Stop ‘under-mind-ing’ early childhood educators: Honouring subjectivity in pre-service education to build intellectual and relational capacities

Abstract

The stubborn dominance of objectivity in child observation in pre-service early childhood education warrants letting go of as we confront its limitations as outdated, problematic, Eurocentric, neo-liberal and even racist. In the context of recent aims to establish ‘critically reflective’ practices, such as ‘pedagogical documentation’ and ‘collaborative inquiry’ as the ‘new way’ to ‘do’ early childhood curriculum planning in Ontario, Canada, the authors are concerned that the hard work of naming and creating conditions to ‘think together’ with concepts of subjectivity has been missed and misunderstood. The risk of missing this shared thinking and not persevering in the struggles of subjectivities, especially in curriculum courses and placement, underestimates and ‘under-minds’ the intellectual capacity of students and positions theory as neutral in its relation to practice. How, then, does one take up subjectivity and recognize its affordance in building the intellectual and relational capacity of pre-service students? What conditions need to be created to lead with critical thinking and engage in subjectivities in the context of early childhood education pre-service programs? Drawing on critical educational perspectives, the authors work to define subjectivity in the context of early childhood education; identify the conceptual barriers that they have encountered in their work as a professor and a field liaison; and propose potentially generative conditions for pre-service programs.

In this work, we trace shifts in thinking from our own early career commitments to developmentalism towards challenging entrenched ways of knowing within ourselves and in the context of reconceptualizing pre-service education courses and placement supervision. Over time, we have identified ‘objective observation’ as a particularly stubborn ‘brick in the wall’ of early childhood pre-service education that warrants letting go of, as we confront its limitations as outdated, problematic, Eurocentric, neoliberal, and even racist (Burman, 1994; Callaghan et al., 2018; Cannella 1997; Dahlberg and Moss, 2005; Rinaldi, 2006: Waters et al. 2021). We make the case for reclaiming ‘subjectivity’ and offer an analysis of its affordances, describing what intellectual and ethical demands it offers to adult learners. Finally, we share illustrative examples of our own efforts and touchstones in co-creating conditions for intersubjectivity in pre-service courses and placements. We hope that this work contributes to an ongoing rethinking of subjectivity in reconceptualist scholarship and to systemic transformation of pre-service education, extending into the work and lives of early career educators.

Our context in Ontario, Canada, is similar to other parts of the western English-speaking world, where early childhood education (ECE) is dominated by psychological theories of child development (Cannella, 1997) and developmental frameworks like developmentally appropriate practice (Gestwicki, 1999). A ‘Continuum of Development’ was a key feature of Ontario's Early Learning for Every Child Today (ELECT) framework (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2009). However, in 2014, How Does Learning Happen? Ontario's Pedagogy for the Early Years (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014b) was introduced as an attempt to reconceptualize/re-vision ECE frameworks within Ontario through reforms that involved additional layers of practice (e.g. pedagogical documentation) or ‘pivots’ towards holistic approaches from international contexts (e.g. Reggio Emilia, Te Whāriki).¹ Yet the discourse of developmentalism, so entrenched in the profession, was not so easily dislodged. Prescriptive, formulaic approaches to ECE curriculum design persist in pre-service courses and placements, with set scripts dominating what students seem to be sanctioned to ‘see’ and ‘record’. Reproduction of the status quo and ‘not stepping on toes’ is how students describe best ‘surviving’ placement, and they admit that such performance ‘standards’ are limited and feel diminishing.

In our own journeys with the reconceptualizing ECE movement, we have come to grapple with the limitations and violence of objectivity, its ‘under-mind-ing’ of students’ intellectual capacities, and how to confront and engage with this within our collegial communities. In coming to understand how objectivity hides its colonial and racist roots, we are no longer comfortable in teaching from this paradigm, and we cannot avoid examining its legacy in curriculum courses. We focus specifically on pre-service course design and placement support in relation to planned ECE curriculum, recognizing that ECE places pre-service educators in complex, multifaceted, even contradictory roles. Our current times require us to attend and respond to racism, colonialism, imperialism and neo-liberalism in early childhood pre-service education – not just in social policy courses or in the social structures ‘outside’ of ECE, but also in the everyday work of child observation, interpretation and curriculum planning.

There are risks and fears in engaging with/in subjectivity that we continually come up against – that it can be taken as ‘anything goes’ and that we remove our legitimacy as educators by removing our expertise in child development. Over the years, we have included current scholars and critical theorists in course syllabi, moving course readings beyond the canon of developmental stages and play theory, yet we have been often cautioned not to move too quickly, not to ‘throw out the baby with the bath water’, not to move to critical theory until students have the ‘foundation’ of the ‘basic’ traditional theory. But students have challenged and called us out on this when critical theories have been taken up in a second-year course or late in a term: ‘This makes so much more sense. Why were we not given this last year?’ or ‘These readings are so much more relevant to my life; I wish I read it sooner’. Consulting with student advisory representatives and student researchers during college program review processes has also revealed students who value and are motivated by current issues and post-foundational theorists, recommending that their programs begin and continue within these frameworks – rather than assuming students need to ‘progress’ towards them.

