ABSTRACT. In this themed panel, Black children, pre-service and in-service educators, community educators, and teacher educators (re)imagine Black joy in early childhood as a tool for liberation (Johnson, 2024). Utilizing porch conversation methodology, we invite RECE participants into an intergenerational storytelling experience to discuss how Black community members are dreaming about and crafting emancipatory spaces in early care and education. During this session, participants will both witness a porch conversation and engage in their own narrative circles with each other to examine how we can disrupt anti-Blackness through the unapologetic enactment of Black joy across time and space.

ABSTRACT. Predominantly White Institutions (PWI) often prioritize diversity as a numerical representation of students and faculty of color and fail to address challenges faced by them. PWI should not only focus on recruiting students and faculty of color but also on retaining them. In particular, Women of Color (WOC) are pushed into a system where individualized ways of being and excluding the power of comadres/comadrismo and pláticas are viewed as “normal.” This cultural-deficit system oppresses WOC to survive, struggle, and even work more than their white counterparts to show their competency and value, and even make them visible for others.

ABSTRACT. Care and education for young children is described variously as: early childhood education (ECE), early childhood care and education (ECCE), and early childhood education and care (ECEC). The varying positions (and apparent omission) of care highlights the impact of neoliberal discourses in ECE which divert attention away from care towards more universalising and economically advantageous discourses of education, outcomes, and individual success. Such discourses also produce teachers, their practices, and their knowledges. This interactive presentation explores epistemic injustices evident in teacher narratives about care-full teaching, inviting participants to imagine political actions to affect a re-engagement with care in teachers’ work.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores alternative possibilities for (re)imaging ECE and its profession through a critical examination of Freire's ideas. Drawing on Freire's work and how his ideas have been reinvented in ECE, this paper focuses on exploring and understanding the long-standing oppression of early childhood professionals. Departing from Freirean ideas of critical consciousness, this paper aims to challenge the deficit view and promote counter-narratives of early childhood profession and professionalism. It provides implications for future ECE practices, pedagogies, and policies, contributing to the vision of a more just and sustainable early childhood education and profession with critical hope.

ABSTRACT. With intensifying pressure to do more—in a day, a unit, a school year—teachers are rushing. Even when reflection is possible, judgement can feel hasty, as we hurry to determine what and how much children learned. This paper discusses approaches to supporting teachers’ critical reflection that resist the accelerating time pressures in early childhood education by developing methods for fostering slow pedagogies and delayed judgements. Through qualitative analysis of data collected during a teacher education course, we introduce a pedagogical and methodological tool called the Pointillizer, which slowly renders images while teachers reflect on the pacing of their practice.

ABSTRACT. Drawing from Freire's dialogic education principles, this study explored the transformative potential of arts-based reflection in teacher development (McKay & Sappa, 2019), focusing on enhancing language awareness among international candidate teachers studying in Finland. Arts-based reflection is a powerful tool employed in teacher education contexts (Hunter & Frawley, 2022), shown to be effective in addressing the challenges of ‘inviting the uncomfortable and the unsayable into a lesson’ (Link, 2022, p. 36). During this session, we discuss the potential of the polyvocal self-study methodology in fostering reciprocal transdisciplinary faculty development and stimulating innovation in established academic traditions (Samaras & Pithouse-Morgan, 2020).

ABSTRACT. This workshop explores the burgeoning field of speculative theorizing within early childhood education (ECE), addressing its novelty amid crises and its transformative potential. Participants will engage in arts-based methods to co-construct speculative storyworlds, inspired by inquiries into just futures and ecological interconnectedness. Bridging theoretical frameworks, the workshop emphasizes relationality and challenges anthropocentric narratives through hands-on work with clay ecologies. Drawing on Ursula LeGuin's carrier bag theory, we will examine storytelling's role in shaping childhood imaginaries and clay’s role as container. Ultimately, the workshop seeks to provoke critical creativity, fostering imaginative responses to contemporary challenges through clay-based world-building in ECE contexts.

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this study is to discuss what kind of enablers and obstacles are to children's participation in pre-primary school settings in Finland. The research data consisted of 13 children’s photographs and group discussions. The most important thing for children's participation in pre-primary school settings was play with peers. However, children's participation was seen as a continuous phenomenon, with elements of compulsion and voluntarism present at the same time. Educators played a key role in how they facilitated the use of spaces and materials for children's play and activities and how they participated in children's play and activities.

