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.
Cristina and Nicole: What is evoked or revealed to you as a PSI pedagogist by the idea of a return? If there is a return, how do you articulate this return? What is the work of a pedagogist in a post-secondary neoliberal institution as they support students and colleagues to do the work of returning? Do we want to return – and how?
Paolina: I am enticed into “returning” to a world without the protection of the screen and the safety net of my home environment. I have come to know the screen for how it creates an emotional barrier in the learning encounter, a separation in relations with “other” which granted a more intense and abstract focus on content, ideology, and production. The dynamics of our relationships stilled, hidden away in the small empty frames that consumed the screen; offering anonymity. Time taking on a different meaning; rhythms and routine suspended from the systemic framework of the “schedule outside of the exposure.” How is it that I have come to find comfort and safety in the isolation that has been the result of a Pandemic?? I am provoked to consider the anxieties that this “returning” might create for students who have perhaps also found comfort in the flexibility and protection offered through on-line options. I am invited to question how institutions can be responsive to student realities by creating agile alternatives for learning without losing the dynamic relationships that unfold through face-to-face exposure.
In this “returning,” I am compelled to bring to question, “What are we returning to?” This inquiry generates a flood of tensions that are shaped by what is known, what is unknown and the wonder of what could become new possibilities. Explicit to a “return” to what is known is the strain created by predetermined standards that affect curriculum. Concerned by the increasing gap between the standard, its application and the human experience. In this “returning” do we “return” to past paradigm? Where a neoliberal and capitalist stance is applied to bring value to learning that is fraught with production. As a Pedagogist, I am encouraged to consider, “How can we bring more humanity to the classroom and the expectations that govern program frameworks?”
Foucault and Agamben (2021) urge us to think together about how we want to live in our learning spaces. They challenge us to create something new. In this work, I am compelled to begin by reconsidering our relations and the “production” of the classroom. In this “returning” I am made to bring to question the overt and hidden values that are articulated in my course content, delivery strategies and assessment frameworks that define my classroom; pondering how a more inclusive, human-centered and creative learning space can unfold. How can we build more inclusive learning spaces that are responsive and bring value to tensions that comes from the known and unknown; bringing greater breadth and depth to the engagement?
Marah: A return to the conventional classroom was always lingering in the back of my mind throughout the sudden modification to learning these past two years. The question of what it would mean to return to the classroom was never a consideration due to the fact that I assumed it would be business as usual. This involved bringing back the typical classroom and student field placement experiences that were planned and prepared to support student learning, and eventually meeting the learning outcomes. Is this not one of the purposes of the early childhood education program? The question of what it means to return or what are we turning towards has begun a personal reflection of what it will entail.
Returning to working in a classroom has revealed to me the importance of flexibility that supports the needs of students to learn where they feel most efficient in the moment. It has also proved how offering choices instead of one standard means of evaluating student work is essential. In this first week of the semester, the most common reaction from students was the ability to communicate and participate in discussions, as well as be in the presence of other colleagues. There is the feeling of tension in the physical proximity of each person in one room that can affect the feeling of comfort. I myself felt this when being approached throughout the day. It makes me think: how can I go back to the default practice of teaching? What was my default practice of teaching? I think back and remember the value to talking one-on-one with students, listening to how they feel in class, asking what I can do to help support their learning. That is going to continue to happen with just the presence and awareness of the ever-present mask that I am constantly putting on and taking off. In a few weeks, the return to field placement will be the next tension that may be brought forward. I think about the weight of each adult presence and the impact it will make in a child care centre.
My work within my team requires discussions about our vision and values. Do they remain the same or do they require us to revisit them? Hansen and Phelan (2021) talk about a return to a co-existence until we find the best fit four ourselves as educators and the experience for our students. There needs to be a balance in everything we do in this return. With the continued high enrollment in each program, there needs to be a balance in this business-as-usual environment.
