Tag: Becoming a Pedagogist

Editors’ Note

We are excited to launch the first issue of the Pedagogist Network of Ontario Magazine. This quarterly magazine is a space for encounters with ideas and experiences that are related to the educational practice of the pedagogist.

We hope that this magazine intersects with pedagogists’ ongoing conversations and situated experiences by highlighting their pedagogical trajectories and inventiveness. 

This magazine serves as a living archive of the emergent and generative work that takes place in the encounter between pedagogy and early childhood education as we know it. In this issue, we wonder: What possibilities will be realized? What shifts might emerge? And how might we follow pedagogical inventiveness and its demand to think beyond what we already know?

We made the decision to share our work through a magazine in order to be accountable to a digital form that is public, speculative, rooted in a particular context and commitment, and that is continually on the move. Refusing our website content to relax into staunch stability, we want to create something unfamiliar (a magazine? A knot? A landing site? A confrontation? Something yet to be knowable?) that demands work and return as modes of engagement. While the Pedagogist Network of Ontario (PNO) Magazine will be organized into issues, we want to cultivate novelty and strangeness beyond only the moment of launching a new issue. As the work of a pedagogist demands, we hope readers will linger with and retrace their encounters with each piece. We encourage readers to share articles through different social media pathways. 

We hope that the magazine will keep traces of complicated pedagogical work, and that these traces will become part of a broader memory that is presently emerging and is nourished through the multiple situations, projects, events and artifacts. We hope the magazine becomes a manifestation of pedagogists’ situated and collective work. In this way, the magazine is both historical and prospective.

The works we share in this magazine enact an ethical commitment to the inventive, risky, courageous labour of theorizing and enacting the work of a pedagogist. We invite readers to attend to the rich temporal complexities of doing pedagogical work as a pedagogist in Canada. 

In this first issue of the PNO Magazine, we open with a conversation between Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Cristina Delgado Vintimilla. They discuss the pedagogists’ practice as the work of creating conditions to think otherwise futures in early childhood education. In our inaugural Pedagogist Conversations section, PNO pedagogist Ann Wilke shares a provocation with the intricate question ‘what matters for thinking pedagogically amid an ongoing COVID-19 pandemic?’. Finally, we offer two previously published essays: What is Pedagogy? (by Cristina Delgado Vintimilla) and What Would be Possible if Education Subtracts Itself from Developmentalism (by Cristina Delgado Vintimilla, Nicole Land, Kathleen Kummen, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, and Randa Khattar). 

The PNO Magazine articles are demanding and anticipatory. They asks of us something beyond cutting and pasting, skimming and forwarding. Invention, response, participation, and answerability matter as each piece offers forward possibilities for us to grapple with in early childhood education. that needs re-envisioning. As readers sink into the articles’ complexities and provocations, we hope we might begin to weave an embodied and inventive vocabulary for thinking pedagogically in Canada – that is, a vocabulary that nourishes and is nourished by ongoing pedagogical conversations.

We look forward to thinking together. 

Cristina Delgado Vintimilla, Nicole Land, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Randa Khattar, Kathleen Kummen, and Fikile Nxumalo

When sharing this piece, please include the following citation: 
Delgado, C.V., & Land, N. (December 2020). Editor’s note. Pedagogist Network of Ontario Magazine, 1(1). Retrieved from https://pedagogistnetworkontario.com/editorial/

Becoming a Pedagogist and Co-creating Pedagogical Processes

This online conversation was an introduction to what a pedagogist does, and invited pedagogists and educators from British Columbia who engage in this pedagogical practice to speak on their experiences. Over two hours they engaged with many questions and ideas, including:

  • The process of becoming a pedagogist, and its tensions, difficulties, beauty;
  • How the process of becoming a pedagogist is an act of co-creating a pedagogical experience (with the situated place you work within – relating to educators, more-than-human others, politics, place, ethics, children, families, precarities);
  • The need to reconfigure and co-invent pedagogical processes so vibrant curriculum making becomes possible;
  • The need to subtract taken-for-granted practices, ideas, and habits from thinking to open up toward re-invigorated practices;
  • Pedagogical commitments and what they do, and the hard work of activating these commitments and standing for something

This panel conversation, moderated by Dr. Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw (Faculty of University of Western Ontario), featured:

  • Dr. Bo Sun Kim (Faculty at Capilano University and Pedagogist with Simon Fraser University Childcare Society)
  • Narda Nelson (Pedagogist with University of Victoria Childcare Services)
  • Dongryun Kim (Educator with Simon Fraser University Childcare Society)
  • Sherri-Lynn Yazbeck (Educator with University of Victoria Childcare Services).

In this following clip, Dr. Bo Sun Kim and Narda Nelson speak about the radical dialogue needed to live in question and enact collective pedagogical commitments to keep possibilities open.

A Dialogue with a Pedagogista

In this exposure Dr. Cristina Delgado-Vintimilla and Dr. Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw enaged in Thinking (and Rethinking) Pedagogy through dialogues with a Pedagogista on October 28, 2017 at the Ontario Reggio Association.

They discussed the history and personal story behind becoming a pedagogista. Followed by a discussion of the ethics, histories, and legacies of early childhood education and the possibilities for co-creating ethically responsive pedagogies. They highlighted the significance of collaboratively engaging with ethically responsive pedagogy in early childhood education.

They deliberated on pedagogical disruptions that foster collaboration between educators, children, and families. Furthermore, they considered inviting vulnerabilities as a possible starting point for sharing stories of legacies with children and others.

Cristina and Veronica then called attention to remaining mindful and conscious that pedagogy is non-innocent. In other words, pedagogy embodies a specific kind of intention that is both personal and political in early childhood education.

They closed with a discussion on expanding horizons of possibility in early childhood education, and offering the metaphor of bundling in the work of a pedagogista.

“I wonder if you can start by walking us through how you became a pedagogista…”

“I constantly ask myself: What kind of experiences are we generating?”

“What does collaboration look like?” 

“Where do we start our stories of legacies with children? With others?” 

“If this is a space that is not innocent, and if this is a pedagogical gathering, then it’s a space for something more than me or the child.”

“We are creating a life together.”

“We can enter a space of debate when we understand that it is not about me or you but it is about this thing that we are trying to create.”

“If that is what is going to frame our horizon, it’s a very, very narrow horizon.”

“I am bundled with all of these stories and history that I carry with me – beyond the pedagogista – that just walks with me.”