ABSTRACT. This study explores children’s perspectives on the collaboration between families and practitioners in everyday encounters in early childhood educational settings. For this purpose, 20 video-recorded observations of 10 different children’s pick-up and drop-off situations are analysed, focusing on children’s engagements and intentions, especially when adult interactions occur. Inspired by a cultural-historical wholeness approach to human development (Hedegaard, 2018) and a feminist theorization on objectification (Nussbaum, 1995) preliminary analysis shows multiple motives taking place, where children cannot always subordinate their needs and wishes to the adults’ collaborative demands; and can strongly react to consistent adult objectification.

ABSTRACT. Through pláticas, three higher education faculty work to build a reflective pedagogical space. There, bereavement would become a decolonial tool to unlearn, unleash, and shed colonial learnings of socially belonging as racialized, multilingual, foreign-born, mature daughters, sisters, mothers. An extra layer is added into this space as the bereavement may happen in our own physical bodies, our living spaces, our professional spaces, in the global impact of climate change as well as in the impact of memories and time while at home, abroad and in diaspora.

ABSTRACT. The study aims to understand the cultural knowledge young children bring to the classroom literacy practices from their homes and daily interactions, investigating early experiences. Embedded in a system heavily influenced by British colonial rule, Bangladesh's education system provides a narrow view of literacy, which ignores cultural assets and compels students to conform to a standardized norm. Emphasizing literacy as a socio-cultural practice, this research sheds light on children's complex, hybrid interactions with multiliteracy within schools. The ethnographic pilot study seeks to contribute to understanding how young Bangladeshi children take up, recreate, and resist early literacy expectations in school practices.

ABSTRACT. The paper makes use a journal I kept during my time as a preschool teacher in a multilingual early childhood classroom in Eastern Turkey. Reexamining it for evidence of affective intensities, I reconceptualize my understanding of how multilingual children’s embodied identities created the potentiality of difference and how their expressions of vitality through language literacy practices were received in the classroom.

ABSTRACT. Using ethnographic and case study methodology, this paper examined the way in which the achievement gap was produced in one second grade classroom in an inner-city school in Chicago. Over a six-week period, the researcher observed and recorded the curriculum that unfolded, and using Bronfenbrenner's ecological model of human development, situated this "enacted curriculum" in the context of the school/community and state and federal policies. Results identified several school and school district policies, as well as policies at the state and federal levels that played a role in contributing to the achievement gap.

ABSTRACT. K-12 mathematics classrooms have traditionally functioned as sites of prescriptive norms —offering narrow conceptions of ‘doing mathematics’ (Gresalfi & Hand, 2019; Powell & Frankenstein, 1997). As a result, children are left with few opportunities to direct what happens to them in classrooms (Yoon & Templeton, 2019). Drawing on situative theory and critical childhood studies, this session conceptualizes play as a perturbation for early childhood mathematics education. We analyze video data from one play-integrated kindergarten classroom in order to discover how children insert their social agendas into playful tasks, as well as the spontaneous mathematical opportunities that these agendas help facilitate.

ABSTRACT. Active, critical conversations are an important part of young children’s lives. Such conversations affirm children’s identities and linguistic practices, provide them with information about others, and ultimately help build a more just world. Yet having such conversations with very young people is difficult. This workshop provides participants with specific approaches, phrases, and methods to elicit and honor young children’s (ages 3-8) thinking on critical topics. Participants will be introduced to developmentally-appropriate children’s literature on topics such as immigration and the gender spectrum, explore key approaches and terms, and rehearse critical conversations.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, an early childhood scholar and an Indigenous politics scholar take an explicit transdisciplinary approach, drawing on data from two ethnographic studies. The paper examines how labor intensifies for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) educators in pursuing cultural sustainability and Indigenous survivance within the United States' most comprehensive Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) program. Using a critical Womanist labor approach, the authors investigate the practices required of critically minded Indigenous, Black, and Chicanx women educators as they work to deconstruct patterns of domination in early childhood spaces.

