(Un)finding childhoods in citational practices with postdevelopmental pedagogies

Abstract

Taking up the contention that child development manifests through the developmental logics it enacts, the authors work with citational practices as iterations of how developmentalism's logics are done in everyday practices in early childhood and teacher education. They work with Erica Burman's method of ‘found childhood’ to propose citational practices as artefacts of found childhood – as traces of how childhood happens in contemporary life and as an indicator of the dominant knowledges and knowledge-making practices that animate 21st-century childhoods. With disciplining and failure as moments of citational practices, the authors follow how practices of citing do and do not do developmental logics. In dialogue with postdevelopmental pedagogies, they wonder how one might cite into otherwise futures beyond the certainty and temporalities dictated by child development. The authors refuse the progress-oriented logics of child development and do not articulate new ‘best’ practices for citing, but instead write through provocations that might take up questions of world-making, pedagogy and life in line with the propositions offered by postdevelopmental pedagogies.

Child development is not just about children developing.

We – instructors of emerging educators and teachers – find ourselves articulating this imperfect contention amid the ethico-political layers of our work with pre-service students. It is from our assertion that child development matters for the knowledges and relations it makes possible that this article launches, as we take one iteration of child development as a manifestation of found childhood (as per Burman, 2019, 2022). As we assert that citational practices are enacted as a type of found childhood where developmentalism matters as a skeleton that coheres quotidian childhood, this article traces how developmentalism comes to matter as more than simply a frame for following a child's growth and, rather, coagulates in dialogue with different pedagogical intentions and commitments.

We nod when students mount compelling arguments about the need for cross-cultural developmental frameworks when working with immigrant, migrant or newcomer families, or for centring Indigenous knowledges of children's growth journeys when working with local Indigenous communities. At the same time, we try to cultivate a scepticism and possible disruption toward how Eurocentric child development theories lurk or disguise themselves within many developmental approaches. Pre-service students bring vital tensions to our conversations, as they wonder if it is the notion of children on a growth trajectory that needs contestation, when it seems like a reality that children do shift their identities, relations, activities and worlds over time. We take seriously the temporal character of childhood but wonder if, together, we might suspend the inherited conception of a child as an adult-to-come where the times of childhood are deferred into the future of a successful adult. Far from sharing an elegant, unshakable argument, we stumble through proposing that it is not only that the outcomes or concepts inherent to developmental psychology deserve scrutiny for their role in ongoing settler colonialism and concurrent structures of violence, bias and minoritization, but also that the logics and knowledges that cohere child development together are themselves rooted in maintaining existing systems of neo-liberal governance and status-quo images of childhood, education, intervention and citizenship. This distinction between outcomes and logics too is imperfect, and we backtrack as we teach, reminding our students and ourselves that the consequences of development are intimately entangled with the epistemic and ontological formations that allow development to be consequential, and these developmental consequences constantly circle back, reiterating the urgency of the knowledges that make them possible.

Child development, as a knowledge for formalizing childhood, has a forceful influence in early childhood education in Canada, building on long-worshiped foundational contentions like constructivism and childhood innocence to gain hold in licensing documents and guide student–mentor dynamics that cement developmentalism as an interpretative frame that dictates possibilities for status-quo practice (Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020). As we sit in the mess of contesting developmentalism, we ask: What if our interruptive practices require tracing both the universalized, regulatory corollaries made of child development and the epistemological terrain that holds these developmental residues together? What if we do not conceptualize our confrontations with developmentalism through the frame of hierarchy, where we must unsettle a knowledge before interjecting in a practice or where we must implode a practice to show the fallacy of its knowledges? What becomes of developmentalism's offspring – normalization, growth percentile charts, constructions of health, language, literacy, stories and school readiness, and, as we will argue, citational practices – and their affinities with ongoing settler colonialism in the absence of child development's epistemic inevitability?

