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Abstract

This article responds to Euro-western conceptions of childhood obesity that understand fat within developmental narratives, as biochemically consequential and as a marker of individualized responsibility. Drawing in multiple fat(s) generated in a pedagogical inquiry with early childhood educators and children, the author articulates ‘post-developmental fat(s)’ as fat(s) that trouble the logics, practices and relationships required to understand fat as obesity. She traces how situated methods of tending fat(s) generated specific possibilities for counting and fitting fat(s). Foregrounding questions of how fat(s) happen and what fat(s) can do in early childhood education, the author takes seriously how fat(s) matter momentarily amid intentional, speculative and deeply politicized pedagogical practices oriented towards doing fat(s) differently in early childhood education.

Keywords

childhood obesity early childhood education fat health education post-developmental pedagogies

How do fat(s) become a concern in early childhood education? For dominant Euro-western understandings of fat rooted in contemporary neo-liberal obesity discourses (Beausoleil and Ward, 2009; Guthman, 2013; LeBesco, 2011; Rice, 2016), fat matters because of the biochemical consequences it enacts (Bacon and Aphramor, 2011), because of developmental logics which hold that fat children become fat and unhealthy adults (Evans, 2010; Rich, 2011), and because fat emerges as an arbiter of personal responsibility, bodied legitimacy and valued citizenship (Freidman, 2015; McPhail, 2013; Rice, 2007; Ward, 2016).

Responding to these hegemonic enactments of fat, this article wonders how fat(s) happen in early childhood education in less familiar, tentative and uncertain modes. I begin by outlining how I bring post-developmental pedagogies and feminist science studies together to inform the pedagogical propositions I work with in this article. After detailing the pedagogical inquiry work with early childhood educators and children that animates this article, I articulate ‘post-developmental fat(s)’ as fat(s) that are always in conversation with dominant developmental conceptions of fat and relentlessly trouble the logics, practices and relationships required to understand fat as obesity in contemporary Canada. Drawing in multiple fat(s) generated with early childhood educators and children, I trace how our modes of tending fat(s) generated specific possibilities for counting and fitting with fat(s). As I elaborate these fat(s) and their transitory entanglements with snack time, statistics, wheelbarrows of soil pushed through the forest and mat forts, I foreground how post-developmental fat(s) are wholly situated and never pre-articulable. Centring questions of how fat(s) happen and what fat(s) can do in early childhood education, I make visible how fat(s) matter momentarily amid intentional, situated pedagogical practices oriented towards doing (with) fat(s) differently.

Making fat(s) with pedagogies

If I want to think with – or encounter, or make, or attend to – different fat(s) than conventional Euro-western obesity discourses, questions of how fat(s) come to be made multiply matter to my project of taking fat(s) seriously with early childhood education. To consider that fat(s) are ‘made’ extends conceptions of fat fabrications (Evans et al., 2005) or the obesity assemblage (Rich, 2010), which describe the machinations through which fat becomes knowable as obesity within larger human-centred neo-liberal systems of coding and constructing flesh. Fat(s) are made perceptible or consequential in a multitude of ways in early childhood education: as obesity, as nutrition choices, as body-composition measurements, as the fat that I carry in my body as I move through a classroom. Importantly, and as I will detail throughout this article, fat(s) are made differently within different pedagogical intentions.

Making fat(s) perceptible, with post-developmental pedagogies, as ethical, political and pedagogical concerns is only one method for complexifying how fat(s) might be made in early childhood education. I understand the post-developmental and feminist science studies theories that I utilize, and my practices for thinking fat(s) with pedagogies, as a specific, bounded and contested (Roy and Subramaniam, 2016; Todd, 2016) strategy, which works alongside a multitude of non-Euro-western interventions, for confronting colonial knowledge systems and their lived, fleshed consequences.

Doing fat(s) with post-developmental pedagogies

In this article, I think alongside early childhood scholars who, among the many other interventions their work enacts, complexify the logics of child development, such as Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Mindy Blaise, B Denise Hodgins, Fikile Nxumalo and Cristina D Vintimilla. When I think with these scholars, I pick up the fibres of their work that aim to intervene in the normalizing function of child development as a knowledge that dominates and restrains relations in early childhood (Vintimilla et al., 2019). Developmentalism is a powerful logic in early childhood education (Burman, 2018), which becomes, I argue, amplified when discourses of childhood obesity mean that the linear temporal logics of childhood development echo – fat children make fat adults (Ward, 2016) – and entangle with status-quo early childhood curriculum. Thinking with fat(s) with post-developmental interventions is, I contend, an urgent proposition because fat(s) in early childhood education are often made within this doubled push of developmentalism, where normative development-promoting curriculum meets normative body-promoting childhood obesity-preventing discourses.

I utilize post-developmental early childhood education theorizing in two ways in this article. First, I think with post-developmental pedagogies to articulate a framework for doing fat(s) with pedagogies. Then, as I deploy this practice, I pick up various post-developmental enactments of pedagogy to build a discussion of what ‘post-developmental fat(s)’ might demand of the pedagogies these fat(s) are intentionally crafted with/in. In this section, I address this first tangle of post-developmental theorizing by explaining how I think fat(s) with pedagogies.

