Propositions toward educating pedagogists: Decentering the child

Abstract

The authors propose decentering the child as a critical motion in the education of pedagogists who work to refuse developmental pedagogies in early childhood education. Tracing how child-centered developmental practices are obstacles for deeper ethical and intellectual work and reiterate anthropocentric relationalities, they offer two propositions toward decentering the child that they emphasize in pedagogists’ learning: refusing legitimation through mastery and abandoning narratives of linearity. The authors advance these propositions within an intention to reinvent the relational commons that anchor pedagogists’ learning and practice while responding to the complexities of early childhood education in Canada.

Becoming pedagogists

We are collaborators in multiple projects that aim to reconceptualize early childhood education in two Canadian provinces. ¹ One of these projects has been shaping the role of the pedagogist. A pedagogist—a new role in British Columbia and Ontario—works alongside educators to think pedagogically and together create everyday curricular enactments. Inspired by the Italian pedagogista (Calaprice, 2019), pedagogists envision pedagogical connections and projects to provoke educational processes that, through interdisciplinary and provocative questions, ideas, theories, materials, relationships, and art/media (to name a few means), deepen and complexify strong, situated pedagogical work in early childhood contexts. A pedagogist weaves theoretical invitations together with the particular context they inherit as they work to generate care-full, local, and innovative alternative responses that activate curricular processes.

In this conceptual article, we contribute a proposal for the education of pedagogists in Canada, on which there is currently no scholarship. This thought piece is grounded in our work with emerging pedagogists and aims to open space for rethinking early childhood education and its leadership. This article activates our contention that pedagogists resist practices of centering the child and their loyalties to child development. After tracing some inheritances of centering the child, we share two propositions for inviting pedagogists to invent relations beyond developmentalism. Accordingly, the education of pedagogists is deeply implicated in the political and affective spaces of questioning the vested ties to developmentalism that early childhood education inherits.

The centrality of the child in education is an unquestioned adage that a pedagogist, we propose, needs to unsettle. Drawing on Anne Phelan’s (2017: 24) scholarship, we work with pedagogists to “study the grip of unquestioned categories of thought and those which we have considered unquestionable”—prescripts like centering the child. In this article, we ask questions which help us trace stories that resist the popularized call to center the child in pedagogy. We are interested in how pedagogists might invent alternative dynamics beyond the predictable and stable rote centering of the child that is rooted in developmental psychology.

Legacies and consequences of centering the child

The mantra of “centering the child” is strong, both as a publicly stated discourse and a colloquial anchor for practice in early childhood education in Canada (Makovichuk et al., 2014; Manitoba Early Learning and Care, n.d.; Government of New Brunswick, n.d.; Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014; Saskatchewan Ministry of Education, 2008). We are concerned that this imperative to center the child is tangled in modern inheritances of a romantic notion of childhood innocence and the desire to follow (a developmental trajectory of) emergent learning. We see child-centered discourse as being knotted with North American translations of Reggio Emilia-inspired practices that misinterpret the concept of pedagogy. To center the child, we argue, is profoundly grounded in humanist approaches to pedagogy and world-making that underpin dominant developmental and emergent curriculum pedagogical approaches (Nxumalo et al., 2018). Central to all of these approaches is the familiar assertion that the child should be the main figure of education. These approaches maintain that education must attend to the (not-yet-developed) child (the adult-to-be) because education is the medium through which the child will learn the skills necessary to thrive—that is, to be productive, become properly developed, and acquire an economic value in neoliberal times (Moss, 2014). Concurrent to this assertion is that children carry natural characteristics and aptitudes to answer to the learning trajectories education posits. In this mix, too, are the dictates of education in neoliberal times: school readiness, policy agendas, standardized testing, and increased regulation in the guise of quality (Dahlberg et al., 2006; Moss et al., 2016; Moss and Urban, 2019; Pence, 2016).