Cory: In my second year as faculty in a small early childhood education program I am thinking about what it means to return (or refuse to return) as a productive condition for pedagogical experimentation and how return may figure into the subject formation of future early childhood educators. What pedagogical commitments are cultivated in students when carefully making visible that return is not a neutral proposition? It is hard to avoid the broader cultural reckoning with return – i.e., discourses that place a desire for pre-pandemic times as a return to normalcy, but as I prepare to teach a course on curriculum and pedagogy, I am more interested in thinking about how return can instead act as provocation for the yet-to-be rather than yearning for what once was. I am thinking alongside Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas as, in part, a rumination on what it means to stay, or to refuse to stay and how staying may also be read as a continual return. Without spoiling the story for those who may wish to read it, Le Guin lays out a labyrinthine ethical morass via a city in which the joy of many is built upon the enduring suffering of one. When interpreted through a pedagogical context, the tension of staying-as-returning is made apparent by the importance of making a decision – to maintain what is, or to push against the status quo in search of more just futures. Part of my work as a faculty pedagogist has involved dwelling on the compromises and tensions and ethical quandaries of staying and returning.
Perhaps a specific example will be useful to illustrate how I return. Last winter I taught a course focused on care, and it was during this course that I experimented with return as one of the orienting conditions or commitments for gathering. One of my earliest wonderings when mapping out the course was – Who are the becoming-educators produced through sustained engagement with care? One of the ways I tried to enact both care and return was to open each lecture with poetry. Each week I spent a portion of my preparation time selecting a poem or two – an exercise in both care and return as I waded through the unfamiliar-to-me world of poetry to find texts that would be meaningful tone-setters. We read widely, from Hanif Abdurraqib to Fatimah Asghar to Phillip Larkin to Sylvia Plath, all within whose poetry I can locate the emotional heft of returning. As I prepare to teach the curriculum course with the same cohort of students, return is on my mind. I do not want to read poetry again, that feels like a confirmation of expectations, but I do want to use the opening moments of each class to engage with return. What might happen, for example, if I open each class by reading The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas? While I want to resist predicting, and instead sit in the speculative uncertainty of Le Guin’s fictive world, I am hopeful that engaging with return-as-method may be an opening to a refusal of stasis.
Cristina and Nicole: You have referred to re-turn as a method, also as an inquiry and as a concept inciting reflection. You point out toward re-turning as an explorative invitation to resist the repetition of the status quo in the education of future early childhood educators. Yet, at the same time, it seems to us that this kind of possibility, or perhaps even praxis, requires careful attention to the material and discursive experimentations that you as PSI pedagogists might be able to put in motion in each of your contexts. What initial decisions might be required to do this type of work? What conversations might be needed and who should be involved? Put otherwise: how do we do return?
Paolina: In my re-turn to the classroom, I am driven to reimagine my learning space which is defined by predetermined syllabuses, perhaps with too much content and too little time for reflection, disruption and thinking outside of what might be expected. I face: pedagogical frameworks which continue to be deeply rooted in Behaviorist philosophy. The classroom fraught with intention to “fill empty vessels,” with information and to evaluate what is learned using predetermined assessment strategies that measure what is remembered. The outcome of this fluid, conscious and unconscious dynamic is to create a certain kind of “subject.” In this re-turn I aspire to dismantle with intentionality that which is being formed.
As a Pedagogist, I look to foster dialogue that gazes into the future to reimagine the student and emerging early childhood educator. This is a political discourse that asks us to consider how our learning spaces in the discursively and materially creates as subject. This discourse unsettles our history and brings to question the neoliberal intention to use education as a tool to create a certain kind of citizen; subservient and conforming. In this re-turn, I am motivated to bring to question the underlying philosophy and values integral to Early Childhood Education Program Standards; their interpretations and application. Such transformation evokes tensions that create discomfort as it thrusts us from what we know to what is unknown.
In this re-turn, I am made to bring to question who is the student that is being created within the classroom? How does this learning space respond to the student and emerging professionals’ humanity? How is this discourse characterized and translated into practice with children, families and colleagues? I am brought to consider the need to cultivate greater opportunities for disruptive dialogue that interrupts familiar content and practices; fostering non- conformity and activism. I am motivated by Foucault and Agamben’s (2021) concept of “counter spaces.” Within the structure of the syllabus, I seek out space and time for provocation; where philosophies, concepts and ideas that define the early childhood educator can be dismantled. In this learning space we struggle to bring awareness to what is not seen, ignored, missed or sits in the in-between; while paying close attention to language used and/or not available. In this re-turn I am enticed to create within the classroom “counter spaces” that bring a “playfulness and lightness” to discourse that elicits discomfort and tension.