Post-developmental early childhood education aims to create pedagogical entanglements that disrupt dominant Euro-western developmental narratives and the modernist educational approaches promoted by colonial conceptions of normative, universalized developmental trajectories (Burman, 2016; Dahlberg et al., 2013; MacNaughton, 2003; Olsson, 2012). Detailing the powerful links between developmentalism and dictates of normativity and citizenship, post-developmental theorizing describes the governmental function and strict understandings of children’s learning allowed by pre-articulated pedagogical imperatives, including how these dominant pedagogies devalue alternative conceptions of learning and childhood (Cannella and Viruru, 2004; Kessler and Swadener, 1992; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2014). Post-developmental pedagogies provide one alternative to dominant Euro-western pedagogies by positioning childhood and education as lively experiences that become meaningful with the multiple, situated and ongoing activities, relationships, politics, responsibilities and complexities that co-create contemporary childhoods (Blaise, 2013, 2014; Lenz Taguchi, 2011; Rautio, 2013; Rautio and Jokinen, 2015). Often, scholars thinking post-developmentally work in the company of feminist new-materialist scholars like Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett and Donna Haraway. Particular impulses from feminist new materialisms are put to work with post-developmental propositions, including an attunement to situated knowledges (as Donna Haraway offers – e.g. Nxumalo, 2017), the agency and entanglements of material worlds (as Barad and Bennett forward – e.g. Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2016), and interrupting anthropocentric and masculinist ontologies and epistemologies (thinking with Barad and Braidotti, among others – e.g. Burman, 2018; Taylor, 2019). Importantly, post-developmental pedagogies do pedagogy as a constantly negotiated, intentional, demanding process (Iorio et al., 2017; Nxumalo, 2017; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2016; Rautio, 2017); pedagogy is a practice of attending to what we must respond to, and how, within the accountabilities and answerabilities generated by a unique, momentary and situated array of pedagogical participants.

In this article, I utilize a post-developmental pedagogical practice that entails two propositions: (1) making fat(s) a problem with pedagogies while (2) crafting pedagogical provocations capable of holding fat(s) to account with pedagogical complexities. In order to generate pedagogical problems with fat(s) – the first proposition – I borrow from post-developmental scholars who detail how pedagogy is always ongoing and always intentional. Intentionality, here, becomes a practice of responding to the precise ethical and political tensions that are foregrounded by the researchers, educators, children and more-than-human others who participate in creating pedagogies (Blaise et al., 2016; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2016; Taylor, 2017). I develop this proposition further with Stengers (2008: 9), a feminist science studies scholar, who details how ‘connections are something that must be created . . . this is the only way of succeeding in creating problems rather than receiving them readymade’. Taken with post-developmental pedagogies’ attention to the active work of pedagogy, this means that I cannot assume that fat(s) already pose problems for pedagogy or that pedagogies have already addressed all the demands that fat(s) might make of them. Rather, I must work to generate pedagogical problems with fat(s), creating problems that are sticky and tense and rich, and that knit pedagogies with fat(s) in ways that might draw fat(s) into unfamiliar pedagogical entanglements.

The second proposition of my pedagogical framework involves crafting pedagogical provocations that might hold fat(s) to account beyond the typical standards or criteria that fat(s) answer to in Euro-western education (like evidence-based programming standards for ensuring that children get adequate exercise each day). With this proposition, I take the problems that I have generated with fat(s) with pedagogies and move towards creating provocations that I can take up with moments from a pedagogical inquiry. As I create provocations, I borrow from post-developmental scholars who detail how pedagogies constantly tangle and retangle bodies, places, knowledges and materials together in lively, slippery, consequential knots (Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory, n.d.; Hodgins, 2014; Nxumalo, 2017). From these scholars, I know that the provocations that I generate are precise, bounded and non-universalizable – and that because these provocations are consequential, I need to be answerable to the provocations I make possible. Fat(s) matter and, because they matter, they mark and re-mark (Barad, 2007) bodies and possibilities for life. In creating pedagogical provocations with fat(s), I am not working to create provocations for the sake of provocations. Fat(s) are too consequential for this. I need to create provocations which require that I become ‘answerable’ (Willey, 2016) to the fat(s) that I participate in making and which drag these fat(s) into relationships that stretch beyond the accountabilities fat assumes in predominant Euro-western pedagogical configurations. My provocations must attend to how fat(s) can be crafted with difference, such that what Euro-western obesity dictates might take to be ‘fat’ might matter as an array of complex, differently perceptible, unevenly lived fat(s). The pedagogical provocations that I create must submit fat(s) to answerabilities and accountabilities which function to unsettle predominant ways that fat(s) are made to matter with everyday educational practices, while knowing that these provocations are imperfect, bounded by my situated and precise pedagogical intentions.

Pedagogical inquiry

This article draws on a pedagogical inquiry focused on bodies and movement in early childhood education. As part of an ongoing multi-year collaborative research programme at an urban childcare centre in British Columbia, educators, children, families and pedagogical facilitators think collectively about how pedagogy happens, and what everyday practices of education do, in the emplaced entanglements of a mid-sized Canadian city. Together, we participate in ‘inquiry work’, which brings pedagogical documentation (Hodgins, 2012; Nxumalo, 2014; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015) together with a shared ethic of thinking pedagogy expansively, politically and ethically in response to the settler-colonial, humanistic, child-centred and normative developmental tendencies of mainstream Euro-western education (Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015). Crafting ‘provocations’ intended to unsettle our habitual engagements with everyday events, educators and facilitators inquire with children as we gather documentation, generate questions, follow the unpredictable lanes of interest that emerge from within the work, and carefully wonder the possibilities for doing pedagogy relevant to the tensions and challenges children will inherit.¹ We understand pedagogy and inquiry to be wholly intertwined, as the problems, tensions, wonderings and provocations we generate and encounter emerge with/in everyday moments of pedagogy, and continually reinform our possibilities for thinking pedagogically. In the inquiry with bodies and movement that informs this article, we foregrounded our intention to move with more-than-human others to attend to how movement happens politically and to experiment carefully with uncertain possibilities for how bodies can move in early childhood education.