These threads pull together in what we envision as a pendulum with a foothold in developmental psychology—a constant oscillation where positing the child as the center of education makes the child both hypervisible and indiscernible (Burman, 2016). Importantly, this pendulum marks a critical inheritance that, we propose, pedagogists’ education should carefully resist. We want to think through how this pendulum operates and the relations it creates. We also want to think through what the trajectory of the pendulum cannot bring within its equilibrium. As we grapple with the narratives and policies that pedagogists bring to our projects, on one end of the pendulum’s arc, in the glorification of the child, everything is about a child who is a competent meaning-maker and agent in already-understood terms within an ethic of opportunity and expansion. This child-centered figure proffers a forward-facing linearity moored in developmentalism. The educator is merely a facilitator of experiences based on following the child’s lead in realizing their potential. In the child’s invisibility, the other end of the pendulum swing, the child is a sort of “object in the way” of adult agendas and the established maturity of their purposes. On this side, the otherwise beatific child becomes superfluous—the target of social engineering (made visible in universalized developmental milestones and developmentalism’s normalizing function) that has been predefined by adults and organized by institutions. For this pendulum to function properly in organizing institutional relations and agendas, it needs to oscillate between two sovereign senses of subjectivity, or meanings and effects of being a person, of “I”—the child or the adult—as each are differently constituted by its structural force and its status as an order of (cultural, political, social, pedagogical, curricular) power. The pendulum sweeps fix and further sediment human supremacy and developmentalism. The swinging pendulum that marks early childhood education monotonously repeats a story that flattens relations within the world. This functional oscillation leads to a profound lack of curiosity and anti-intellectualism for pedagogists, and consequently for early childhood education. We return to what is unmasterable—the ruins of knowledge relations, the strangeness of childhood, non-linear narratives, and the disturbance of time thought through a politics of settler implication in memory work—to rekindle curiosities that look beyond the pendulum’s guiding trajectory. To uncritically follow the swing of child development or of adult expertise vacates everyday relations of careful, experimental, relational, and tentative thinking.

We propose that an education for pedagogists in Canada must ask pedagogical and ethical questions to help break from the magnetism of child-centered approaches and their developmentalism. We offer two propositions for pedagogists toward decentering the child: (1) refusing legitimation through mastery and (2) abandoning narratives of linearity. We want to emphasize the character of these propositions—they are speculative and risky, and thus require of us care-full weaving in situated contexts. They are neither practices to implement nor readily translatable pedagogies to utilize. They do not simply add new directions to the existing linearity of developmentalism. Rather, they require work—the work of pedagogists thinking pedagogically in a world where dispersed, messy relations knot us into constellations of more-than-human relations (Haraway, 2016), where we must respond and live well in local, profoundly embedded, and contaminated (to borrow from Shotwell (2016)) places. Our propositions are ongoing, which we emphasize in our use of “want” throughout our writing: we want to keep working with pedagogists to enliven these propositions, to continually nourish the invention and imagination we see as critical to a pedagogist’s work. To situate our propositions toward a pedagogists’ education that resists child centering, we begin with our concerns about developmentalism.

Developmentalism and human mastery as pillars of child-centered practices

Baker (2001), Burman (2016), Cannella (1997) and Castañeda (2002), among others, have written extensively about how developmental discourses have created limiting ideas about what it means to be a child. They argue that a “universal child” discourse has been created through strategies and techniques of power in accordance with political, social, judicial, and economic conditions of society. In Canada, developmental psychology is one of many discourses that have defined and produced a particular understanding of the child. Developmental truths themselves are processes that have been used to organize, shape, and structure our lives. Used as a political strategy to enhance and regulate a democratic way of life, child development has been advanced to support or deny the social, cultural, political, and economic realms of childhood (Miller and Rose, 1993).

Child-centered developmentalism perpetuates education as a project focused on structuring its purposes around the socialization and enculturalization of a child, who must gradually achieve autonomy as they progressively gain mastery of the world (Lesko, 1996; Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2011). In this project, the world must be fragmented in different disciplines of knowledge, organized in sets of concepts to be acquired (e.g. developmentally appropriate practices), and arranged in progressive ways. Knowledge becomes a series of movements toward the mastery of a world that is chaos-free and stripped of any complexity. The onto-epistemology that is proposed through the Canadian educational project tends to evacuate a world full of complex and uneven relations and correspondences in the name of preparing children to become the good, docile citizens of tomorrow. It is this reduction of the world in the name of human mastery and control (Taylor, 2020)—and all its logics of simplification, efficiency, fragmentation, and autonomy (Jardine et al., 2006)—that has always been at the center of our concerns with pedagogists. This is because such logics obey an onto-epistemology that flattens existence and all the many indiscernible possibilities that characterize the adventure of being.