These questions and tensions animate our thinking collectively with students because we want to create space for thinking about developmental logics: What are developmental knowledges? How do we notice them? How do we reproduce them in face-to-face practices with children and in our practices that surround childhoods? We want to push ourselves and our students to think beyond child development practices, and learn to attend to the logics of child development and how these logics sneak their way through many of the practices we participate in as we think pedagogy and curriculum with children. In this article, our core intention is to centre the logics of child development, asking how we reproduce and agitate these logics through one everyday practice in early childhood education: citational practices. Following Burman’s (2022) practice of ‘found childhood’ as a method for encountering with pedagogy the minor ‘objects’ and processes that give form to childhood as an ethical, political, material and temporal formation, we position citational practices as ‘found’ manifestations of childhood. We begin by tracing what we mean by ‘citational practices’, then read citational and found childhoods as method, think citational practices alongside postdevelopmental pedagogies, and conclude by emphasizing the work of doing citational practices otherwise and in dialogue with child development. We follow how two dominant citational practices – failure and disciplinarity – reproduce developmental logics. We then work to rock these status-quo citational practices, asking how we might recreate citational practices with propositions that nourish postdevelopmental pedagogies. To conclude, we ask what we might craft with postdevelopmental pedagogies in the wake of standing on the shoulders of (child development) giants . What is it that we do when we stand in our pedagogical citational practices? What stands, and how can our citational practices build, reciprocate, care with and tumble under? What does this open for thinking citational practices with postdevelopmental pedagogies?

Thinking citational practices

At their simplest, citational practices that involve our ‘techniques of selection’ (Ahmed, 2013) name the ethics, politics and practicalities we inherit and invent as we think in the company of others – be they scholars, community members, children, poets, artists or policy documents. How we allude to, present, specify, evidence and rehearse our relations with different knowledges in different spaces becomes knowable as our citational practices. These are both personal and disciplinary, where the vernacular and power hierarchies of a body of knowledge or knowledge of a body dictate possibilities for how we might cite and what we might cite into. We understand citational practices to be the ethical and political relations we build with varied knowledges that we do and do not choose to cite (To cite = To presence? To acknowledge? To believe? To refute? To share gratitude?), and how different knowledges demand different relations of citation because citational practice is not just a technical act (‘I need to cite the right scholar or concept to prove validity’) but also an intensely pedagogical one (‘If I engage this knowledge this way now, here, what conditions might we create toward living well together?’).

Ahmed (2013) argues that citational practices are a question of who we presence and how we do this presencing in our everyday relations in the academy and beyond:

[With] ‘who appears?’ we are asked a question about how spaces are occupied by certain bodies who get so used to their occupation that they don't even notice it. They are comfortable, like a body that sinks into a chair that has received its shape over time. To question who appears is to become the cause of discomfort. It is almost as if we have a duty not to notice who turns up and who doesn't. Just noticing can get in the way of an occupation of space. (9)

Taking citational practices as a question of ‘Who appears (and how)?’ in early childhood education is to notice our citational trajectories beyond the terminus that we know them through. What structures, erasures, contentions and silences lie behind a particular concept or practice? Who appears in this inherited curriculum approach? How do we attune to citational politics in less ‘obvious’ practices beyond literally naming a reference in a document? These are questions that ask more of us than simply taking attendance based on identity politics or critically reflecting on who we choose to think alongside and why. ‘Who appears?’ is a pedagogical question – one concerned with how citational practices respond to the messy work of figuring out how to live well together. Ahmed (2017: 16) echoes this, contending that ‘citation is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow’. Citational practices, then, are about world-making; they are about the relations and practices we create as we engage with multiple situated forms of knowledges in conversation with the specificities of our own pedagogical contexts and commitments. Speaking of academic citation practices in particular, Tuck et al. (2015) ask: ‘who do you choose to link and re-circulate in your work? Who gets erased? Who should you stop citing?’ Citational practices turn toward pedagogies when we take questions of circulation, erasure and refusal as ethical and political responses to pedagogy's push for ongoingness through emphasizing the ethic of want (Land et al., 2020): we want to keep asking who and what we give air to; we want to keep noticing and presencing against macro and minute erasures; we want to constantly ask how we need to stop citing, who we need to enter into citational relation with, and how to cite well – with care, accountability and reciprocity in contemporary times.

McKittrick (2021: 22), writing on citational politics amid – and as a subversion of – ongoing settler colonialism and pervasive white supremacy, asks: ‘do we unlearn whom we do not cite?’ Thinking with McKittrick, we take seriously that child development haunts our curriculum and classrooms. We are in an enduring citational relationship with developmentalism where to cite can be not only to reproduce or refute, but also to immerse child development and its histories, inheritances and consequences in unfamiliar relations with pedagogies that are concerned with answerability and accountability. In this article, we trace how our citational practices are entangled with child development in multiple iterations, focusing most on following how developmental logics shape our citational practices. Thinking with postdevelopmental pedagogies, we then work at complexifying these, imagining what we might open toward when doing citations as a practice of wanting to activate everyday, humble postdevelopmental pedagogies. How, we ask, might doing citing with postdevelopmental pedagogies become a practice that refuses to allow the complacent citational clout and the stodgy reproductive citational practices rooted in the replicative developmental logics that developmentalism currently preserves in early childhood education?

