Unravelling Early Childhood Education

witnessing the tensions, threads and knots

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Welcome to my website! I hope you’ll linger with me awhile, as I work to (re)invent new ways of (re)imagining, (re)reading and (re)writing early childhood education.

Sarah Ahmed (2019) writes, “I follow words around, in and out of their intellectual histories” (p. 3).

This is my task –to follow words and ideas around; paying attention to the strands– where they go and what they do. I invite you into the fray –the liminal spaces wherein lives vibrancy and abundance, and the possibility of (re)creation.

"Storytelling is as old as humanity, and is one of the means by which we seek to define and understand ourselves."

~Esi Edugyen, 2021

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tensions

Feminist researcher, Lenz Taguchi (2019) writes of the importance of historically situating our academic, educational and research practices. To know not only where we are, but where we came from and where we are yet to go. Investigating the history of early childhood education reveals deeply patriarchal, misogynistic and deterministic worldviews regarding women. In other words, history promotes discriminatory narrative and truths of women’s position in the world in general, and education more specifically (Ahmed, 2016).

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threads

I am thinking about threads as possibilities and trajectories; and as one way to reimagine different alterity for the early childhood educator. For me, thinking about following threads, is thinking otherwise, and it creates for me, the condition for (re)imagining, (re)scripting and (re)reading the identity of the educator with/in early education, leadership and academia (Moss, 2013; Keenan, 2017)

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knots

Manipulating strands of yarn almost always involves contending with knots. Knots figuratively, and literally bind; slowing down progress and disrupting flow. And yet, this interruption can be viewed as an unexpected invitation to linger, and rethink our processes (Todd, 2001, 2015). In particular the ways we make meaning in our world, through identity, language and literacies (Kress, 1997; Malone et al. 2020).