We invite you into our ongoing collaborative project to create conditions for pre-service students to keep thinking, individually and collaboratively – to grapple with them in the contradictions in their role(s), to resist simplistic linear conceptualizations of learning and growth, and to welcome uncertainties and take intellectual risks, all the while feeling the pressure to reduce the introduction of ECE curriculum to one-off play-learning ‘activities’ designed to practise and measure discrete skills assessment/development. This continues to be a stubborn idea to disrupt – it seems to take up so much space in collective notions of how to ‘do’ ECE. How, then, do we nudge (shove?) this focus on discrete skills into the background, and foreground the processes involved in deeper collaborative inquiry and co-creating curriculum? We have been curious about the adult learning processes that have been generative in our reframing curriculum design and offer our stories as illustrative and never instrumental. We invite you into this project by (1) framing our pedagogical commitments; (2) deconstructing objectivity as ‘under-mind-ing’; and (3) creating conditions that value subjectivity.

Framing our pedagogical commitments

We have come to this discussion on subjectivity like so many ‘early years people’ by way of the multifaceted and complex histories of our own educational and professional journeys – mother, ‘day-care’ teacher, early childhood educator, field mentor, early years activist, researcher, graduate student, professor and pedagogist. We both began our careers in ECE in our youth, as early childhood educators working in childcare programs; our whole adult lives have been framed within this work. During our college education, the image of the ‘developmental child’ opened up new worlds to us, as the frameworks of our previous schooling had been dominated by authoritarian values and assumptions (i.e. spare the rod, spoil the child; corporal punishment; misogyny). The science of early childhood development and its focus on objectivity was alluring and seemed to add legitimacy to our efforts in building childcare systems that could simultaneously enable women to study and work outside the home and fulfil our own goals of a professional career.

While reconceptualist work in the field of ECE existed and continued (Bloch et al., 2018; Burman, 1994; Cannella, 1997; Dahlberg et al., 2013; Malaguzzi, 1994; Silin, 1987) even as child development assumed its dominance in ECE, it was not until graduate school that either of us encountered the thrill of these critical ideas. For Kimberly, confronting the limits of child development has been a hard and heartfelt process:

Viewing child development as a universal, linear, ‘one size fits all’ theoretical model is thought to skew our vision of human growth and development, overlooking variation and allowing dominant cultural assumptions to dictate a normal or ‘usual developmental pathway’ (Bernhard, 2002: 47). Reconceptualizing our understandings of childhood, to move away from a vision of children climbing the ‘steps and stages’ of a developmental ladder, involves multiple perspectives and a revisioning of children's developmental pathways. (Bezaire, 2009: 106)

For Lisa, making connections between the logics of developmentalism and how they shape ECE has been critical to understanding her own frustrations as an educator:

Woven into developmentalism are discourses of who is a good early childhood educator or who is not. The quotas for documentation and quality rating scales set predetermined expectations for quality, and therefore expectations for educators, in much the same way that developmental theory sets predetermined outcomes for children's growth and development. … The good ‘professional’ educator is also the one who expertly applies the theories of development to children. (Johnston, 2019: 74,75)

In our careers, we have had to confront that child development is part of our history and current systems – we cannot avoid it and neither can our students as they build their careers and teaching philosophies. We do not have that luxury. Although reconceptualism has long been influential to our work, it still is labelled as ‘new’ in challenging the status quo within the systems in which we live and work. Even as theoretical frameworks have changed/are changing, the structures and framework for training pre-service students seem cemented/sedimented. We are mindful of tensions with colleagues, university/college administration and accreditation systems, whose histories, power and structure are steeped in child development, and what implications our questioning of child development and objectivity presents. Yet the sector's commitment to the status quo in ‘traditional developmental observation’ negates real-world concerns ‘for how fairness operates (and is opposed) in the everyday social world of a children's services centre’ (Campbell and Smith, 2001: 90). When students’ academic placement success and ‘professional teaching’ rest on the one, ‘truthful’, developmental view as ‘summative of the individual’, we are miseducating and obligating them ‘to privilege and silence particular understandings’ (Campbell and Smith, 2001: 89). It is important that critical work not be relegated as an ‘add-on’ without disrupting the status quo in day-to-day curriculum planning.