Citational practices and ‘found childhood’ as method

Burman (2022) builds a conception of ‘found childhood’ as a sister project to ‘child as method’. To understand the links we weave between found childhood and citational practices, we need to initiate our thinking by following the conceptual underpinnings of found childhoods, beginning with child as method. Building on the work of post-colonial scholars, Burman (2022) positions child as method as an active framework for tracing how childhood ‘becomes understood not as a singular monolithic entity (to be saved, restored, protected, etc.), but rather produces as and through multiple and unstable sets of practices whose forms and interpretation are therefore diverse and contested’ (274). For Burman (2019), child as method moves beyond an ethic of critique where we might analyse the rhythms of childhood, such as child development, for their multifaceted consequences and then pose a solution. Instead, child as method calls us to pay attention to the

necessary intersection between the political economy of childhood and geopolitical dynamics, alongside how such local and global relations must figure as part of a postcolonial, antipatriarchal, anti-capitalist project, and in which children figure as more than policy or theory tropes. (6)

To think child development with child as method is to tend to the ethics, politics, erasures, silences and possibilities of manifesting childhood amid a world where child development exists. It is a project, as Burman contends, of ‘not only acknowledging flows of knowledge with power, but also highlighting the multiple origins and complex, contradictory currents that inform such practices’ (11). Doing child as method becomes a practice of tending to the real, lived tangles of childhood and development amid worldly colonial and state flows while refusing the abstractions that child development often imposes on childhood (Burman, 2008). As we turn now toward arguing that current citational practices are a form of found childhood that is grounded in child development's logics, we position our engagement with citational practices as one made in the mess and precarities of continually turning ourselves toward the lived systemic conditions created within these colonial and state flows. We do so, while paying attention to the subjectivities, affects, inheritances, and possible and impossible configurations of childhood . In our engagement, we ask: How does child development, as a discipline, impose structural conditions for knowing (finding) childhood and what engagements with citational practices might we need to attend to in early education for more just futures?

Crucial to this engagement of citational practices and their developmental logics as ‘found childhoods’ is Burman’s (2022: 273) assertion that ‘a further conceptual and methodological intervention mobilized by found childhood is the reminder that we do not only need to study children to know about childhood. Rather, modes of childhood proliferate abundantly everywhere, if we notice them’. Citational practices are manifestations of found childhood because they directly shape our relations with various (non-innocent, always imperfect) knowledges, and these knowledges create possibilities and impossibilities for childhoods and for children's lives. We quite literally enliven and erase childhoods based on with whom, how, why and with what pedagogies (and worlds) we do citational practices, be these citational practices directly citing child development literature or citational entanglements grounded in or in denial of developmental logics. This is especially true in the context of interrogating how citational practices perpetuate the logics of child development: citing with the certainty, status, violences and spurious interpretative validity assumed by developmental psychology shapes childhoods differently than doing citational practices with speculation (Ashton, 2020), refusal (Nxumalo, 2021b), anti-colonial futurities (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013) and in the collapse of child development's image of the romanticized, apolitical child (Garlen, 2021; Nxumalo et al., 2018; Templeton and Cheruvu, 2020). Burman (2022: 274) continues: ‘[found childhood] identifies childhood as both constitutive of, and as a critical practice of reading and critically reflecting upon, such sociomaterial practices’. In this sense, citational practices are material manifestations of ‘found childhood’ on two fronts. First, citational practices in education and childhood studies often traffic in child development. Put differently, we are often citing child development – be it directly and affirmatively, with critique, or in a refusal to so overtly presence developmentalism's content and contexts. Second, through our citational practices, we materialize developmental logics. We find citational practices in peer-reviewed literature and pedagogical documentation, but citational practices are also found in our discussions, disagreements, modes of attending, habits of ignoring, relations with materials, everyday decisions, drawings, reflections, lexicons, histories, loyalties to scholars and ideas, and engagements on Twitter, blogs and other social media – all found filaments of the possibilities and impossibilities for childhood that we make real and answer to.