ABSTRACT. This paper reconfigures childcare activism as a movement toward a more just and caring world by rekindling feminism as an anti-capitalist, subversive force that disrupts the dominance of neoliberal feminism where childcare advocacy remains encapsulated in human capital terms and equality conflated with women joining the workforce. Employing Ahmed’s (2020) method of “following words around,” I follow the word work to trouble its relations with feminism and (child)care. Unsettling fixed notions of feminism, care, and work may instigate childcare activism that inspires communities to participate in projects which aim to collectively care for the world we want to live in.

ABSTRACT. Creating humanizing early childhood and elementary spaces that disrupt dehumanization is an ethical imperative for teachers, a difficult task in today’s neoliberal context. A vast body of research considers the ways teachers respond to neoliberal policies, from unquestioning compliance to outright refusal. In this presentation, we will analyze how researchers portray teachers’ responses, specifically considering how they write about compliance and navigate the tensions between humanizing teachers and excusing unjust actions. Finally, we will consider the role of such portrayals in the work of nurturing more liberatory spaces for children in schools, both despite and because of their neoliberal contexts.

ABSTRACT. This interactive, arts-based workshop weaves together narratives of intergenerational scholars working with children in Africa and the African Diaspora focused on early literacies, Black childhood imaginaries, and the vitality of ways families and early childhood workers organize care/education for children. Working in contexts of increasing state regulation/surveillance, the presenters intertwine their research and stories about refugee children's multilingual learning in Kenya, a traveling archive of children’s literature rooted in the writings of the Black women’s literary renaissance, ways teachers and caregivers actively resist scripted curriculum and state regulation, and are creating the care/education they want and need for their children.

ABSTRACT. Scholars from the global north and west have had an overwhelming influence on early childhood policy in the global south and east. Rural communities in formerly colonized countries are influenced by national and regional policy, however practice is more likely to be reflective of local values in that there is less government oversight. This presentation is a portion of a larger study that incorporates traditional ethnography and Video Cued Ethnography to glean a rich understanding of local values as they relate to prosocial behaviors.

ABSTRACT. The paper draws on a two-year research study in one elementary school in Toronto, Canada at which research-creation methodologies were used to explore the integration of a Non-Canonical Philosophy with children (NCP). NCP is a kind of philosophy based primarily on ideas from non-Western philosophy, and which values affect and emotion just as much as reasoning and argumentation. Within this paper I argue that this speculative approach enables a more inclusive conception of philosophy to be explored with children in a diverse school in Toronto.

ABSTRACT. In light of this year’s conference theme, this session interrupts the silenced voices and overlooked epistemologies and ontologies of Black girls who aspire to be future early childhood educators. The purpose of this session is to elevate the academic and racial/cultural experiences of Black girls enrolled in non-selective high school career pathway programs, as revealed through a yearlong investigation in three different school districts in one state. Centering Black girls’ perspectives, this session highlights the ethical imperative to put things right in the implementation of early childhood teacher preparation that is responsive to the identities and needs of Black girls.

ABSTRACT. This themed interactive panel connects members of the RECE policy caucus in a multilogue across several sites of critical policy engagement. We interrogate actors of the multi-dimensional early childhood policy space (including international organisations, supra-national bodies, corporations). We aim to involve ourselves in processes of policymaking beyond analysis and critique, as well as in critical (re)theorisation of policy and politics. Each panelist will speak for 5 minutes then raise a provocation for discussion about common threads across locations and levels. We ask how such multi-dimensional exchange and learning can help to join the dots and strengthen our endeavours in solidarity

ABSTRACT. Working with Laurent Berlant’s (2011) concept of cruel optimism to theorize the current neoliberal positioning of professionalism in ECEC as cruel and unjust, we make visible the everyday lived experiences of professionalism by ECEs through focus group narratives. Drawing from the narratives, we think deeply with feminist ethics of care to imagine how ECEs resist this cruelty in everyday spaces and practices and collectively embody resistance and vulnerability by actively reimagining professionalism through a feminist caring activism.

ABSTRACT. This session draws upon a narrative inquiry of the experiences of six educators working within the toddler age group across three early childhood education and care contexts. Interview data interpreted through cultural models theory illuminated the marginalisation that participants experienced across multiple figured worlds. Implications for future practice include building an alternative narrative for the profession. It is proposed that through providing opportunities for engagement with critical theories, educators will reimagine the role of the toddler educator, the field of early childhood education and care, their professional identities and the professional identity of the field.

