibilities for student-teachers to move beyond a narrow concern with critical reflection. By playing with rhythm and plasticity we stretch established ideas about ECTE and offer diffractive pedagogy as a slippery, contingent, relational, emergent, speculative and ultimately less certain concept than critical reflection. Introducing diffractive pedagogy into debates about ECTE offers a generative rupture; an opportunity to extend conceptualisations and practices

Sticky stories from the classroom: from reflection to diffraction in early childhood teacher education

This article aims to challenge the prominence of reflexivity as a strategy for early childhood teachers to adopt by taking Norwegian early childhood teacher education as its focus. Observed micro-moments from a university classroom generate multilayered, multi-sensorial entangled narratives that address what reflection and diffraction are and what they do – where students, the educator, materiality, space and affects intra-act. Furthermore, the article explores the ways in which teacher educators and students in early childhood teacher education become-with the classroom and materiality, and, in doing so, ideas about professionalism in early childhood education are opened out. By identifying the limitations of reflection, the authors go on to explore what working with diffraction might offer to reach alternative understandings. By placing a focus on seemingly unremarkable and routine events in the life of an early childhood teacher education classroom, the authors offer other, potentially more generative ways to think about student teachers and their further professional practice in kindergartens

A feminist new materialist experiment: exploring what else gets produced through encounters with children’s news media

In this paper we are concerned to grapple with the ways in which real world issues directly impact children’s lives, and ask what else gets produced through encounters with children’s global news media specifically within the contexts of the UK and Norway. Our aim is to experiment with worldling practices as a means to open up generative possibilities to encounter and reconfigure difficult knowledges. We take two contemporary events: the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire tragedy in London, and the 2018 Marjory Stoneman high school shooting massacre in Florida, as a means to attend to ways in which affects are materialised across multiple times and spaces. News reports of these harrowing events, alongside what they produced, in terms of child activism, racism and toxic masculinity, provided a catalyst for a feminist new materialist experiment in generating other knowledges through material-affective-embodied encounters. Newspapers, glue, sticky tape, string, torches, bags and a cartridge for a firearm undertook important work within a speculative workshop, where a small number of early childhood researchers came together to be open to multiple and experimental ways of (k)not-knowing in order to formulate collectively shared problems. Following Manning (2016) we recognise that to avoid getting stuck in familiar ways of thinking and doing we need to undertake research differently. We wondered how might the re-materialisation of these events (through objects, artefacts, sounds and images) shift our thinking about childhood in other directions. We dwell upon the affective work that these high-profile news events perform, and how they might become rearticulated through affective encounters with materiality. Attending to how these events worked on us involves staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) as it becomes reignited, mutated and amplified across time and in different contexts. Our goal is to generate other possibilities that seek to reconfigure the ‘image of the child’. By resisting comforts of recognition, reflection and identification we reach beyond what we think we know about how children are in the world, and instead argue for their entanglement with difficult knowledges through, ours and their, world-making practices

Grappling with the miseducation of Montessori: a feminist posthuman re-reading of ‘child’ in early childhood contexts

This paper demonstrates how feminist posthumanism can reconfigure conceptualisations of, and practices with, ‘child’ in Montessori early childhood contexts. It complicates Montessori’s contemporary reputation as a ‘middle-class phenomenon’ by returning to the earliest Montessori schools as a justice-oriented project for working-class children and families. Grappling with the contradictions and inconsistencies of Montessori thought, this paper both acknowledges the legacy of Montessori's feminism, whilst also situating her project within the wider colonial capitalist context in which it emerged. A critical engagement with Montessori education unsettles modernist conceptualisations of ‘child’ and its civilising agenda on minds and bodies. Specifically, Montessori child observation (as a civilising mission) is disrupted and re-read from a feminist posthumanist orientation to generate more relational, queer and expansive accounts of how child is produced through observation. Working with three ‘encounters’ from fieldwork at a Montessori nursery we attend to the material discursive affective manifestation of social class, gender, sexuality and ‘race’ and what that means for child figurations in Montessori contexts. We conclude by embracing Snaza’s ‘bewildering education’, to reach towards different imaginaries of ‘child’ that are not reliant on dialectics of ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’, and that allows ‘child’ to be taken seriously, without risking erasure of fleshy, leaky, porous, codified bodies in Montessori spaces

Introduction: reimagining 'childhood, motherhood, family and community'

This Special Issue acknowledges genealogy as a critical method and mode for tracing power-laden, taken-for-granted assumptions about childhood, motherhood, family and community [...

Reconfiguring the ‘Male Montessorian’: the mattering of gender through pink towering practices

This paper attempts to open out investigations in ECEC by working beyond anthropocentric accounts of gender. Drawing upon feminist new materialist philosophies we ask whether it might be possible to reconfigure ideas about gender that recognise it as produced through everyday processes and material-affective entanglements. In order to do this, we work with Montessori materials, spaces and practices to grapple with the ways that gender is produced through human-material-semiotic encounters. By focusing on familiar Montessori objects, we follow diffractive lines of enquiry to extend investigations and generate new knowledge about gender in ECEC. This shift in focus allows other accounts about gender to find expression. We argue gender can be encountered as more than an exclusively human matter; and we go on to debate what that might potentiate (i.e. that if gender is fleeting, shifting, and produced within micro-moments there is freedom to break free from narrow framings that fix people, such as ‘the Male Montessorian’, in unhelpful ways). An approach that foregrounds affect and materiality makes a hopeful, generative and expansive contribution to the field