In this article, we speak to failure and discipline as developmental logics that we build our own citational practices with, but a multitude of other developmental logics, such as universalizing, repetition, productivity, scalability and generalizing, often thread through status-quo citational practices. We cite, for example, with repetition when we reference well-cited articles because a citation count becomes a measure of gravity. Productivity means that we cite ourselves, showing how our own prolific work builds on an existing foundation and makes a meaningful (citeable?) contribution. In what follows, we get to know citational practices as consequential bits of found childhoods, whereby our citational accountabilities shape childhoods in a very real, tangible, lived way, especially if we follow how citational practices as found childhoods mirror and rattle child development – where a return to interrogating child development answers to a common thread throughout Burman’s (2008, 2018, 2019, 2022) scholarship, which we work to activate here.

Citational practices and postdevelopmental pedagogies

A pivotal point that we will return to throughout our thinking with citational practices is that we are interested in rethinking how developmental logics populate citational practices while thinking with postdevelopmental pedagogies (Blaise, 2014; Murris et al., 2020; Vintimilla et al., 2021). Our orientation is pedagogical, not punitive. It is not our contention that we need to cite less developmental psychology, but that we need to trace how our citational practices themselves reiterate developmental knowledges. Our struggles in thinking developmental logics with students, outlined at the beginning of this article, are about pedagogies and not critical analysis or policing ‘better’ ways to cite in childhood studies. This echoes our use of citations as a trace of found childhoods because, as Burman (2019: 9) writes, ‘identifying an instance of found childhood reflects as much about the mental and physical state of the recorder (or practitioner) as the space/place it is found’. Importantly, this attention to how we are embroiled in our work of thinking with citational practices leans into our own commitments toward thinking with postdevelopmental pedagogies.

Resisting the universalizing, human-centred, technocratic, individualizing, and often violent logics and consequences of child development, scholars, educators and artists who think with postdevelopmental pedagogies nurture relations, conditions, exposures and entanglements that demand situated, humble responses (countering the grandiose, confident best practices produced by developmentalism; Nxumalo, 2021a; Rooney et al., 2021; Taylor, 2020; Woods et al., 2018). While postdevelopmental pedagogies do unapologetically resist the quotidian moves of development, they do not position themselves as a direct foil to developmentalism because their project is different than refuting or scolding. As Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2020: 631) illustrate, ‘pedagogical thought is reinvigorated as it transforms educational practice … This is why pedagogy tries to unsettle practice to find (and sometimes even liberate) its creative force’. What is inventive about postdevelopmental pedagogies is their uncertainty, not in a relativist vein, but as a process concerned with ‘reinventing the relational commons we participate in’ (Land et al., 2020: 118). Postdevelopmental pedagogies ask us to dwell in the uncertain spaces opened when dominant narratives in education – like child development – are not afforded the power they assume and when the everyday configurations made by child development – like centring the child, legitimation through mastery and trust in linearity (Land et al., 2020) – fail into otherwise futures. As we take citational practices as a happening of found childhood and trace how citational practices tangle with developmental logics, our engagement with postdevelopmental pedagogies is oriented toward this uncertainty. Because we are not seeking better citational practices, what we want is to pull citational practices into an ever shapeshifting postdevelopmental lexicon of composition, co-labouring (Vintimilla and Berger, 2019) and choreographing (Pollitt et al., 2021). As we ask questions of citations as a practice in found childhoods where to confront childhood is to burrow into its developmental tentacles, we are doing so as a gesture toward postdevelopmental pedagogies that sustain the unanswerability of slippery educational questions, where ‘it is within this void that pedagogy thinks early childhood education, not as a predetermined project but through open questions, such as: What is education? What are education's purposes?’ (Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020: 635). These are the living propositions we carry with us as we engage citational practices.

Another gesture we stumble over and return to in our teaching is firmly avoiding drawing too easy a binary between developmental and postdevelopmental pedagogies. Binary logic is, after all, best friends with child development: reaching milestones/falling behind, behaving/misbehaving, progress/failure. We want to enliven postdevelopmental pedagogies as a provocation toward unsettling the logics and practices of child development in the name of inventing modest, speculative, responsive pedagogies that are rich in questions of how we might live well together (Vintimilla, 2018). We see neither developmental nor postdevelopmental pedagogies as confessing loyalty to a team, where one is forever labelled progressive and the other regressive, or one practical and the other abstract; this diagnostic expert/parent, child-led/pre-planned or good child/bad child (or educator) logic is an intrepid thread of child development. In what follows in this article, we work with developmental and postdevelopmental knowledges. We do, at times, draw lines between the two. These faults, we need to emphasize, do the work of marking out a difference but do not wholly sever one bundle of knowledges from another. We take seriously that in thinking with postdevelopmental pedagogies, we do not know what will become of collisions of developmentalism and pedagogy because

our work is nourished by the possibility of participating in just commons. However, we do not pretend or aspire to already know what livable commons require, or how to work at such a project. Therefore, we keep the question of commons open. (Vintimilla et al., 2021: 7)