This child-centered onto-epistemology grounds itself in anti-intellectualism under the guise of predefined and overdetermining universals, standard practices, and shared developmental trajectories. Within it, pedagogists and educators are configured as facilitators, who must draw on particular evidence-based, verified, and validated practices to ensure proper child development. Following Biesta (1998), it seems to us that when referring to pedagogists or educators as facilitators, child-centered practices reduce teaching to a matter of provision and control, and therefore take us back to the pendulum, reducing education to a back-and-forth project of mastery where what matters is mainly to define and assert who holds control. And perhaps this is what our effort to support pedagogists inherits: an educational project that still acts and thinks as if the world is dependent on our will. This is a pedagogical orientation that assumes education is only about learning as a way to render and organize the world.

Often, a child-centered or emergent curriculum is argued to be less developmental because it does not depend on the prearticulated utilitarian practices imposed by developmental milestones in the way performance-oriented school-readiness practices do. We have no wish to insert ourselves into debates about the developmental ghosts that populate emergent curriculums. Following the pendulum, we want to crack this argument differently—breaking developmentalism with emergent curriculums brings us back to the child. Child-centered perspectives keep us under the thumb of familiarity. Practitioners cling to child-centered discourses because they know them so well and because they work (to maintain status-quo relations). We want, in our projects with pedagogists, to do more than end up back at humanism’s child. We are unconcerned with which is best practice—developmentally appropriate or Reggio-inspired or an emergent curriculum—because we want to dismantle the ontological underpinnings which allow for the child-centered paradigms that sanction any of these practices. We are trying to do something different than critique or advocate for existing practices. Disrupting anthropocentric relationalities (and the pendulum they articulate) is our struggle.

In the education of pedagogists in Canada, we propose that to disrupt anthropocentric ontologies requires sticking close to the intertwining of developmentalism with child-centered practice. This involves following how child-centered approaches are wholly complicit in settler-colonial narratives of human progress and supremacy that create and demand sovereign and unitary human subjects. We are interested in the difficult knowledge that decentering the child represents. Often, efforts to discursively reorient conversations in early childhood education are challenged by the status-quo insistence that childhood be thought only in positive terms. To recognize their proximity to relations of centering the child (returning again to the pendulum), pedagogists need to question how the figure of the child also centers status-quo relations and structures, which cannot be addressed if we rely on language that thinks education in only positive terms. Decentering, we want to suggest, recognizes the strangeness that is already figured in representations of the child. As pedagogists enact this small step from centering to decentering through noticing the oddities of childhood, they attend to the extraordinary force of ordinary moments in education (Britzman, 2009). Foregrounding unfamiliarity, creation, and unconventionality in language also gives a sense of why this simple move of thinking beyond the positive carries such force.

Decentering the child is at first destabilizing and does not offer an easy understanding of how the pedagogist and educator are positioned within decentered pedagogical relations. For many pedagogists, relations can hardly be understood without the familiar alignment that centers the child as both object and subject of educational projects, and foregrounds the difficult work of a pedagogist in inventing ways to question and disrupt the normative child. We think this is a worthwhile project in the education of pedagogists because unsettling the normative child means contributing toward the necessary efforts to rethink who the human is while questioning what ways of being, knowing, and relating we might need to nurture pedagogically so that we can better respond to the times in which we live (Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw, forthcoming).

Propositions for pedagogists to resist the anti-intellectualism and dictates of child developmentalism