I turn now to two entangled overarching fat(s) that we met in our pedagogical inquiry work: developmental and post-developmental fat(s). I need to insist at this point on a clarification for readers to carry with them as I trace these two enactments of fat(s). I want to be careful to not draw a binary between developmental and post-developmental fat(s), where post-developmental fat(s) are positioned as redemptive or as a solution to disciplinary obesity pedagogies. Concurrently, I do not understand either developmental or post-developmental fat(s) to be impenetrable or stable; all relations with fat(s) are situated and held together by a particular set of conditions. My use of the language of ‘entangled’ overarching fat(s) is very purposeful. Staking a polarization between these two overarching modes of doing fat(s) is not my project. Rather, getting to know the dominant ways fat(s) are made within developmental and obesity discourses in this specific pedagogical inquiry and following the alternative, less familiar ways of relating with fat(s) that we participated in is a practice of noticing and naming the discourses, relations and logics that matter differently in different moments as we think with fat(s), bodies and movement in this particular work. Put differently, some of our relations with fat(s) are steeped in developmental paradigms while other fat(s) relations draw on the concepts, relationalities and logics that post-developmental scholars think with as they intervene in dominant developmental discourses. If we are accountable to the consequences of the fat(s) we make, we need to know how it is we make these fat(s). Teasing out the broad ethical and political commitments of the logics and practices that make the fat(s) we engaged with in our inquiry work is, I contend, an important move in thinking carefully with the specific ways of being with fat(s) that I think with later in this article.

Developmental and post-developmental fat(s)

Developmental fat(s) are familiar to people living in Euro-western spaces. They are the fat(s) that populate calorie labels on snacks and that lurk behind upbeat body-positive gym membership advertising. These fat(s) are crafted amid dominant Euro-western practices of making flesh knowable. These governmentally allowable epistemological structures for confronting fat(s) have been elaborated as ‘fat fabrications’ (Evans et al., 2005), ‘obesity assemblages’ (Rich, 2010) or ‘fatuous measures’ (Guthman, 2013), and make fat(s) in specific strategic modes. Developmental fat(s) are made to be quantifiable, to be human-centred, to be tracked in terms of health consequences, and to matter as social stigma and gendered weight-based oppression. Developmental fat(s) invest in trajectories that decisively assert that fat children become fat adults (Elliott, 2016; Evans, 2010; Evans and Colls, 2011). These ubiquitous narratives of normative childhood development allow for the creation of fat-phobic and fat-mitigating curriculum, which reminds children and educators that it is their personal responsibility to become healthy adults, whereby health can be achieved through carefully controlled practices of healthy eating (or consumerism) and exercise (or self-discipline).

At the nexus of mainstream biological epistemologies and fleshed developmental logics, fat is made as obesity (Bacon and Aphramor, 2011; Rice, 2016; Rich, 2011). With obesity, developmental fat(s) become perceptible as flesh that subscribes to linear conceptions of temporality and endurance, as fat that is biochemical, as tissue that can become catastrophic to bodies, as adiposity subject to individual human agency and as a bodied material that responds to human-rooted practices of intervention. Elsewhere, I have traced how developmental fat(s) become differently consequential with varied physiological fat knowledges (Land, 2018), and how human-centred developmental fat(s) strategically bracket possibilities for relating with fat(s) in childhood (Land, 2015). Developmental fat(s) delimit a precise array of relations with fat(s), whereby only relations that recursively sustain the dominant obesity apparatus within which they are manufactured are made perceptible. This generates fat(s) relations saturated in repulsion, responsibility, analysis, predictability, reduction and control. As many critical obesity and fat studies scholars highlight (e.g. Rice, 2016; Rich, 2011), the normalizing function of developmental conceptions of fat and/as obesity enacts neo-liberal forms of governance, differentially requiring that certain bodies (gendered bodies, racialized bodies, disabled bodies, bodies from different socio-economic classes) become differently controlled and controllable in order to ‘prevent’ and ‘mitigate’ the financial burden of bodies that do not conform to a thin ideal.

Post-developmental fat(s) are made intelligible with post-developmental education frameworks. Euro-western knowledges that frame flesh as ontologically accessible, biochemically quantifiable and materially stable are infiltrated by fleshy bodies that are constantly participatory (Lenz Taguchi et al., 2016), made of and making material marks (Barad, 2007), and threaded with an attunement to divergent possibilities for doing biologies critically (Willey, 2016; Wilson, 2015). These fat(s) are concerned with/in human bodies, but demand modes of attention that are disloyal to Euro-western human-centred bodied politics.