ABSTRACT. Drawn from pláticas held with im/migrant Latina early childhood educators (ECEs), this paper explores the impact of center-based policies on ECEs and the liminal cultural work they do in navigating their personal and historical knowledges as im/migrant women and assimilating this knowledge with the desired performativity within their school. Using a diffractive approach (Barad, 2007) , we sought to remake meaning as childhoods, adulthood, and teacher identities collided, often critically questioning the differences and tensions between policies, practices, and the “reality” of their teaching environments.

ABSTRACT. This presentation will share previous research that describes the structural barriers and complexities faced by families with disabled children. Focusing on those families who identify as First Nations, or Metis, and guided by community, we will present our early processes of developing an Indigenous and Disability positive approach to early intervention, and community-centred ECEC.

ABSTRACT. What does it mean for all children to be seen as whole and “appropriate”? How can educators and families understand a child as capable and whole within deficit-based evaluative systems around disability? Using narrative inquiry of a mother/early childhood teacher, this paper explores entanglements DAP, 4th Edition and deficit-based evaluations for children with disabilities. This case study explores possibilities for empowered educator-family collaborations, resisting deficit-based identities while navigating evaluations, and culturally sustaining interventions emerging from shared knowledge of children. It examines perspectives and practices that invite critical engagements around evaluation, framing all children as “whole.”

ABSTRACT. We reconceptualize marginalized children’s engagement with early schooling experiences incorporating a therapy dog team into lessons of kindness, inclusion, ecology, movement and circle time, situating the principles and practices of human animal interaction (HAI) in the early childhood classroom. It reimagines a series of opportunities to support children’s nonlinear socio-emotional and academic unfoldings in a multicultural, multi-species context of love and trust powerful enough to nurture a sense of community that human-human relationships may have disrupted. And, when children trust the environment, their confidence returns, and their curiosity reawakens. Therapy dogs present such opportunities in the pedagogy of play.

ABSTRACT. Children’s play conditions and opportunities in ECEC centers vary both historically, across cultures, subcultures, pedagogic traditions and according to socio-economic status (SES) and/or minoritized status. The aim of these studies was to investigate conditions for children’s self-initiated play in ECEC centers in Denmark, Norway and USA. Participatory observations were conducted in two centers in each country with varying SES focusing on children’s conditions and access to self-initiated play, types and contents, and the teachers’ role in play.Findings showed similarities and differences in and across the three countries, specifically, inequities regarding children’s opportunities to develop and experience joy through self-initiated play.

ABSTRACT. This research within a childcare center in Olinda Nova do Maranhão, Brazil, utilizes visual ethnography and feminist common worlding methods to explore Early Childhood Education responses to the Anthropocene, considering Brazil's colonial legacy. This presentation brings the material relations centring the inquiry with children and educators and explores what these materials invited, how spaces of experimentation were created with them, and how documentation gave voice to the materiality and the children. Refusing educational simplifications, this project emphasizes creating a curriculum that resonates with Olinda Nova's unique context, drawing from common worlds pedagogies and Black studies to challenge educational conformity .

ABSTRACT. Te Whāriki, New Zealand’s[NZ] renowned early childhood curriculum, embodies a bi-cultural framework rooted in te ao Māori (the Māori world). However, many early childhood education (ECE) communities struggle to fully embrace its bi-cultural vision. One issue is the dominance of Western theories about ECE overshadowing indigenous perspectives. This presentation explores interpretivist research exploring how children engage in collaborative inquiry-based learning in NZ ECE. The findings revealed a diverse range of inquiry practices connected children to their local places, nurturing authentic bi-cultural experiences, suggesting that inquiry could act as space of cultural inquiry and inclusivity for both children and teachers.

ABSTRACT. The study examines the impact of neoliberal ideology on Bangladesh's early childhood education narrative. It explores how neoliberal policies create the idea of a competent child and how this idea is adapted in the ECE spaces in Bangladeshi education. Recognizing understandings of childhood as social, cultural, historical, and economic constructions, in this study, I work to highlight the multiplicity of childhoods in Bangladesh and to provide alternatives to the neo-liberal assumptions made in our post-colonial nation. In this study, I use photo-cued interviews with parents to investigate diverse perceptions and contextualize the narratives of childhood across different classes of Bangladesh.