We ask the reader to keep reminding themselves of this: we are trafficking in entanglements and mess, not simplicity and condemnation. If you catch us riding too easy a break, we hope you will be momentarily distrustful and follow us as we return to the pedagogical grapplings we learn from postdevelopmental pedagogies – situatedness (Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015), contamination (Shotwell, 2016), collectivity (Hernández et al., 2021; Vintimilla, 2020), humility (Taylor, 2017) and careful invention (Loveless, 2019; Stengers, 2010) – all in the context of our settler accountabilities amid ongoing settler colonialism (Todd, 2016). When we play with citational practices, our ‘careful’ of ‘careful invention’ is in dialogue with McKittrick’s (2021; thinking with Sylvia Wynter) and Christine Sharpe’s (2016) writing of how the intricacies and possibilities of Black life require that inventiveness within existing colonial and neo-liberal institutions stutters, where ‘to reckon with the fact that the archive, too, is invention’ (Sharpe, 2016: 51), and tracing the elasticity of citational practices is to recognize that both the stretch and the snap of citational practices are implicated in neocolonialisms. We think citations too with our reading of Tuck’s (2009) call toward involution in the face of damage-centred narratives of Indigenous communities, knowing that, in the context of this article, we hear a call for settlers to navigate academic spaces toward shrinking the citational clout imbued to epistemic trajectories that advance settler futurities (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013).

We turn now to thinking with two dominant citational practices: discipline and failure.

Discipline/disciplining

Treating citational practices as a manifestation of found childhood, we note how citational practices discipline childhood. Citational practices draw and are drawn by lines that mark the insides and outsides of knowledges relevant to childhood; the exclusions and inclusions relevant to childhood are named by the citational practices that make and are made by these exclusions and inclusions. These exclusions and inclusions are borders, where the borders are in dialogue with legitimacy, veracity and expertise toward maintaining the disciplinary hierarchies that thrive because of these borders. Take child development itself: the first Google Scholar result for ‘child development’ has been cited nearly 4800 times. This book, in the discipline of child development, has been directly used to reiterate child development's explanatory and technocratic power 4800 times and has, at the same time, gained 4800 endorsements of its epistemic influence. In this way, citational practices both discipline and do the discipline of childhood(s). Consider the bracket of a citation itself as a relic of childhood: childhood (Vygotsky, 1920s), childhood (constructivism, 1900s), childhood (growth and height percentile charts, 1970s), childhood (not adulthood, 1990), childhood (‘war on terror’, 2001), childhood (postdevelopmental, 2020). These brackets and the distinction they draw between childhood and the stuff that makes childhood are epistemic structures. We have been taught to read them hierarchically and descriptively, where the concept under question is sedimented and legitimized by the content of a citation. This echoes the explanatory logic of child development, where each moment of a child's life is made meaningful through a citation: friendship (belonging, 9 a.m.), running (physical development, 10 a.m.), mealtime (nutrition curriculum, noon). This ‘moment’ and ‘knowledge’ correlation is echoed in citational practices, which concurrently sediment this iterative, already perceptible rhythm of life-making as a valid, rigorous, meaningful practice. In this way, citational practices as a manifestation of found childhood reiterate the patterns of knowledge-making that we know well, where a moment is justified by an already perceptible or validated knowledge and the brackets of a citation literally and figuratively bracket the explanatory power of this knowledge.

