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. Sector stratification, inadequate and disparate compensation and funding, and control-based regulatory policy discourse create early childhood workforce inequities and high-risk conditions for early childhood teacher shortages. Harmful notions of professionalization rooted in racism, classism, sexism, and White supremacy are reinforced by policy and effectuated in organizational practices, exacerbating high-risk conditions by marginalizing the early childhood teacher, contributing to ECE workforce instability. A critical equity lens for understanding early educator professionalism holds the potential to increase organizational capacity to provide authentic workforce support by acknowledging and challenging existing social inequities.

ABSTRACT. Highly neoliberal education systems are known to produce unjust working conditions for the EC workforce. As school-based EC provision becomes more prevalent, in an increasingly marketized sector, the pressures of schoolification and deprofessionalisation of EC education rise. Drawing on a psychoanalytically-informed study with Chilean EC educators on the intersubjective and unconscious aspects of their professional identities, I argue that schools constitute contested, liminal spaces of practice, where educators must negotiate a professional identity that lies somewhere in between that of a school teacher and an EC educator. These complex professional subjectivities must be heard towards a more just professional practice.

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. We share tensions within our research and teaching projects, as a result of our commitments to teaching and learning with children in ways that create more just present and futures. We draw from decolonizing and new materialist methodologies to recognize the importance of teaching and researching in ways that share power and are justice focused, as a matter of respect for young children, their ideas, and contributions. We conclude with insights for teaching and research approaches which embrace agency as social and collective, coming into being when we take a relational and critical posthuman perspective.

ABSTRACT. This study highlights the impact of curricular and environmental shifts in public education on children’s agency and their perceptions of the educational experience. Emphasizing emergent curriculum and posthumanist perspectives, it underscores the importance of elevating children’s voices and their role as co-researchers. This study was conducted in a Midwestern U.S. public school district, utilizing narrative inquiry and semi-structured interviews. The author investigates and analyzes discrepancies between initial themes determined from kindergarten child-created Documentaries and their later reflections, demonstrating the influence of social context on their perceptions. Emerging findings demonstrate the impact social context has on their views of education.

ABSTRACT. As a year-long ethnographic study conducted in two public kindergarten classrooms, this study explored how 5-year-old children’s peer culture mediated their emergent practices in using educational robots and constructing context-specific meanings of the technology. Drawing on Corsaro’s (2005) work on children’s peer culture and the notion of funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992), this study demonstrated what aspects of children’s peer cultures were integrated into and how their peer culture shaped their engagement with the new technology. The findings of this study contribute to providing empirical accounts of educational robots as collective cultural artifacts and meaning-making tools.

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. Drawing on the findings of a dissertation in practice research study conducted by the presenter in her doctoral candidacy, this paper works to explore the intersection of constraints around ECE practitioners utilizing ABE within their classrooms and school districts.

ABSTRACT. This proposal examines four mothers of biracial/multiracial children living and working in New York City and their experiences of their own racial socialization in relation to their children’s multiracial identity and how those experiences frame the mother’s understandings of race. Using feminist ethnographic methods the mothers, along with the researcher create space for conversation about how we experience mundane mothering experience in a white supremacist environment.

ABSTRACT. This study analyzes the experiences of three marginalized preservice teachers through a collaborative autoethnography. Through this study, the authors discuss their (dis)empowerment as a contributing factor to rethink and reimagine early childhood teacher education programs. Interrogating their identity as a resource and a strength, the study addresses issues such as (mis)representation and (un)belonging as crucial to transform the field of ECTE.

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. One hundred and fifty children (aged 3-8 years), from Nursery through to Standard One classes in Emmanuel Public School, India, co-researched with a researcher from Ireland over three years. They drew pictures of who and where they loved to play, and they took photographs of things they love about their school. They also turned the lens back on the researcher, taking her camera, taking photos of her, and writing her name and information carefully in their copy books. The children then took back their identities, classrooms, and school - de-colonizing the research process. The interactive workshop showcases their findings.

ABSTRACT. This presentation delves into the intricate dynamics of intergenerational trauma and its influence on mother-infant intersubjectivity, integrating a psychosocial perspective to explore the profound impact of societal and cultural factors. By embedding psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches within a broader sociocultural context, this paper seeks to uncover the nuanced ways in which external societal pressures and cultural norms shape the intersubjective experiences of mothers and infants, potentially perpetuating or healing trauma across generations.

This paper submission if for an individual paper to be presented virtually at the 2024 conference in EST.

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.

ABSTRACT. The traditional landscape of Early Childhood Education (ECE) often overlooks the multifaceted challenges faced by families of color, particularly those experiencing environmental injustices such as housing insecurity, climate change burdens, and systemic racism. By integrating the narratives of parents and ECE professionals, we aim to uncover the intersectional dynamics at play and advocate for systemic solutions that address the root causes of environmental injustice and racial inequities. Furthermore, we delve into how ECE professionals, alongside families and community members, can redefine partnerships for collective healing and systemic change by adopting the mutually reinforced practices of family resiliency.

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. There is little in the ECE/D literature about what happens to the differently-abled child after the early years. In terms of justice, what is that child’s experience as s/he encounters the education system for years on end, into adulthood and even middle age? Despite global, national and local regulations concerning the rights of disabled persons, and presuming a disabled child’s development continues as ‘a-typical’, can we foresee the endless obstacles to inclusion the child will likely confront after the age of eight? This presentation draws on two case studies to illustrate.

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. 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. This methodology paper proposes a new conceptual framework for understanding ruling passions of autistic children. Ruling passion (RP) is a tendency to focus on topics, objects, or activities. I begin by discussing extant research, which generally conceptualises RP as barriers to accessing education. Then, I demonstrate how my study draws from the turn to arts-based methods in critical autism studies (e.g., Douglas et al., 2019; Shannon, 2020) to innovate new methodologies for working between stakeholders, exploring the importance of RP to autistic children and their families as well as their utility for education providers.

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. 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.