Post-developmental fat(s) provoke response-able (Haraway, 2015) engagements with mainstream developmental logics of childhood. Thinking post-developmental fat(s) with pedagogies, I argue that attending to post-developmental fat(s) demands that we differently encounter the contested, fleshed politics that children and adults unevenly inherit. Post-developmental fat(s) do not pretend that fat(s) are biochemically inert, nor do they apolitically refute that fat(s) impact possibilities for life. Rather, they orient towards doing fat(s) pedagogically as they wonder how fat(s) matter differently, with different places, with different bodies, with different practices of making fat(s) matter. Post-developmental fat(s) do not ignore obesity discourses, but they do not rest with making clear how obesity functions as a tool of neo-liberal governance. Troubled by the governing pedagogical purview of developmental fat(s), post-developmental fat(s) demand active, ongoing, intentional and uncertain practices capable of critically thinking with fat(s). They create, and are created by, conditions for relating with fat(s) in less familiar ways, whereby fat(s) relations might be accountable to dominant logics in the same moment as they toil to unsettle such discourses and cleave space for different connections, tentative modes of critique or provisional methods for attuning otherwise with fat(s).

I trace these two enactments of fat(s) not to draw a binary between developmental and post-developmental fat(s), or to frame post-developmental fat(s) as an aspirational pedagogical imperative, or to obscure alternative engagements with fat(s), but to inhabit the continually remade incommensurability between these two fat(s): developmental and post-developmental fat(s) are made with differences that matter, but are not simply an inverse of one another. Post-developmental fat(s) matter with developmental fat(s). As I participate in post-developmental fat(s), I am not concerned with only articulating critiques of developmental fat(s), but work instead to infiltrate developmental fat(s), insistently unsettle their carefully curated ontological stability and actively toss (and retoss) fat(s) into intentional, speculative pedagogical conversation. Post-developmental enactments of fat(s) are accountable to the fat(s) they complexify because of the uneven politicized complexities I choose to (or can) attend to. No fat(s) are innocent or inert in intricate lifeworlds.

With the pedagogical inquiry moments that I think with in the following sections, the problems, provocations and fat(s) that I foreground are my attempt to work through how I might, and how I often fail to, create conditions for doing fat(s) post-developmentally. I trace – follow, notice, make, hold on to – the stories and relations we made possible in inquiry work, thinking these moments with concerns, materials and theories that were raised in conversation with educators and children, and also within my own particular histories with fat(s). I often start with a moment from inquiry work and then extend these moments by picking up the twofold practice of thinking post-developmentally that I described: (1) making fat(s) a problem with pedagogies while (2) crafting pedagogical provocations capable of holding fat(s) to account with pedagogical complexities.

There is nothing about the moments that I think with that is especially or always conducive to post-developmental fat(s); that they are mostly mundane moments serves to emphasize the intentional, ongoing work in doing fat(s) post-developmentally. I think fat(s) with snack time, statistics, wheelbarrows of soil and mat forts to chase down moments when fat(s) are momentarily made post-developmental and probe how we made/make fat(s) matter as post-developmental fat(s). I also notice when my pedagogical intentions to think fat(s) differently do not pan out and reassert developmental or habitual neo-liberal pedagogical enactments of fat. I argue that we might craft post-developmental fat(s) as a specific, persistent, non-universalizable labour of (re)caring, (re)disrupting and (re)tending fat(s). Where fat(s) become lively, post-developmental fat(s) are not already perceptible or pedagogical, and developmental fat(s) are not ontologically pre-given.

Tending, counting and fitting fat(s)

We often participated in pedagogical inquiry work in the morning. This meant that mid-morning snack time became entangled with our inquiry practices, as the educators and researchers often paused our work to describe what snack was being offered to the children or to confirm that the children who had opted to pass on the snack were certain in their decision. As the children flowed out of the inquiry space to share in the snack, as snack-covered sticky fingers moved with movement provocations and as bodies nourished by freshly filled bellies generated differential momentums in the space, snack-time interjections mattered as a mode of making fat(s). Planning, selecting, obtaining and preparing snacks marks a readily accessible method of constructing fat(s), where (healthy) fat(s) are maintained and promoted by providing snacks in accordance with licensing regulations. These fat(s) are made within a transactional logic, where humans care about and for fat(s) in predictable exchanges: adults create healthy snacks for children so that children develop healthy body weights; experts create healthy-snack guidelines for educators so that healthy fat consumption can be promoted; children eat healthy snacks and do not become unhealthy adult citizens.

These modes of making fat(s) can be imbued with an ethical attention towards cultivating healthy bodies, but such a transactional logic of maintaining or promoting fat(s) does not hold up to the complexities of snack-time interjections that matter to our movement inquiry. When I enter my voice into a conversation that I was not previously active in to share snack options with children, this is a mode of being concerned with fat(s). Then, I care differently for fat(s) when I move my body across a room to double-check with a child that they are satisfied with their choice to skip the snack, because my need to confirm this choice is rooted in the assumption that adults know when children should eat. When children return to the movement-inquiry space with blueberry-stained faces, our collective moving conversations must intentionally tend to/with fat(s) with snack-time interjections.