Refusing legitimation through mastery

Developmentalism permits an ethic of mastery whereby educators can be positioned as those who have studied and gained the knowledge about children that is made visible by developmental psychology. Children, as a central object and subject (returning to the pendulum) of education, become those who are knowable through development, and development becomes a way of knowing children oriented toward (educators’) expertise. Part and parcel of the humanism project of which it is a part, developmentalism centers the child as a subject to be shaped through the application of the developmental knowledge that an educator has mastered. This orientation toward mastery—toward knowledge as an entity to be grasped, collected, comprehended, and applied in a particular way—both sustains and is sustained by centering the child through developmental paradigms. This inheritance of mastery involves wanting to collect knowledge in the name of progress, proficiency, and efficiency. This mastery, we want to argue, is especially forceful in the early childhood education contexts that pedagogists inherit because of the presence of child-centered and developmental approaches. In these approaches, to be a master is to be a legitimate educator in the eyes of neoliberal education systems. Legitimacy and perceptibility come through an individual educator amassing a validated quantity of applicable knowledge. Amid ongoing politics that devalue the work of female labor in early childhood education, we understand and empathize with the energy of individual educators to seek mastery and legitimacy. Proving expertise in a neoliberal system is a way of building the stature of the profession (Arndt et al., 2018; Langford, 2007). In our work with pedagogists, we make a different move amid these politics of legitimacy: we want to study and dismantle the desire for knowledge as something to collect, extract, and apply to prove legitimacy. We want, with pedagogists, to notice a world where humanist mastery crumbles in the face of immense complexity. Most urgently, we want to resist the ontological and epistemic configurations that allow for the legitimation of pedagogical thinking through performing mastery. We want to create practices that pay attention to the illusion of mastery and control. These are practices that understand thinking as relational and contaminating, as what emerges from aporetic impasses (Vintimilla, 2012)—practices, we argue, that force pedagogists to think not as a repetition of what is already known, but as a creative force (Vintimilla and Kind, forthcoming).

Pedagogists often come to our projects with a desire to become the “correct” kind of pedagogist. The pull to become an expert in the study of pedagogy is strong, and we sense this both personally and from the institutions of which pedagogists are part. Proving legitimacy is enacted by requiring that pedagogists demonstrate the progressive value of their work by naming how it improves quality, the curriculum, practice standards, and institutional identity as leading edge. We think that it is our ethical responsibility to trouble these demands for naming and elucidating the quantifiable outcomes of a pedagogist’s work. We trace such demands to the neoliberal logics they serve (often represented by the concept of professional development) and point to how they are anathema to pedagogical work and the educational practice of the pedagogist. These conversations are crucial as we continue to create the ethos for and of pedagogist work. We make no promises in the name of humanist dictates of progress and advancement. Instead, we question with pedagogists the structures which demand that pedagogy becomes a question of mastery. We think with multiple education scholars who argue against practices of mastery and expertise, and offer propositions of dissensus (Biesta and Safstrom, 2011; Vintimilla, 2018), of “making the familiar strange” (Osgood, 2015: 157; see also Vintimilla, 2012), of appreciating multiple representations (Bloch, 2013), of creating “possibilities for local knowledge and local action” (Dahlberg et al., 2006: 17), of contributing to “an ever-growing plurality” (Di Paolantonio, 2014: 12), and of “disbelieving neoliberal logic, [so that] we can remember that there are other axes of thought, other spectrums of possibility” (Tuck, 2013: 339; original emphasis). We spend time with interdisciplinary scholars like the anthropologist Tim Ingold (2009: 193), who proposes a practice of attuning to “stories against classification,” and Alexis Shotwell (2016), a sociologist and anthropologist who argues that, in the impure, contaminated conditions of modern worlds, relations of individualist mastery are untenable.

Thinking with Taylor (2020), who weaves theories of more-than-human common worlds with early childhood education, we follow with pedagogists how the pursuit of legitimation through mastery compounds existing anthropocentric relations. Taylor (2020: 2: 341) writes with the insights of feminist science studies scholars Isabelle Stengers (2015) and Donna Haraway (2016), and proposes that we must be “wary of grandiose responses that risk perpetuating the [ecological] damage through rehearsing the myopic human exceptionalist script that the world is ours alone to act upon.” This script, as we have argued, requires the pursuit of mastery through positioning (developmental) knowledge as a commodity to acquire and apply. Concurrent to this demand for mastery, such a script also centers the child as the primary figure of education—the subject whose development must be mastered to ensure their future ability to pursue mastery. Taylor (2020: 3: 342), who writes in the particular context of responding to ecological devastation in early childhood, argues that resisting anthropocentric relations with knowledge “entail[s] recalibrating our scalar imaginaries, and refuting the narcissistic delusion that the world is our stage and we are its only major actors—regardless of whether we cast ourselves in the role of earth’s destroyers or saviours.” With pedagogists, we work to disrupt this tangle of humancentric, mastery-oriented relations with knowledge. What educational spaces might we open if we refuse to see the work of the pedagogist as an expert or master? If we resist making our pedagogical thinking perceptible to the humanist structures that require we become expert appliers of knowledge in order to be legitimate, what might the ongoing work of a pedagogist become?

