Abstract
Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education, a welcome text in the Changing Images of Early Childhood series, extends the conversation of reconceptualizing early childhood education into post-colonial discourse, problematizing current practices and challenging the assumptions of discursively constructed childhoods. Edited by Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Professor at the University of Victoria, and Affrica Taylor, Associate Professor at the University of Canberra, this 11-chapter volume seeks to “unsettle” ideas and practices in early childhood education within settler colonial societies. The book speaks to the current critique on the duality of childhood studies and the nature–culture separation, approaching childhood as a complex hybrid of natural and cultural elements (Prout, 2011). Firmly situated within a critical post-colonial perspective, the authors draw on the ideas of new materialism, critical race theory, indigenous ontology and pedagogy, and posthumanistic philosophy to describe the complex entanglement of childhood with natural, cultural, and social agents in early childhood practice. The authors, all important voices in the reconceptualizing early childhood movement, draw on personal experiences and collaborative projects with indigenous populations to critique and offer strategies to untangle childhood from the colonizing agents often overlooked by a social constructivist view of childhood. The book is organized into three sections, each informing practice in a different area of early childhood education.
Section 1, “Unsettling places,” looks at place-based practices and nature pedagogies, and utilizes new materialism to extend the post-colonial perspective to include nonhuman agents. Chapters 1 and 2 build on earlier writings of Affrica Taylor (2013) and Donna Haraway (2008) to deromanticize the relationship between children and nature as innocent. Fikile Nxumalo, in chapter 1, draws on Van Dooren and Rose (2012) to draw attention to the nonhuman participants in the “storying” of a place, such as a tree-stump hollow encountered on a preschool nature walk through a mountain forest. Chapter 2, co-authored by the editors, expertly uses narratives of bear encounters in Canada and kangaroo encounters in Australia to argue that child–animal relations are more complex than is often assumed, involving systematic culling and habitat destruction in human–animal relations. They present Latour’s (2004) “common worlds” framework as a tool to transform pedagogy in order to meet the critical ecological needs of our time, considering agency and resources as shared between all the inhabitants of a place, human and nonhuman. In chapter 3, Kerith Power and Margaret Somerville diverge from looking at child–nature relations to examine the fence as a technology of power and control in Australia.
Section 2 moves to spaces created in the early childhood curriculum for children, unsettling curriculum development and practices that reinforce neocolonialist perspectives. In chapter 4, Emily Ashton examines assumptions of a social pedagogical approach and the ways curriculum strengthens settler dominant discourse by silencing indigenous voices. She draws on the work of Troy Richardson (2011) and Sara Ahmed (2012) to analyze the inclusion of an indigenous colleague, Bear Nicholas, as a form of “enclosure” and containment—a nod to multiculturalism, including indigenous pedagogies and principles within their already established Eurocentric framework. Chapter 5 highlights New Zealand’s Te Whāriki curriculum as an agent of resistance to the governance of early childhood as enacted by today’s neoliberal policies and practices. Marek Tesar begins with a historical overview of the context and development of Te Whāriki as a way to empower the indigenous Maori culture, and subsequently the rise of neoliberal discourse in early childhood education, which narrowly views both the goals of education and the value of the individual as economic. As a bicultural curriculum, Te Whāriki opposes the competitive individualistic ideals and increased accountability measures of neo-liberalism by valuing indigenous perspectives of community and ensuring the inclusion of minority populations in education.
In chapter 6, Vanessa Clark problematizes a seemingly non-political object in most early childhood classrooms—the art easel—and situates it in the historical context of the settler colonized nation of Canada. She maps the concept of the easel through its use as a colonizing agent in art and, as part of the environment, a third teacher to children in the classroom to demonstrate how spaces in the curriculum can be an agent of neocolonialism. Chapter 7, by Julia Persky and Radhika Viruru, utilizes Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1999) concepts in Borderlands: La Frontera to look at the contested spaces along the Texas–Mexico border and the lives of children in those spaces. Persky uses her own narratives and poems to poignantly illustrate how children are daily asked “to exchange their selves for ‘whiteness’” (149). They present the stories of children in contested borderlands as a way to “unsettle” Eurocentric assumptions about childhood as innocent and expose the need for spaces in the curriculum for children with different histories.
Chapters 8 through 11 focus on unsettling indigenous and settler relations within the context of early childhood education. In chapter 8, one of the most impactful in the book, Jenny Ritchie draws on her own work with early childhood contexts in New Zealand and the Te Whāriki curriculum to reveal the failure of teacher education to unseat biases rooted in white privilege. She offers several practical “disentanglement” strategies for challenging colonialism within the early childhood context. Utilizing Lisa Mazzei’s (2011) theory of a “desiring silence” to analyze the lack of engagement in conversations about racism and power as a way of maintaining the status of whiteness as unchallenged, one such strategy encourages teacher educators to engage in confronting the silence. The final strategy “re-entangles” early childhood in the Maori concept of wairuatanga, focusing on spiritual connectedness and respect for what each person brings “that in some slight way may transcend the trauma of the colonial past” (181).
Chapter 9, by Lyn Fasoli and Rebekah Farmer, continues the critique of teacher education programs that claim to respect both indigenous and settler epistemologies. From their experience in a rural Australian community with Aboriginal populations, they question the concept of unilateral gaps in knowledge and highlight several examples of their own gaps about Aboriginal ways of learning “on country.” Chapter 10 makes use of an Aboriginal informal communication—“yarning”—between the indigenous author, Adam Duncan, and non-indigenous Fran Dawning and Affrica Taylor to collaboratively build knowledge and decenter the research process from settler colonial methods. They build on the concept of place as a palimpsest and consider practices that work to facilitate and hinder decolonization, highlighting the challenge in moving beyond tokenistic inclusion of traditional indigenous culture. In the final chapter, Mary Caroline Rowan presents an example of utilizing Inuit pedagogy as a way of thinking with land, water, ice, and snow in an early childhood setting, giving agency to the natural materials children are in contact with daily.
This book presents a critical view of early childhood practice and the ways in which it continues to disempower indigenous groups. Although global in its scope, the text focuses on Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian contexts, where this cutting-edge work is being conducted. While researchers might benefit from a cover-to-cover read, the first section requires a thorough grounding in new materialism and might be better understood, by some, after reading the later sections, and familiarizing themselves with some of the major voices in post-colonial theory and indigenous pedagogies. Because the text aims to make the theoretical more practical, practitioners familiar with the reconceptualizing movement would enjoy chapters 6, 7, 10, and 11, and teacher educators specifically would benefit from a thorough read of chapters 8–11 to begin to untangle their own settler colonial practices. As an emerging researcher in the field of early childhood, I found that the text offered a much needed theoretical perspective, which is lacking in much of the literature.