Writing of postdevelopmental practices, Murris et al. (2021) follow this well-worn iteration of knowledge, arguing that, in early childhood education, ‘divorced from a temporal, spatial, and sensing body, the western knowing (adult) human subject makes knowledge claims about the world through the mind (ideas or mental states) or brain (transmission of nerve cells)’ (398). This adult-mediated validation of knowledge relies on the ‘binary’ (1:1, them/us, event/fact) moment–justification–knowledge rhythm outlined with dominant citational practices, where, as Murris et al. continue, ‘Enlightenment, anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism have territorialized and set boundaries to what can and cannot be known, and who is doing the knowing (the human)’ (398). Citational practice as a relic of found childhood, then, rests in the outline of humanist knowledge structures – as does child development through its profound loyalty to perpetuating the project of the neo-liberal human. This is important because it means that the logics of developmentalism reinscribed through/with normative citational practices, as outlined above, are deeply political – wholly invested in maintaining existing knowledge systems that centre anthropocentrism, rationalism, positivism and the pursuit of knowledge as a noble, individualized pursuit. This politic is also reproductive of forms of knowledge that are already perceptible: we make what already makes sense. Such citational practices are endemic of early childhood education's – and childhood's – ‘dependency on its sources of legitimation, specifically its attachment to child development as the body of knowledge that defines the borders of what is possible and impossible to think’ (Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020: 633). For Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2020), postdevelopmental pedagogies must stubbornly intervene in this patterning of knowledge and of citation, where we cite what it is we already know, to prove valid what it is that makes sense to that know . In the face of these reproductive, binary, humanist citational structures, they propose that we might ‘invent knowledge, subjectivities, and communal forms of life’ (629), and that we need to do knowledge otherwise – to craft unfamiliar relations with knowledge-making that take as their concern questions of accountability, reciprocity and relationality instead of familiarity, hierarchy and the contention that meaning can only become meaningful through a justification. There are questions here for citational practices that, with a small twist, are also questions we want to ask of child development: How do we cite with accountability, reciprocity and relationality? How do we resist humanism’s erasures in our citational relations? How do we cite in the failures of readily familiar binary, justification-oriented forms of doing knowledge? How do we cite into worlds and do citing as speculative knowledge-making?

Citational practices, as an artefact of found childhood, also discipline the time(s) of childhood. It is a colloquial practice to date a citation, to give to a citation a time. Often, with dominant citational practices, this is a notion of colonial time grounded in sequentialism and historicity, where legitimacy is often positioned in the interval between a citation's inauguration and the moment when a citation is utilized. This is where a citation from Vygotsky (1930) assumes more clout, more validity, than one from Anyone Else (2022) – not just because of the power given to Vygotsky's theorizing in Eurocentric childhood studies, but also because we draw an assumption that the endurance of a theory is indicative of its potentialities. This is not to argue that theories do not have historical threads or that contemporary theories are inherently more subversive than aged ones. It is afterall, this linearity and an easy assumption that we clearly and decisively know the times of our citations, or the times of childhood, already . Rather, we want to name the temporal logics at play in such citational practices: linear, sequential time is a metric by which life should be measured. Time is disciplined and disciplining. Citational practices discipline our relation with time, where we not only know time primarily through calendar, yearly time but the times of our citations also dictate where these knowledges fit within projects of childhood. Is this citation of the right time? Does this citation do time in a way that is perceptible to the disciplined/disciplining childhood I am invoking? The parallels to developmental logic are robust, whereby child development is assumed to operate through the logic of young children building their life, their knowledge and their identity over cumulative time toward an end where they become perceptible – where they become capable of making a legitimized, perceptible citation within the world. We know time in segments (stages: infant, toddler, preschooler; schedules: circle time, boots and jackets, home time; eras: pre-1900s, revolution in the field, contemporary advancement), and these segments are not only disciplined (we have to keep the time) but also disciplining (we are kept on time).

How might we think citational practices as threads of found childhood if we think the rhythms, tempos and times of childhood otherwise? In a critical piece on clocking practices in the field, Pacini-Ketchabaw (2012) traces time as a mechanism of discipline, arguing that we need modes of time-making and time-keeping that stretch beyond regulation and reiteration. Drawing on this analysis, Murris and Kohan (2021: 584) argue that ‘school was turned into a chronological institution’, where the developed child was accompanied by humanist narratives of societal progress and school as a mechanism to produce ‘good’ adults ; it is this disciplining logic that we traced above – the contention that citational practices are cumulative and chronological, where time is constructed to unfold along the linear timelines already perceptible to Eurocentric constructions of temporality. Citational practices – and child development, as it matters in found childhood – posit time as the temporalities of progress, schooling how knowledge can gain stature, power and validity through the ‘clock time’ duration of sequential temporalities. We do not mean to argue for citational practices as atemporal. We hold near McKittrick’s (2021: 22) provocation – ‘do we unlearn whom we do not cite?’ – knowing that citational practices have highly consequential histories and futurities beyond development's disciplined chronicity. Agitating this, Murris and Kohan (2021: 593) ask: ‘what does it mean to listen to child(hood)? What follows when time is not universal and empty but always spatial? How is time experienced when space is not a neutral container for human movement?’. These questions of time as an ethical and political activity, where time is entangled with world-making, are paralleled by Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2020), who argue that because the conditions of our ‘times’ are so profoundly complex through their interrelation with capitalism, settler colonialism and individualism, to think time with postdevelopmental pedagogies requires that we grapple with ‘what does it mean to live well with others in the times in which we live?’ (637). These are not the times of normative citational and developmental practices of childhood, where time is known through development's ages and stages, and the sequential, chronological times this begets. Rather, with Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw,