Pedagogical problems with tending fat(s)

Snack-time interjections become a mode of making fat(s) centred on caring with fat(s). If fat(s) can be cultivated or sustained through practices that are non-innocent, then fat(s) are made as tend-able. Conversant with pedagogies of care (Hodgins, 2014), fat(s) require tending. Snack-time interjections are not only a question of how fat(s) are made in practice, but an attention to how making fat(s) requires ongoing, careful, ethical methods of minding and nurturing fat(s). Crafting snack-time interjections as a problem with pedagogies requires thinking fat(s) as lively matters worth tending to, where tending practices mark intentional, ethical interventions. Tending with fat(s) demands non-universalizable, unsteady processes of inhabiting uneven and difficult ‘obligations of care’ (Haraway, 2008: 7). Rautio (2017: 97) elaborates tending and tuning as modes of ‘understanding or tuning into how something not-self is similar to your self and tending that not-self as part of your self’, where questions of how tending unfurls with pedagogies demand an attention to the complex politicization of caring with more-than-human others. Taking inspiration from Rautio, doing caring fat(s) as problems with pedagogies requires sustained and unfamiliar practices of tending fat(s), such that we might ethically and intentionally tune differently to how fat(s) happen otherwise. Not all practices of making fat(s) are drawn with tending and caring, and not all tending(s) of fat(s) are disruptive or evocative or inevitably post-developmental, but tending is always active and intentional and swathed in response-ability (Haraway, 2016; Hodgins, 2014).

Extending on the queries that snack-time interjections effect, how do fat(s) generate problems of tending with pedagogies? How do practices of maintaining fat(s) spin into modes of tending fat(s)? If tending burrows into the demands that caring with fat(s) might make of fat(s) and pedagogies, then it becomes essential that we trace the messy bonds where tending saturates fat(s)-making practices with ethics and intentionality. How can we truly tend with fat(s) with early childhood education pedagogies, and what happens when we do? How might we be accountable to the tending that we enact or obscure, and to the fat(s) that we intentionally care with or purposefully refuse?

One mainstream Euro-western mode of maintaining fat(s) relies on statistical practices of quantifying lived fat as accessible, measurable, stable and subject to anthropocentric constructions of empirical, scientific numeracy (Bacon and Aphramor, 2011). Presenting fat(s) in statistical terms, where counting becomes a scare tactic for asserting heteronormative conceptions of health (Rice, 2007), marks one central strategy of the insidiously iterative governmental function of the obesity apparatus: use seemingly objective statistics to purposefully mark some bodies fat; assert evidence-based strategies to mitigate the bodies that were strategically counted as fat; and use (re)counting and analytic strategies that ensure the need for counting and for evidence-based interventions, and therefore guarantee that a continual emphasis on governmentally sanctioned notions of health (and citizenship) becomes increasingly urgent (Guthman, 2013). It is not uncommon for fat-adjacent resources for early childhood educators (including those centred around concepts of obesity, physical activity or healthy living) to launch from a terrifying statistic about rates of obesity among children, and for these statistics to immediately segue into probabilities for lifespan obesity-caused morbidity and mortality. These statistical habits maintain fat(s) that are overwhelmingly developmental.

Tending fat(s) with statistics in our inquiry

I often notice myself taking fat-adjacent statistics very seriously. I find it difficult not to feel discomforted by statistical predictions that 50% of Canadian provinces will have more adults who are overweight or obese than adults with ‘normal’ weights by 2019 (Twells et al., 2014). It matters to me that I am so complicit in mainstream fat(s)-making practices that I impulsively feel alarmed by this statistic and must intentionally shelve that unsettling tendency before I can wonder the ontological complexities of predicting fat(s). I am incredibly concerned that 23.1% of youth who participated in a national survey reported to Statistics Canada (2014) that they met predetermined weight- and height-based criteria for overweight or obesity. It certainly matters more to me how body-mass-index standards seamlessly mark these youth as overweight or obese, therefore firmly evaluating their bodied legitimacy, marking them as certain types of citizens and assigning a moral appraisal to their relationship with their fat(s) (not to mention how uncritically and uncare-fully this statistical figure is tossed around in discussions of obesity). But, as much as my critical post-developmental researcher heart might long to pretend otherwise, that 23.1% number does matter to my pedagogical thinking. This imperfect, violent, settler-colonial statistic is enmeshed in my tending with fat(s). I am response-able to the Euro-western machinations that allow for these statistics to prevail in mainstream curriculum resources and I am account-able to how these statistics endure with/in my pedagogical intentions. Borrowing inspiration from Rautio (2017) to imagine that fat(s) statistics never touch our pedagogical inquiry work with movement would be to obscure that statistics and fat(s) might be tended to otherwise. This would require that I refuse to tune with how statistics might be part of fat(s) and how fat(s) might tend with statistics. How, then, might I tend with fat(s) with statistics as a generative problem with pedagogies?

If tending marks a call to ‘matter and not just want to matter’ (Haraway, 2016: 47), perhaps tending with fat(s) with statistics can lean on De Freitas’s (2016) reimagining of ‘how we might do calculation differently, how we might distort calculation for new purposes’ (462). Infiltrating anthropocentric numerical models of discrete, finite magnitudes of calculation that mainstream Euro-western mathematics (including inferential statistics) is loyal to, De Freitas works to ‘rethink the ontology of the data point’ (463). Tending to ‘calculating matter’ as a question, wrought with complex ethical tensions of how intensely politicized calculating performances unfold, De Freitas stories how an ‘iterative but creative calculation [might] be immanent within matter’ (468). The ontologically productive numeracies at play in De Freitas’s inquiry, the nuances of which are deeply entangled with thinking fat(s) made in feminist new materialisms (Colls, 2007; Warin, 2015) but stretch beyond the scope of this article, become a mode of tending with fat(s) and statistics: How might pedagogies and practices calculate with fat(s) when calculating is conversant with worlding and numeracy counts into ethico-onto-epistemological liveliness? When numbers are not discrete, fat(s) are multiple, and pedagogies, fat(s) and numbers continually (re)craft numbers, fat(s) and pedagogies, how might statistics become pedagogical provocations?