As a Pedagogist, we look to also create such “counter spaces” within the context of our faculty meetings where opportunities for dismantling practice are integrated. This discourse is initiated through shared readings that bring to question common practices; philosophy and application. This dialogue is made visible and documented through minutes.
Marah: Looking back to the discussions made to prepare for the return to the classroom, the predominant sentiment was that of relief to returning to the familiar. It was a feeling of returning home. Home being the space where educators are more proficient in the use of the space, timing, and basic teaching methods and materials. As I reflect on the past few weeks of having lived in the return, I am drawn to the question: What is it that I am trying to make different and how do I begin to do this type of work? This reflection of my work as a pedagogist compels me to think about my role as a member of a team, my role as the educator who brings information to the students, and my role as a member of the institution that I work in. Bringing information, in thi context, means delivering content that is required for first semester ECE students to be familiar with such as governing documents, health and emergency policies, and the role of an ECE student during placement. Information takes the form of policies and procedures as well as personal experience. I am referring to information as actual artifacts.
As a member of the faculty team, we have begun the process of thinking together and listening to one another about our experiences in this return to work. We shared our eagerness as we prepared for the semester, and we also shared the realities that we faced as we are in this daily practice of teaching. Through the discourse, I learned that a careful balance is needed. This balance can be found through communication with one another as we make decisions to best meet individual student needs.
The ECE faculty team shared similar positions around the ability to teach in a classroom and being together with the students. Discussions centred around being in the familiar learning environment of a classroom that allows us to interact easier with students. A careful balance in the classroom means maintaining program policies, following the course syllabus, and adapting to any student needs such as offering a different modality of the class if needed. A specific example is allowing the student to attend the class online if they tested positive for COVID but decides that they still want to attend the class. This demonstrates the need to be flexible and adaptable to student situations in our planning. There is tension in the need to bring things “back to normal” because the two-year experience of teaching online has taught us a new way to deliver the class. That is something that was not a norm unless one was teaching in the blended format.
In relation to the required information required by the syllabus, the balance I mention is bringing to question my role and how I rethink the need to offer a new way of delivering content outside of what is in the syllabus. The importance of delivering necessary information around the ECE career is centered around a program’s philosophy of teaching. Why we select the topics, how we plan to deliver the content, and the expectation of the production of a knowledgeable and experienced ECE student.
As an educator, I am faced with the awareness of what MacNaughton discusses as truth and knowledge in our delivery of content (2005). As an early childhood education pedagogist, my aim is to create an awareness of a balance between contributing to the knowledge of the subject through the required content to help them be better prepared for their role as placement students. I find myself in a new and sometimes uncomfortable space of moving outside of the typical learning materials such as research facts, typical developmental research as norms, governing documents, and learning outcomes. How do I deliver all the content subjectively? What experiences and expertise, if any, do the subjects bring to enhance learning?
As a pedagogist it is integral to bring to question and look outside of the syllabus to know what is happening in the role of an ECE in practice. The work of a pedagogist is to bring the content to life by making connections to real life scenarios in a child care centre to look beyond things that are not visible. I encounter tensions when trying to bring the student’s perspectives to how they think they would respond during the use of case studies that go beyond the course content. There is apprehension from the student’s perspective when they come to the classroom without any child care experience. This is where discourse can focus on the difference between role of the adult who has power and an educator who demonstrates responsiveness. As a PSI pedagogist, am I only delivering content? Am I bringing a new perspective to students? What is the philosophy that I bring to my work? I think about the implications my “delivery” makes to the learning.
As a member of an institution, I find it more challenging to begin conversations about returning outside of a “back to business” mindset. It appears that it is important to continue to ask the question about returning and what it requires until more educators continually reflect on this return and act on their intentions. Revisiting conversation is an ongoing process that may bring forward awareness of how we affect our students and what kind of student we create in our program.