Critique is not a resting place for a pedagogist. Stengers argues that:

in the ruins of our world, reclaiming ideas is remembering that ideas cannot be trusted as such, that they need to be fed, connected with something other than entrepreneurial “thuses” and “therefores,” which are always liable to turn their power into authority or into a weapon. (Stengers, 2018: 109)

We hear Stengers arguing that our relations with knowledges are activities we make ethical and political choices to nourish and weave. We are implicated in the relations with knowledges we perpetuate. The pendulum we have invoked of how the child is configured amid developmentalism will not stop oscillating until we disrupt its momentum. We are then accountable for channeling its energy elsewhere. Stengers writes:

if we have to reclaim the risky business of honouring change, the assemblages we participate in, inversely, are to become a matter of empirical and pragmatic concern about effects and consequences, not a matter of general consideration or textual dissertation. (Stengers, 2018: 107)

The effects and consequences we actively participate in, we learn from Stengers, are a mode of reinventing our relations with knowledges as we refuse mastery and legitimation. Attending to real material and lived effects and consequences, we want to suggest, both decenters the human/child (consequences are dispersed; effects do not impact only humans) and upsets mastery and legitimation (in a world concerned with attending to and being accountable for consequences, it is useless to try to become a master of constantly shapeshifting effects and consequences). Responding, being implicated, and becoming answerable for the knowledges we participate in becomes an ethic for a pedagogist.

Toward this intention, we read many disciplines with pedagogists, splintering the edges of what “counts” as educational scholarship, tracing how the borders of knowledge marked as perceptible to education are made, and grappling with how to engage unfamiliar provocations because engaging carefully with these theoretical propositions resists the configurations of mastery and perceptibility that child-centered paradigms and developmentalism enable. Reading in the name of setting the unfamiliar into motion, rather than mastering the content of a reading, is a practice we work to nourish. When questions of understanding are raised through discourses of accessibility (Is this article accessible for educators?), we tug at the work “accessibility” does to reiterate taken-for-granted humanist conceptions of mastery and legitimacy. We want to think with “accessibility” because we notice this word in the lexicon of emerging pedagogists, where it stands in for ease of understanding and where it names the practice of reading for utility: Can I digest this text in a way that lets me use it or apply it? To be accessible means to be masterable and perceptible to dominant structures. Accessibility works when we read in the name of individual mastery and of extracting knowledge to apply in order to bolster legitimacy. Accessibility centers the knowing, sovereign human subject and their particular requirements for engaging only with knowledges that contribute to their own expertise within a particular field. Accessibility as an assertion of comprehensibility envelops us with the coziness of the familiar and the easily grasped. With pedagogists, we work to resist accessibility’s practices for engaging with theoretical propositions. Far from arguing for pedagogical work that alienates people, we wonder, when people raise the question of accessibility, if what they are actually demanding is familiarity. Following Taylor, Stengers, and others, we want pedagogists to recalibrate, to flirt with new ideas, to attune to dispersed consequences, and to actively participate in activating the knowledges we engage with. What might emerge, we wonder, from collectively engaging with ideas that are sometimes difficult to understand? What does it do to our collective life to come together not based on our shared discursive understandings, but on the basis of having to figure out unfamiliar discursive practices? We want to invent relations with knowledge outside the intricate web of humanism, developmentalism, child-centeredness, mastery, legitimacy, and accessibility that we inherit in early childhood education. Together with pedagogists, we ask: How do we knit together interdisciplinary knowledges, knowing that each knowledge has a history and consequences we must answer to? When we attend to the diffuse residues of knowledges we inherit and nourish, how might we craft relations with knowledges that activate our ethical and political intentions? If we understand our reading and knowledge-making practices as pedagogical acts, what ways of reading, writing, speaking, and discussing might we invent together?