pedagogy is interested in the creation of a life … in working at a life, becoming studious of it, being interested in its different forms and formations in what it does and what it invites and in how we become of it. We do not propose that early childhood education prepare children for life. Instead, we see early childhood education as a space for making life. (637)

Any easy linearity ascribed to development is dissolved in the urgent ethical complexities that animate our common worlds. This poses toothy questions for thinking citational practices and temporalities, especially in the context of citational practices, developmentalism and found childhoods: With what temporalities do we want to do knowledge and make worlds? How do we do citing, or childhoods, without the crutch or assumptions of sequential time – or, how might we have to come to know knowledges differently when we know them as more than only a date? What other contours, conditions, anchors and consequences might matter to doing citational practices in/with/of childhoods?

Failure

Oftentimes, pre-service education comes with a set of validating inferences about education that sneakily reinforce the purpose of education and the educator. A common practice is to ask students entering the field a question that might attend to the ethics of it all: ‘Why did you choose this profession?’ In turn, an abundance of responses might be offered about the need to protect children, making sure children all belong, and the important role and responsibility of the educator to make sure each child is successful. There is a crossing here in one's instructional practice that leads to offering up direct solutions to student concerns or desires, or might engage with everything else ‘out there’. Engaging in the prior, in its invalidating nature, enacts that challenge of coming into a space without citationally anchoring or holding onto a ‘big citational leader’ that enables quick responses to students’ desires. It requires a shift from validation practices to an openness and a possibility of failure – both in the way that citational practices reinforce our relationships with education and the ways in which they have shaped our ways of living and attending to education. Lastly, it invites the educator or instructor to resist the mastery rhetoric that is so present in anthropocentric and Euro-western scientific inquiry (Taylor, 2020). Staying with the discomfort of citational failure runs the hopeful risk of creating other possibilities or paths for working through the ruins of the formulated hyper-capitalized, neo-liberal child that is currently validated in developmental citational practices (Dahlberg et al., 2013). The importance of this risk is reiterated in Burman’s (2019) description of failure as pivotal to ‘child as method’. In order to expose normative ways, emphasized through what we are positioning as citational validations and reinforcements, Burman argues against the completion of the child as we know it, and instead encourages an incomplete view of the child that suggests childhood as a transforming, and relational epistemology. In this way, engaging with knowledge outside of a particular developmental citation can be an act of imperceptibility to both the ontological or disciplinary construction of childhood and the educational vocation itself.

More specifically, introductory development classes tend to start in a similar fashion. Why should we know development? The answer usually justifies its own discovery well, as it validates and contorts students’ entrance into pre-service education – it is development that helps us to get to know the child, to make sure that we are attending to the child's needs, and it is these needs that help us to master good pedagogy. Developmental appropriateness becomes a necessary citational tool kit for legitimizing curriculum that educators can then bring to their practice – all with the assumption that it is this citation that helps us to get to know ‘the child’ and, ultimately, education. Found childhood within child as method helps us to think instead of citational practice/method that is a ‘conceptual intervention to enable the posing of more interesting questions that better engage with the cultural-political complexities, diversities, and fluidities of children's positions and lives’ (Burman, 2018: 199). In pre-service education, we wonder with students what it might mean to engage in a careful experiment that allows us to think about questions and to think about childhood and educator practice, without prioritizing and framing developmental citation as child. What failures might emerge if development is stripped of its hierarchical priority? What is at risk, or what failures might arise, if an experience with children is planned or described without the validation of developmental appropriateness, and instead might find moments that question and notice developmental discourse? What previously lost or forgotten artefacts or citations (aesthetic or otherwise) might help us to think about engaging?