Cory: Your question is correct that careful attention is necessary in pedagogical work, that pedagogical processes are a studious kind of thinking and doing. Much has been written about care-full pedagogies in dialogue with the long history of feminist care ethics. As Joan Tronto, Miriam Williams, and others have written, care-fullness is activated in ways that maintain, continue, repair and transform, but also in ways that take seriously what exactly is being maintained, continued, repaired, and transformed. To this I would add that these are affective responses to the ongoing political question of whether we want to return, and that we need particular tools to make such dialogues visible. Thankfully, to your question of the how of return, we have pedagogical documentation as one such tool. Through documentation – with students, educators, children and families – we can bring return into conversation with other concepts and return in careful ways that matter.
Cristina and Nicole: In thinking about how we ‘do’ return, we see many discrepant threads in your responses. For example, there is talk of thinking deeply about subjectivity and there is a desire to meet student needs. These feel like discordant positions, where one is asking questions of who the student can become and another is asking who the student is. There is a discussion of building a more humane society and of learning to adapt to the structures of the post-COVID institution. These ideas too, we suggest, are in tension. With this in mind, we are reminded that the work of the pedagogist is never in isolation and we are also reminded that this work attends to tensions. Can you tell us how, as a PSI, you work through these tensions that seem to emerge in our attempts at re-turning? What conversations do you think are necessary? How do you share and bring attention towards these tensions?
Paolina: In this re-turn to the classroom, I endeavor to move beyond the production needed to respond to the standards that govern Early Childhood Education programs; I am driven to reimagine pedagogy beyond the parameters of the course syllabus. As a Pedagogist, I am inspired to encourage students as emerging educators to find ways to look beyond the theory, ideas and concepts that characterize the learning space. It is within this process of engagement that I search to create a new dynamic, “life force” where a playful comfort is unearthed by discrepancy, tension, and uneasiness. This re-turn, post pandemic has also generated a heightened awareness of the critical role of relations; the need for social connections for health. I am motivated to reconsider the student in the learning space beyond the neoliberal definition of “subject;” subservient, passive, objectified. I think about social discourses about life and living rekindled. Integral to this dynamic is the need for “other;” responsive, caring adults who recognize and value relationships by allowing time and space for social connections. I am motivated to consider how learning spaces can generate a dynamic “life force” that fosters creativity, innovation, and relations. As a Pedagogist, I bring to question how this “life force” can be defined and integrated affectively within or outside of the existing standards that define our learning spaces.
Within the context of the classroom, efforts to create a new dynamic, “life force,” are fostered discursively and materially through what Foucault and Agamben refer to as “counter spaces” or “zones of distinction” (Phelan & Russelbaek, 2021). Winnicott, proposes a similar concept when referencing dynamics that are unleashed within the context of a 3rd space (Downes & Romhild, 2022). Integral to this learning environment is time for playful engagement where concepts and ideas are made visible using pedagogical documentation. This is fostered through layered opportunities that immerse the student in exposures where processes take precedent over production. Playful, small group interactions with Creative Art, Dramatic Art, Music, and Language are fostered to build depth in awareness; making conscious the unfamiliar and unspoken. Students create representations of the content and then scrutinize the depiction using inquiry that makes visible what has been ignored; bringing to question socio-political ideology and intentionality. Representations are layered over the semester and reveal insights, deepened understandings, and relations. Production is replaced by the power of a renewed “life force” created through immersive processes that enliven learning and assigns value to collaboration with “other.”
As Pedagogists, we gaze into the future (Phelan & Russelbaek, 2021)to reimagine the early childhood educator as an emerging professional; we search to unearth the “subject” and bring to question what Foucault refers to as our “regimes of truths” (MacNaughton, 2009). This discourse is foundational to pedagogical design and decision-making processes. We aspire to broaden our thinking of who the early childhood educator can be outside of the defined standards and curriculum syllabus. We think together about what sits in the in-between, this ignored space that embraces an affective “life force” that is playful and filled with tension, passion, and creativity; reawakening memories of childhood. Such discourse is made more meaningful when it brings together systemic influencers: government, professional governing bodies, and internal and external academic collaborators. Collectively we bring to question “regimes of truths” with the intention to deepen pedagogy.