How can we tend with fat(s) that are incomprehensible to (and far too concerned with other lively features to pause for) a body-mass-index statistical measure? De Freitas et al. (2016: 431) compel a rearticulation of how ‘becoming a statistic’ unfolds, and thinking fat(s) and statistics with this renewed attention to statistical making means that the 23.1% statistic about overweight and obese youth in Canada might be crafted otherwise. That these digits might matter for their predictive capacity dissolves into a concern for how fat(s) are made with ontologies that allow for estimating flesh, while also wondering the ontological absurdity of forecasting fat(s) that are profoundly, unpredictably, politically generative. Rather than feeling endlessly frustrated about the governmental techniques of deploying body-mass-index criteria to understand fat(s), a 23.1% made in alternative ontologies of numerical scale means that I must tend to how this statistic can be, and is, deployed otherwise, therefore tending fat(s) and statistics as modes of worlding amid a ‘hope that numeracy will never be the same’ (Lather, 2016: 504). This involves taking seriously how, when differential conceptions of mathematical calculus cleave open numeracy such that statistics are iterative and inventive, statistics made in mainstream quantitative analysis practices might become differently pedagogical.

Pedagogical problems of tending with statistics, with pedagogical inquiry work, tune to the complexities of this 23.1% to chisel into how this statistic is (re)made and to care for how this 23.1% matters – to tend to how this statistic counts. This is a refusal to ignore 23.1% as a consequential signification coupled with an equally aggressive push to never tolerate 23.1% as ontologically sustainable; it is understanding 23.1% as developmental fat(s) while interrogating 23.1% with post-developmental fat(s). Taking tending fat(s) as problems with pedagogies, with statistics, creates pedagogical provocations of counting and fitting. How do we count with/in/as fat(s)? What, and how, do fat(s) fit (in/as)? How does counting or fitting (with) fat(s) make possible varied fat(s) relations in early childhood education?

Pedagogical provocations of counting fat(s)

In mainstream obesity-preventing early childhood education resources, fat(s) often count as calories. Fat(s) made as calories are rooted within a transactional logic of calorie balance, and metabolism is crafted as a machine of consumption that can be understood by numerically bounded constructions of caloric intake and output (Landecker, 2011). As calories that enter into a body are counted, deducted from calories expended by a body and weighed against expectations for how that body should be gaining, losing or maintaining mass, fat(s) are made as operationally exchangeable. Epistemologies of closely governed caloric conversion, which rely on Euro-western constructions of numeracy and quantification, allow for what Landecker (2013: 495) elaborates as ‘postindustrial metabolism’, whereby neo-liberal practices of counting explicitly promote fat(s) relations of regulation. These linear, additive counting practices and the regulatory relations that sustain these practices make fat(s) that are developmental. These developmental fat(s) perpetuate relations of control, monitoring and reduction, where pedagogical provocations of counting make visible how fat(s) can be strategically crafted as techniques of bodied governance in service of Euro-western scientific epistemologies. As educators are reminded that children should only drink 125 millilitres of fruit juice no more than twice a week (Collaborative Action, n.d.) or that ‘child care programs must ensure a minimum of 60 minutes per day of outdoor active play’ (Government of British Columbia, 2016: 1), fat(s) are made to count (as) calories that foreground developmental fat(s), which maintain fat(s) relations of mitigation and management.

Counting fat(s) with bike jumps in our inquiry

How can fat(s) count otherwise? Often our pedagogical inquiry work travels into the forest, where the children and educators are engaged in complex, enduring, challenging conversations with youth in the neighbourhood who construct bike jumps made of tree branches, couches, rocks, soil and an array of materials that inhabit the forest. When we visit the bike jumps, the children clamber over the hard-packed muddy mounds, stretching their bodies over inclines that reach higher than the heads of the educators. A readily accessible logic might think these moving moments as complicit in the required 60 minutes of outdoor play required by provincial licensing or as an antidote against the sugar-rich fruit juice a child might have sipped. This exercise-based frame of reference might enter developmental fat(s) into dialogue with the bike jumps.

The bike jumps, however, make possible fat(s) relations that demand other practices of counting. Recently, the children confronted new bike jumps in the forest. These jumps brought with them a massive hole where the soil used to stabilize the jumps had been swiped from. The children were concerned about the hole, and the trees and soil and critters that had been disturbed in making the bike jumps, and wanted to repair the hole as an act of care with/in the forest. With the educators, the children strategized an intervention in these new bike jumps, where they deconstructed the bike jumps and, with many loads of shovelled and wheel-barrowed soil, filled the massive pit with the bulky materials that had been made to participate in the bike jumps. To count this moment only as a developmental-fat(s) accomplishment of recommended physical activity duration or as burning excess calories through sustained exercise severely delimits the scope of fat(s) counting made pedagogically perceptible.