Abandoning narratives of linearity

Pedagogists often refer to our work together as a “journey.” In settler-colonial Canada, this invocation of journeying troubles us, both for its association with conquering (a journey to obtain more knowledge) and progress (a journey to obtain better knowledge) and for the linear, outcome-oriented conception of temporality it engenders. Journey, in this sense, entails for us a sequential character, one whereby, working with pedagogists in months-long courses or over years in reading groups, we will continually build toward better pedagogies. To journey is to have a present and a future. It requires that a pedagogist marks a beginning to their work, a severing from “before” and a capstone, an investment, in an “after.” To journey is also to be a journeying body—a sovereign, unitary human on a pathway toward something. We know well that the heroic human subject is the protagonist in tales of journeying. Seeing pedagogical collaboration as a journey requires that we ask the questions that narratives of progress want: What is next? How can I build on this learning? What skills and knowledge will I gain through our work? These questions demand outcomes. They look forward to a better future that we pave a clear pathway to. In our work, we want to build, with pedagogists, imaginaries of time that are not so easy, not so humanist, not so apolitical.

To see pedagogical work as a journey is, we argue, a non-innocent appeal to a settler-colonial notion of temporality. Rifkin (2017: viii) contends that attention to the “principles, procedures, inclinations, and orientations that constitute settler time as a particular way of narrating, conceptualizing, and experiencing temporality” is a practice for interrogating how temporality is made to perpetuate particular relations amid ongoing settler colonialism. Linear conceptions of time unfurl a particular set of relational configurations that sustain and are sustained by this “settler time.” Such a linearity allows us to think sequentially (as developmentalism asks), to see the past as over and done, and to look toward the future for possibilities. Shotwell (2016) links this linear conception of time to forgetting: to have a past is to be able to dismiss what has already happened in the name of progress. Shotwell (2016) argues that “political forgetting names an epistemology (a way of knowing) and an ontology (a way of being). Epistemologically, forgetting is a core piece of colonial practice” (37). Grounding her work in ongoing settler colonialism in Canada, she asserts that “a central feature of white settler colonial subjectivity is forgetting; we live whiteness in part as active ignorance and forgetting” (37). We notice that, in early childhood education, this forgetting is perpetuated by wanting to keep everything within an eternal present. This presentism is cultivated through, for example, a constant focus on the meaning children make, rather than noticing what memories past child-centered meaning-making needs to relate. Presentism is centered too when focusing only on what the child says today, rather than keeping material traces of the collective becoming that is taking place within a classroom. In pedagogists’ learning, this emphasis on severing the present from histories—what Shotwell (2016) names as forgetting—becomes enacted when pedagogists believe that education is an apolitical endeavor. We forget, for example, the violent ongoing histories of colonial violence that education as an institution perpetuates in what is currently known as Canada (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015). When temporality is a profoundly linear construction—what Rifkin (2017: vii) calls “dominant settler reckonings of time”—a Euro-Western settler-colonial relationality that emphasizes the human is held intact by a temporal configuration that centers at-present human relationships as the measure against which time unfolds, and allows for narratives of human progress that permit a clean delineation between past and present.

Following Shotwell (2016), linear conceptions of time serve the ongoing violence of settler colonialism because they facilitate the “easy” erasure of colonial genocide by people in power. Such a conception of time allows for white settlers to sever a past they were not alive for from a future they feel should be absolved from the actions of their ancestors—actions that endow them with systemic privilege in the current day. Shotwell asks:

How can we tell the full complexity of this narrative in a way that foregrounds the needs and interests of people most affected by vectors of oppression and vulnerability—without reinscribing the very categories delimiting purity and impurity that were deployed to organize this form of colonization[?] (Shotwell, 2016: 39)

The second half of this question is of utmost concern to us as we think with pedagogists about decentering the child: How can we dismantle real colonial structures and their lived material violence without recreating the anthropocentric grounds on which colonialism operates? Shotwell aims

for a kind of settler politics of memory that does not try to stand outside the past in all its horror, that does not individualize the possible responses to how we are implicated in that past, and that opens possibilities for collective action. (Shotwell, 2016: 46)