Marah: Looking back to the discussions made to prepare for the return to the classroom, the predominant sentiment was that of relief to returning to the familiar. It was a feeling of returning home. Home being the space where educators are more proficient in the use of the space, timing, and basic teaching methods and materials. As I reflect on the past few weeks of having lived in the return, I am drawn to the question: What is it that I am trying to make different and how do I begin to do this type of work? This reflection of my work as a pedagogist compels me to think about my role as a member of a team, my role as the educator who brings information to the students, and my role as a member of the institution that I work in.
As a member of the faculty team, we have begun the process of thinking together and listening to one another about our experiences in this return to work. We shared our eagerness as we prepared for the semester, and we also shared the realities that we faced as we are in this daily practice of teaching. Through the discourse, I learned that a careful balance is needed. This balance can be found through communication with one another as we make decisions to best meet individual student needs.
As an educator, I am faced with the awareness of what MacNaughton discusses as truth and knowledge in our delivery of content (2005). As an early childhood education pedagogist, my aim is to create an awareness of a balance between contributing to the knowledge of the subject through the required content to help them be better prepared for their role as placement students. I find myself in a new and sometimes uncomfortable space of moving outside of the typical learning materials such as research facts, typical developmental research as norms, governing documents, and learning outcomes. How do I deliver all the content subjectively? What experiences and expertise, if any, do the subjects bring to enhance learning?
As a member of an institution, I find it more challenging to begin conversations about returning outside of a “back to business” mindset. It appears that it is important to continue to ask the question about returning and what it requires until more educators continually reflect on this return and act on their intentions. Revisiting conversation is an ongoing process that may bring forward awareness of how we affect our students and what kind of student we create in our program.
Cory: Tensions are ever-present. When I am thinking with educators or students about tensions and how to respond, I will often lay out my thinking to show how I arrived at particular decisions, and in these tracings I am careful to include choices I considered but decided against. Let me give another example to demonstrate how these kinds of conversations are one starting point for attending to tensions in classroom contexts. My curriculum class has been labouring with pedagogical narrations in a way that feels like returning. Recently, we worked together with the concept of a paper studio, and I offered their documentation (that they presumed we were finished with) back to them as some of the paper we worked with. As we returned to the documentation, I shared with my students that as I was deciding how to offer their documentation back to them that I considered tearing their documentation in half and returning to it in a fragmented way. In the end I offered it back to them whole, because there was no underlying commitment or condition I was responding to that would make tearing the documentation a necessary pedagogical rupture. For me, conversations that dwell in tensions are a way to collectively articulate what we stand for as much as what we stand against. I am reminded of a phrase usually attributed to Allen Ginsburg, where he encouraged artists and writers and thinkers to enact a “first thought, best thought” approach to their craft as a way to avoid the over-working of an idea or a practice. While it is interesting to explore instinctual practices, I do not think this serves the studiousness I referred to in response to your earlier question, and in fact it is very rare that the first thought is the best thought. The first thought, or the first conversation might be an opening to something new, but from my experience it is more likely that tensions are tended to through the ongoingness of pedagogical thought and action.
The discordant positions or discrepant threads you note in our responses are interesting because for me, they are a reminder of the differently situated conditions the three of us live and work with, but also, perhaps an acknowledgement that we responded to your questions separately and did not collectively attend to this important question of return. As I wrote above, I like conversations that serve as a collective unravelling – ones that grapple with the choices we could make, but don’t, so that’s both an admission of my own failures as a PSI and an invitation to my co-respondents to think together next time to see what happens!
References
Downes, S., & Römhild, J. (2022). Pandemic fiction as therapeutic play: The New York Times Magazine’s The Decameron Project (2020). Thesis Eleven, 169(1), 45 – 61. https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136211069417
MacNaughton, G. (2009). Doing Foucault in early childhood studies: Applying poststructural ideas. Routledge.
Phelan, A.M., Hansen, D.R. Toward a “thoughtful lightness”: Education in viral times. Prospects 51, 15–27 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-020-09536-4