To start working through this question while resisting a direct criticality of what might be wrong with various teaching methods (developmentally informed or otherwise), it might be useful to think about the binomial construction of failure. To fail or to succeed is to be included or excluded from the normative western image of the good child, the good adult and, in the case of teaching methods, the good curriculum. Once failures are defined, in a direct response to our assertions of what it might mean to be developmentally capable and successful, it is almost impossible to attend to the complex relations mentioned by Burman (2019) above as she describes the cultural-political complexity of childhood. Examples of these small failures are present in students’ suggestions as they remark on the frustrations present in child development's assumptions of what constitutes ‘good child-rearing’. A student who has thought a lot about normative gender practices, for example, might be quick to point out the heteronormative structures that might be referenced in dramatic and social play chapters of a developmental textbook. Similarly, in practicums and placements, failure might often present itself when a student wonders why an activity was not ‘successful’, as they planned for the developmental milestone and made sure to make the activity fun and based on the children's interests. Why are the children not engaged?

These blueprints often fail us but also enable openings for thinking or speculating otherwise. When blurring the lines between failures and successes, there are openings to think of citational practices as more than just validation tools. These are entryways to think with who it is we cite and what is consequential to this particular relationship with knowledge that is rooted in neo-liberal conventions of linearity and success. In response to these conventions, perhaps, instead of asking why the children are not engaged (which, developmentally, could assume a failure of enacting Vygotsky’s (1978) zone of proximal development), we might be motivated to ask what it means to think about children's engagement. What citational relationships do we inherit as we think about engagement? What does development as a citational anchor do to engagement as we have inherited it? Or, more bluntly, why do we think that each child must be engaged in our offerings as educators? These questions move well again with McKittrick’s concern about the erasures of citation. In following this concern, McKittrick (2021: 22) continues: ‘How do we teach each other to read (disapprove, evaluate, critique, use, forget, abandon, remember) “white men” or other powerful scholars? Or is the critique (uncitation) to enact erasure?’. Attending to found childhood as an attention to failure might mean a careful noticing of the citational artefacts present in early childhood spaces that move beyond critique and forgetfulness, and arguably enact the deliberate smoothing out of citational correspondences and tensions. To question early childhood and its complex colonial and neo-liberal structures might take the careful situated work in practice of thinking with citational artefacts so as not to simply erase colonial histories or smooth out settler futurity.

Doing citational practices

We have worked with citational practices, as they matter in the early childhood education sphere, as artefacts of found childhoods that are enormously entangled with child development and its logics. The assertion that coheres this article together has been that child development matters for the worlds it makes possible and that, in taking citational practices as a limb of found childhoods that make visible how we come to know developmentalism, we can think otherwise about citing into our relations with, and without, doing development. In enacting this, we have followed how developmental logics thread through our citational practices, curating possibilities for how we can and cannot do citing, where citing is an important means for grappling with knowledge politics and shaping how ‘childhoods’ are conceptualized and unfold. It is our hope that this analysis shares with students how developmental logics in all their iterations, and their reverberations with neo-liberalism and ongoing settler colonialism, shape the epistemic contours of early childhood education and the monstrous, multilayered consequences enacted in children's lives and our pedagogical possibilities when the collective that is the field invests in, or allows to linger unquestioned, child development. We have resisted articulating anything akin to a new ‘best practice’ of citing because we want to move away from the progress-oriented, linear, solution-ogenic ways of knowing that child development so easily advances. We want to resist posing citational practices alongside a grammar of technocratic practices. What we do want to invite is a practice of attending to how the logics of child development come to matter in everyday moments and monuments of doing citations with childhood, experimenting with how thinking found childhoods might create space for imperfectly thinking with the provocations offered by postdevelopmental pedagogies. In thinking about postdevelopment as a provocation itself, we propose a consideration of how we find and unfind childhood within citation. We did not find childhood with postdevelopmental theories; we take found childhoods and citational practices as reiterative configurations that unfold alongside childhood development, where we want to tentatively pick up citing and/with development's practices amid ongoing ethics and politics, and carefully engage their situated, non-generalizable possibilities, limits and world-making specificities. We invite the reader to spend time with these unfinished processes that we are tracing, following the lines of developmentalism, citational practices and postdevelopmental pedagogies, and reading through our messy, non-chronological times.