ABSTRACT. This interactive workshop explores the aesthetic and embodied knowledge of early childhood literacy pedagogies through mark-making and exchanging ideas across diverse early childhood education contexts. The presenters conducted a year-long pilot study in Chicago, Arizona, and New Mexico based on art inquiry strategies exploring literacy pedagogies. The goal was to promote children's agency and ownership of literacy, as opposed to overly academic curricula. Vignettes from participating educators and hands-on explorations with diverse drawing tools and surfaces are included. The workshop mirrors the project's intent to build a community centered on researching children and mark-making while nurturing a sense of wonder.

ABSTRACT. The presentation problematises the vision of collective advocacy and activism in New Zealand ECE, which relies primarily on strategies for improving human working (economic) conditions. Through a critical posthuman feminist and existential posthumanist lens, it argues that collective responses to ECE crises demand solidarity, justice and fair participation for all be(com)ings-in-the-world. Specifically, it considers: What may justice-oriented collective advocacy and activism look like if ‘we’ embrace the human as a relational inter-being/becoming whose crises are not in isolation but are co-emerging and co-manifesting with others across glocal socio-political, eco-technological, spatio-temporal, bio-eco-cultural realities.

ABSTRACT. Our session focuses on our scholarly article about a professional learning series for early childhood educators. We conducted a comparative analysis of the impact of post-COVID-19 conditions on our engagement and vision for professional learning. We explored the influence of dominant systems and ways of professional learning, technology use, professional standards, power relations, and the neoliberal climate in childcare on the way educators perceive their learning. We invite stakeholders to challenge the system that has limited educators’ identities and historically favored the interests of those in power and extend an invitation to collaborate and explore new possibilities for professional learning.

ABSTRACT. This paper conceptualizes public policy work as a complex dance between totalizing discourses that shape the individual and the power of human agency. Although discourse works to produce the subject, history has shown that individuals do often choose rather consciously or unconsciously to act in very diverse and divergent ways. While politics is by no means an apodictic science, it precedes with experimentation, groping in the dark, injection, withdrawal, advances, and retreats. We plan to report on our winding journey on a statewide taskforce navigating the transition from research to legislation.

ABSTRACT. This interactive session invites participants to engage with the Flashpoints project, through which narratives of oppression were collected from students of color, women scientists, lgbtq + individuals, students receiving financial support, disabled students, and members of religious minorities. Eight filmed vignettes were then created that include those evidencing: (1) misgendering; (2) trigger warnings; (3) land acknowledgments; (4) assumptions about class; (5) disability rights; (6) negotiating hot moments around current political struggle, and more. Participants will view the enacted vignettes which were crafted in the above areas and practice strategies for challenging oppression and creating inclusive and supportive classroom environments.

ABSTRACT. Epistemic injustice can be defined as the silencing, exclusion, distortion and/or misrepresentation of experiences from groups that do not fit the dominant knowledge system, causing further marginalization and disenfranchisement of these groups and their knowledge(s). In this paper we seek to deny epistemic injustice as we share research conducted with ten Black early childhood educators (ECEs) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Their ‘counter-stories’ shed light on how the ECEs both navigate anti-Black racism and enact Pro-Black practices, along with their recommendations for change. Our work is guided by Black Feminist Thought (BFT), Critical Race Theory (CRT), and Black Critical Theory (BlackCrit).

ABSTRACT. This session will use narrative to illustrate how the understanding of time grounded in African collectivity, matrix of domination, personhood, and self-determination shifted the centering, grounding, and practices of a researcher-educator’s work in technology and digital media education. Specifically, it will focus on the role of remembering and studying African and African a/de-scent Americans’ cultural, ancestral, and familial knowledge, traditions, ways of being, and lived experiences in this process. It will conclude with a discussion about how engaging in this type of process can be instrumental for early childhood educators to recreate their approach to digital media and technology education.

ABSTRACT. This paper presentation delves into the spirit of heartwork and heart pedagogy within Indigenous early childhood education (IECE) contexts. Grounded in Indigenous epistemologies and pedagogies, heartwork transcends conventional methodologies, emphasizing holistic development, cultural awareness, and equitable practices. By exploring the conceptual underpinnings of heartwork and heart pedagogy, this session seeks to illuminate their significance in fostering justice, equity, and healing within educational spaces.