To activate the kind of responses she imagines requires a temporal attention which knows that colonial histories are ongoing and that pedagogy is implicated in settler-colonial violence. Such responses, we argue, require resisting both sides of the journey narrative. They require that we resist habits of individual subjects seeking control and commodity in the name of progress, and the severing of past from present entailed in pedagogical work having a beginning and an end. Accordingly, we offer to pedagogists the proposition that our work together is concerned with temporal relations and questions of memory. We propose that our connections with time are not innocent, not natural; they are made in everyday movements. We decline to offer a completed syllabus that outlines an exact trajectory for becoming a pedagogist. We resist thinking of our work in terms of projected outcomes, focusing instead on weaving ideas together week to week. We think together about what temporalities pedagogy demands of us: What forgetting and remembering do our pedagogical relations demand? How do we weave together pasts that are not over with futures that are not just to come as we collectively orient toward more livable futures? What do we do with our particular pedagogical inheritances, knowing that an inheritance is neither deterministic nor forgettable?

To further our thinking with time, we make links with pedagogists to the linear temporality that developmentalism invokes. Developmental trajectories bracket time in a way that locates children in the future as productive citizens and in the present as humans-in-progress. This is a colonial time, a Euro-Western configuration that makes staunch divisions between past, present, and future in order to protect the sovereignty of human agents making decisions toward control and mastery in a present that prepares for a better future. This linearity is grounded in succession, where each skill a child develops or each moment of learning builds on the next, eventually delivering an adult who is well trained in subjectivities of productivity and mastery. As Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kummen (2016) detail, this linear temporality trickles into everyday practices in early childhood education, where clock time governs routines and bodies. Linear conceptions of time, then, are allies to developmentalism; they are both formed by and pivot around developmentalism’s humanist subjects. With pedagogists, we forward the proposition that decentering the child while disrupting developmentalism requires letting go of linear time. To decenter the child is to decenter the human referent around which time operates—temporalities, in multispecies entanglements, do not obey the colonial structures of linear time (Kummen, 2019). We think together with pedagogists about what is required of us to think about our relations with children who live in a present that is imbued with a past and threaded with the energies of a future we are implicated in co-shaping. If we subtract ourselves from the predictably linear and sequential demands of developmentalism, what trajectories might we open up for thinking pedagogically? When pedagogists refuse the status-quo narrative of children as adults- or citizens-to-be, how do we answer to a present enmeshed in ongoing colonial legacies that create inequities which our pedagogies must both respond to and generate an alternative future with?

Relating within propositions toward decentering the child

As we draw together the threads of this article, we want to underscore that we see the ongoing and collective work of dismantling the pendulum of child-centered relations—and the anti-intellectualism it supports—as a project that is wholly knotted with tentative, speculative experiments in proposing an education for pedagogists in Canada. Our intention has been to disrupt anthropocentric relations in all their patterns. We do not want decentering the child to take on the character of a dictate or mantra, or for our two propositions to be adopted as practices to be applied to implement pedagogist training. We thoroughly believe that we have an ethical and political obligation to propose possibilities for reinventing relations which do not reproduce the relational logics that bolster humanism. We want to participate in relations that both refuse and open up alternative movements to mastery, human supremacy, progress, and control; we aspire to participate in relations that might liberate early childhood education from its long-standing conceptual constraints. Having analyzed what we envision as an inherited pendulum of child-centered practice that positions the child as both the hyper-capable subject and adult-dominated object of educational encounters, and then tracking this pendulum through to its alliances with child development, we launched our discussion from amid the mess of two of the most enduring accomplishments of humanism in early childhood education in Canada: child-centered practice and developmentalism. It is within this highly political space that we begin our collaborations with pedagogists, and it is also where we figure out what our propositions toward decentering the child might open up in the particular contexts where we activate them. We offer refusing legitimation through mastery and abandoning narratives of linearity as two lived, situated proposals that intervene in the logics that both underpin and are made by centering the child. These propositions are concerned with reinventing the relational commons we participate in within pedagogists’ learning, and thus they take form only alongside local collectives that are also invested in decentering the child and the human. Our conclusion is accordingly non-triumphant. We see multiple tunnels into the massive project of decentering the child and resisting anti-intellectualism in supporting emerging pedagogists. We hold the dearth of relations allowed by anthropocentrism as an urgent call to reconfigure the relational commons of early childhood education as we work to respond well, with pedagogists, to the complexities of childhoods and of education in 21st-century Canada.