Thinking pedagogical provocations of counting (with) fat(s) with bike jumps requires counting practices that are intentionally disloyal to familiar systems of calculating. I can understand the two hours that it took to refill half the hole as a temporal investment in repairing the forest and getting exercise, but this conception foregrounds only how predominant criteria for understanding fat(s) and metabolisms count this moment. It does not account for how bike jumps, buckets of soil and tired bicep muscles count differently with fat(s). Borrowing from scholars who complexify how temporalities and pedagogies entangle in complex, dispersed and fractional ways in early childhood education (Farquhar, 2016; Kummen, 2010; Myers, 2016), just as time is made multiple in diffractive, non-human or post-developmental practices, so too might counting proliferate with fat(s). I extend Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kummen’s (2016: 433) proposition to cultivate ‘temporalities that do not necessarily view time as a container’ into thinking fat(s) that cannot enact counting as confined. That is, when ‘knots of time bind us together and, in doing so, become relations of obligation’ (433), how can counting become a practice of intense accountability, a taking to account with counting that does not allow for bounded, stable, familiar practices of counting fat(s)? When fat-powered muscles strain against shovels loaded with soil and fat-hungry stomachs start to rumble with exhaustion after multiple trips between the bike-jump carcass and the replenished hole, fat(s) count with/in/as an investment, as an ethical commitment to be accountable to the obligations counting engenders.

As we care-fully carry soil across the forest floor, fat(s) relations of investing are made possible, where energy and fat(s) and metabolism make calculations of situated response-ability. Rather than accounting for calories burned, counting with fat(s) traces how calories matter momentarily as moving soil, as dismantling holes where tree roots were severed. Where Myers (2016: 428) attends to play as a ‘temporally productive event in its own right’, fat(s) can count with bike jumps, with pedagogies, as a counting that actively refigures what it is to count. Counting fat(s) becomes a transitory practice of accounting with fat(s), of intentionally pouring calories into forest interventions. These fat(s) can be made to matter momentarily as post-developmental fat(s), as fat(s) that refuse to submit to anthropocentric, predictable, sequential modes of counting. These fat(s) are not the fat(s) of statistical scary stories, but are fat(s) fashioned with/in ethical knots with/in complex lifeworlds.

Pedagogical provocations of fitting fat(s)

How, then, do counting practices with fat(s) matter otherwise? When practices for counting with fat(s) extend beyond quantifying fat(s), how might we account differently with fat(s)? As nap-time mats become fort walls in our movement inquiry, as I describe below, space is (re)configured and relations of fitting fat(s) become momentary experiments in how bodies might fit with/in a structure. These fitting-fat(s) relations are not stable, nor are they pre-articulable. They demand unfamiliar practices of accounting – calculating, crafting spatialities, making numbers meaningful – with fat(s). Fitting-fat(s) practices and relations are intertwined with tending practices and are made as (momentary, transitive, uncertain) developmental and post-developmental fat(s). Taking ‘fitting’ fat(s) as a pedagogical provocation built with/in pedagogical problems of tending fat(s), then, requires attending to the multitude of ways that ‘fitting’ happens with/in early childhood education.

Fitting fat(s) with mat forts in our inquiry

As floor mats from the nap room initially entered our movement inquiry, the mats often lay flat across the plane of the floor and invited movements that played out parallel to the ground. Becoming more familiar with the mats, we wanted to extend these flat-mat events by propping the mats unsteadily on their thin edges or balancing the mats against chairs and tables to pause their large, flat surfaces from lying flat against the floor. Many of the children, educators and researchers began to construct forts and walls. Crafting enclosed spaces, making shapes that required entrance and creating areas where the easy flow of bodies was complexified by the presence of waist-high mat interjections animated our moving. As the child and adult bodies made and negotiated these momentary spaces, fat(s) relations of fitting became differently perceptible. Crouched under a small square table encircled by mats, a child invited me to join her in a ‘fort’ and, as I weighed if my limbs entering her space was even a possibility, fat(s) relations of fitting concerned with anthropocentric assessments of displacement and volume emerged (Manning, 2012). In wondering if my body might join the space, I invoked a fat(s) that is profoundly developmental – a fat(s) that assumes steady demarcations between the fat(s) beneath my skin and other lifeworlds; a fat(s) that takes the spatial arrangement of the mat fort to be stable and quantifiable; a fat(s) that submits to politics of adult bodies needing to comfortably occupy space suitable to the contours of their stature; a fat(s) that assumes that I can best, and accurately, assess how space might respond to my bodied fat(s).

Meeting my hesitant ‘I am not sure that my body will fit in there’ by decisively kicking down one of the mat walls, the child made possible fat(s) relations of fitting capable of actively reasserting what is entailed in ‘fitting’ and space. As I curled my legs tightly against my chest, two more children clambered into the space without pausing to wonder the logistical possibilities of fitting. Fitting-fat(s) relations of experimentation and of responding to the ongoing politics of fitting as they are made differently palpable became necessary. Fitting relations were profoundly unconcerned with submitting bodies to existing space constraints and, as bodies and fat(s) and muscle(s) overlapped with toppling mat(s), these relations became a practice in reformulating how ‘fitting’ might unfold (Lenz Taguchi et al., 2016; Rautio, 2014). Fitting marks, in this moment, a provocation of making fat(s) with space, of doing bodied displacement as an ongoing, immersive, uncertain negotiation of creating space (Manning, 2009; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2016; Yazbeck and Danis, 2015). These relations of fat(s)-fitting ignore pre-existing observations of fitting/space/fat(s); they actively refuse the logics of developmental fat(s).

