Issue 4 – The Pedagogist Network of Ontario

Editors’ Note

“No time passed is good enough for my living,” Dionne Brand – a Black poet and essayist who lives in Toronto – contends, in response to Indigenous poet Billy-Ray Belcourt’s question “what if any, is the relationship between nostalgia and poetry?”. Unfolding on an episode of the Between the Covers podcast hosted by David Naimon, Brand continues: “I can only think of the future, the place where we might live, which would refute all that we are living; negate and tear up all that we are living. I am always living in the future…my work is to live in the future”. When we listen to Brand’s words as a pedagogist might, we are struck by the emphasis on ideation as a world-making tactic: to envision a future that refutes the neoliberal, settler colonial pillars of existing early childhood education because the future must be imperceptible; it is a requirement that the future be illegible to the white supremacist, humanist, developmental grammars of the present. A pedagogist, learning with Brand, is uninterested in creating a “better” future where better is simply a synonym for status-quo with a slight social justice flavour. A pedagogist is, instead, interested in discerning how and why different questions and concerns matter differently to specific educational experiences and responsive curriculum-making such that we might generate situated, responsive pedagogies grounded in the ongoing rhythms, politics, ethics, and flows of an early childhood or post-secondary education space.

Returning to Re:

“The pandemic has left a mark on all of us in disproportionate ways. The prospect of re:opening from the pandemic, with all of its assumptions, complexities, and uncertainties, has caused us to pause and consider what re:opening actually means. We offer the prefix re meaning both “again” and “back” (Oxford University Press, 2021), as a way to consider our relations with/in histories and futures. The : after re intensifies this relationality by “amplifying what has come before it” (histories) and “directing us to the information following it” (futures) (Grammarly, 2021). The preposition re:, meaning “in the matter of,” “concerning” (Oxford University Press, 2021), draws us to the urgency of what matters and what concerns us in the now. Thus, we conceptualize re: as a liminal space/time between pasts and futures, a bumpy space where disaggregated research practices, theoretical frameworks and methodologies meet, resist and transform. Taking the preposition re: as a proposition, we engage Donna Haraway’s provocation to stay with the trouble of what concerns us and of what matters in conversation with Sara Ahmed’s incitement to build and ruin from/with/in this liminal space/time of re:.”

– From the 2022 York Graduate Students in Education Conference call for proposals

In Conversation with Dr. Adam Davies

In the early autumn, Cristina and Nicole engaged with Dr. Adam Davies to think together about the work of crafting life and joy-sustaining pedagogies in the context of the province of Ontario – a context ripe with child development, heteronormativity, and everyday invocations of human difference as deficit. Dr. Adam Davies (they, them, theirs) is an Assistant Professor of Family Relations and Human Development at the University of Guelph. They are the Co-Chair of the Anti-Oppression Rainbow Research Lab and are active on Twitter where they boldly advocate for the rights of students and professors amid the neoliberal institution. As Cristina and Nicole prepared to offer Adam an opening provocation for our dialogue, we turned to Adam’s recent publications which invoke a palpable sense of living and embodying pedagogy as it functions as a world-making process, and never resting with pedagogy as a technocratic practice. From here, our conversation moved toward thinking who we see as our co-conspirators in this work of thinking pedagogically and in proposing possible educational worlds that are infused in ethical desire, where Adam emphasized the labour of critique in dismantling child development and the normativity it produces and reproduces, and brought to our attention a certain ethos of critique as life-giving, joining a history of thinking critique as more than neoliberalism’s ‘critical thinking’. Bringing our conversation to a (we hope temporary) close, we ask Adam about their work of critique and this insistence on refusal, where insistence is a doubled move that also insists on life. Together, many threads of the work of a pedagogist weave through our conversation, from thinking embodiment, commons, critique, collectivity, and futurity, to mounting tangible gestures against technocracy, essentialism, child development, and the colonial heteropatriarchy. We are so grateful to Adam for their time, and we offer this conversation as the inauguration of a new ally relationship and thinking companion for our work in the Pedagogist Network of Ontario. Thank you, Adam.

Returning as/with Post-Secondary Pedagogists

What modes of returning matter to post-secondary institution (PSI) pedagogists as they return not just to the college or university institution, but also to the ethics and politics that cohere early childhood education together as an institution? In autumn 2022, post-secondary institution pedagogists are taking on a unique project: they are returning to their role as educators of pre-service teachers and they are returning to their role as a pedagogist intent on agitating the developmental and instrumental logics that underpin much of what counts as pre-service teacher education. To linger with the tensions that come from such a return, Cristina and Nicole participated in a conversation with three post-secondary institution pedagogists: Paolina Camuti, Marah Gardner Echavez, and Cory Jobb. Paolina and Marah work as pedagogists in Ontario and Cory is in British Columbia. We began our conversation with a simple question: do we want to return – and how? We then turned to questions of methodology, where, if we have a desire to return, how do we then do the work of returning well? Finally, we point toward some of the tensions that have emerged through each pedagogists’ responses, wondering how returning might also be about uncertainty and disjuncture, and not the confident and slick return to learning advanced by contemporary neoliberal discourses.