The Pedagogist Network of Ontario
Pedagogist Network of Ontario creates conversations and spaces that nurture the hopeful, rigorous work of inventing pedagogical possibilities that resist status-quo practices in early childhood education. As a collective of researchers and pedagogists, we propose that curriculum-making with children and early childhood educators should respond to the situated, urgent, lived ethics and politics of a particular place. The role of the pedagogist in Canada is ongoing, with active participation with the Pedagogist Network of Ontario, and with our sister project the British Columbia Early Childhood Pedagogies Network.
The site is currently under construction. We are thinking carefully about the role of the PNO and how it works within and alongside communities of practice. This reflection has called us to reimagine what the website does in relation to those communities.
As part of this process, the quarterly magazine we once shared is being reworked. The magazine was originally envisioned as a space for encounters with ideas and experiences connected to the educational practice of the pedagogist. Over time, however, we have recognized the need to reconsider how a sense of aliveness can exist here, within the format of a website.
We invite you to check back periodically as we continue this reworking. In the meantime, we invite you to read archives of previous articles .
What do we do?
The Pedagogist Network of Ontario creates the processes and pedagogical trajectories necessary to become a pedagogist in Ontario. Through these processes, pedagogists and researchers collaborate to think intensely about the educational practice of a pedagogist, and the possibilities and commitments that this work might open up. In other words, we collectively craft spaces to co-invent pedagogies that take up questions of ‘living well with children’, and creating conditions for liveable futures.
We challenge the idea that early childhood education is a space for children’s socialization into the current status quo. Pedagogists offer questions and trajectories that have the potential to interrupt and transform existing norms, truths, structures, and inheritances in early childhood education. We do this with the intention to create and care for pedagogical relations – that is, relations that shape educational encounters and continually engage in the ongoing work of living curriculum with children.
Importantly, the Pedagogist Network of Ontario resists taking the form of a professional development certification or a pre-articulated program of study, both in the work of becoming a pedagogist and within the collaborative inquiries that pedagogists and early childhood educators create together. Instead, we see the work of a pedagogist as profoundly situated, responsive, and ongoing. Pedagogists continually inquire into the ethics and uncertainty of encountering early childhood education while thinking pedagogically.