These fitting-fat(s) relations momentarily matter as post-developmental fat(s), where the politics and spaces and ethics of fat(s) are constantly renegotiated such that my worries about my body not fitting into a space (and the developmental fat(s) this made real) literally become unintelligible. When the logics with which I assessed my body would not fit are made unthinkable (Haraway, 2016), the fat(s) made of these logics become vulnerable to creative interventions and enter differently into conversation with the lively matters of early childhood education. Participating in the ongoing making-perceptible of spacetime configurations (Barad, 2007) demands that I take seriously my active accountability to the continual unfolding of tentative, relational possibilities made real with fitting fat(s). Here, post-developmental fat(s) do (with) fitting as a practice of answerability.

(Re)counting and (re)fitting with statistics in our inquiry

Post-developmental fat(s), made with/in a practice of crafting fat(s) as a problem with pedagogies and cultivating pedagogical propositions to hold fat(s) to different accounts, are never stable or complete. As I notice, in our pedagogical inquiry work, how fat(s) are made with wheelbarrows of soil and mat forts, these momentary fat(s) layer back through pedagogical problems of tending fat(s) with statistics to animate the making-visible of post-developmental fat(s) as an iterative, ongoing pedagogical intention. With counting fat(s) and fitting fat(s), Lather’s (2016: 504) query of ‘what would a curriculum look like that focused on situating, historicizing and contesting the conventional epistemological and ontological framing of numerical data?’ entangles with fat(s) to smash fat(s) + statistics + (early childhood education) pedagogies into conversation. When mat walls are kicked down to remake space – a spatial endeavour that perhaps never was dedicated to rational, anthropocentric assessments of volume, displacement and parsing space as discrete units – fat(s) are a critical doing with statistics. As what might be read through a calorie-consumption frame becomes meaningful as an investment in unpredictable relational entanglements, counting fat(s) makes possible different practices for accounting with fat(s) that cannot privilege statistical ways of knowing, and generates different possibilities for how we might calculate how pedagogies entangle with fat(s). These counting fat(s) and fitting fat(s) literally refute the ontological underpinnings of statistical discourses, which rely on specific scientific conceptions of numeracy that allow for precise empirical quantification. The work entailed in trapping these soil-counting, mat-fitting, momentarily post-developmental fat(s) as a positivist statistic is immense, and perhaps, I hope, joyfully impossible.

Doing (with) post-developmental fat(s)

Detailing tending practices of ‘making’ fat(s) as productive problems with pedagogies, and thinking with fitting and counting fat(s) as pedagogical provocations, I have articulated tentative, temporary and non-universalizable gestures towards how post-developmental fat(s) might matter with early childhood education pedagogies. Importantly, the momentarily meaningful post-developmental fat(s) elaborated in this article are crafted in precise collisions of making, tending, relating, counting and fitting with fat(s). These fat(s) did not simply happen and they are never conclusive; they entangle with snack time, statistics, metabolisms, bike jumps and mat forts, and with pedagogical worlding in localized, partial engagements with post-developmental theorizing. These fat(s) are, I hope, only a very initial grappling with the possibilities for doing post-developmental pedagogies with fat(s) across diverse early childhood education spaces. There is nothing about fat(s) or the moments from our pedagogical inquiry work that is inherently post-developmental or disruptive or pedagogical. Rather, these fat(s) matter as tentatively post-developmental and are infused with intentionality, with pedagogical politics invested in doing (with) fat(s) otherwise.

Post-developmental fat(s) precipitate questions of where, and how, fat(s) happen, momentarily and differently and constantly in early childhood education. Making post-developmental fat(s) perceptible entails doing fat(s) pedagogically, whereby disrupting dominant epistemologies of fat(s) (especially as they become entangled with discourses of health, or obesity, or development) is a practice in making and relating with fat(s), rather than ‘embodying’, understanding or regulating fat(s). Rather than mattering as a benchmark or ‘best’ way to engage fat(s), I forward post-developmental fat(s) as a verb, as a labour with fat(s), as a practice of actively taking fat(s) as problems with pedagogies and crafting accountable pedagogical provocations with fat(s). Working to make post-developmental fat(s) meaningful is, then, an always ongoing practice of crafting fat(s) as complex and answerable to ethical, political and pedagogical concerns in early childhood education.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Nicole Land

Notes

Author biography

Nicole Land is an Assistant Professor in the School of Early Childhood Studies at Ryerson University.

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Tending,counting and fitting with post-developmental fat(s) in early childhood education

Abstract

Keywords

Making fat(s) with pedagogies

Doing fat(s) with post-developmental pedagogies

Pedagogical inquiry

Developmental and post-developmental fat(s)

Tending, counting and fitting fat(s)

Pedagogical problems with tending fat(s)

Tending fat(s) with statistics in our inquiry

Pedagogical provocations of counting fat(s)

Counting fat(s) with bike jumps in our inquiry

Pedagogical provocations of fitting fat(s)

Fitting fat(s) with mat forts in our inquiry

(Re)counting and (re)fitting with statistics in our inquiry

Doing (with) post-developmental fat(s)

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biography

References