We gratefully acknowledge the work and contributions of colleagues who struggle together with us in reconceptualizing pre-service curriculum to resist our patterns of ‘under-mind-ing’. Inspired by and mentored within the Canadian contexts/communities in which we live, teach and learn – namely, Toronto, Ontario, Canada (Bernhard, 2002; Langford, 2007; MacNevin and Berman, 2017; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015; Vintimilla, 2018; Vintimilla et al., 2021; Wien, 2015) – we also credit work with our colleagues and other community members in the Ontario Centre of Excellence for Early Years and Childcare, now the Pedagogist Network of Ontario (2020),² for creating a critical collaborative community that obligated us to take action in our pedagogical positions as faculty and field liaison.

We are continually reminded that our students’ lives and times are different from our own, not least because we are both English-speaking, working-class, white women with settler-colonial histories. In 2008, Canada joined the roster of more than 40 other countries in establishing a truth and reconciliation commission to address its genocidal legacy of residential schools (Ibahwoh, 2019). Of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's (2015) 94 Calls to Action, Call 12 directly implicates ECE.³ Further, the increasing diversity of students and calls to implement anti-racist curriculum demand that we confront our collusion in the objectification and ‘under-mind-ing’ of students when the curriculum is delivered as neutral (Cannella, 1997; Delpit, 2006; MacNevin and Berman, 2017; Tuck and Yang, 2012).

Thus, in coursework and placement, we are creating pedagogical conditions that begin with critical reflection and collaborative inquiry – processes that require engagement with subjectivity and a different temporality in rethinking assumptions about how adult learning happens. Thus, we have made pedagogical commitments to (1) starting pre-service students’ studies directly with critical, complex readings that address the limitations of developmental theory and (2) involving students in collaborative meaning-making practices as essential to their pre-service education and their ongoing professional practice.

Deconstructing objectivity as a stubborn ‘under-mind-ing’ ‘frenemy’

Deconstructing developmental processes of adult education has involved rethinking notions of the adult learner as ‘needing to walk before they can run’, memorizing the basics before they think with complexity, and having to ‘earn the right in upper years’ to think with complexity while denying their own experience of complex thinking. What it is actually building is a docile educator who is expected to work compliantly in their early/mid-career before they start to think/voice critically. An important part of this work is living within the tension between engaging in complex pedagogy and the pressures of technical, standardized practices. Technical approaches may, arguably, serve the regulated work and efficiency demands of educators in performing safety, cleaning and health tasks – tasks that become automatic, quick and unthinking as we perceive ourselves as becoming ‘skilled’. However, quick, automatic thinking will not serve the student well in the complexity of curriculum and relational demands in ‘real-life’ programs. Similarly, understanding the ‘trajectory of development’ may inform students in life and growth as an ongoing and adaptive process; however, ‘real-life’ co-learning with children and families is more complex, uncertain and messy than predictable trajectories and sequences (Bernhard, 2002; Cannella, 1997; Clark, 2020: MacNevin and Berman, 2017). Further, building capacities to interpret children's play explicitly through critical theoretical perspectives, for the purpose of sharing and critiquing dominant theories with classmates/colleagues, can open spaces to recognize how inequities such as racism, colonialism, ethnocentrism and sexism function in early years programs (Campbell and Smith, 2001, cited in MacNevin and Berman, 2017: 835). We assert that multiple and critical perspectives be taken up in early childhood pre-service programs from beginning to end.

Laureen Blu Waters (Elder Blu) is the Elder on campus at Seneca College, Toronto, whose many roles include working with college administrators, faculty and staff to communicate Indigenous understandings and ways of being to influence work not only with Indigenous students, but also with all students, as detailed in their article ‘Decolonizing time in post-secondary classrooms’ (Waters et al., 2021). They teach that:

We all must be a little bit more knowledgeable in everything that we do. It's not good to solely focus on one discipline because we’re limiting the opportunities to be able to make better choices. If we are giving students only one perspective, we’re not giving them an opportunity to have their learning relate to multiple ways of living and being. (Waters et al., 2021: 146)

Inspired by Elder Blu, we understand how the dominance of child development and the performative practice of objectivity limits and ‘under-minds’ students. It does not consider their intellectual capacity to engage with multiple perspectives. We also understand that we cannot simply switch from one perspective to another – objectivity for subjectivity. By taking up subjectivity as the paradigm from which we work, we seek to engage in multiple perspectives in the uncertainty and messiness that such an endeavour entails, recognizing that this has changed/will change the ways that we design courses and support students in placement.

This is not an ‘academic’ critique of objectivity, but a confrontation that objective child observation does not meet our pre-service students in the richness of their current lives/capacities, or prepare them for the complexities of their future work. The performative practice of objectivity is tenacious in ECE as a way to approximate being a ‘real professional’, a ‘real teacher’, when in fact it marginalizes the collective subjectivities that are required to ‘spark’ fulsome, meaningful curriculum. Pre-service students persist in inferring that the ultimate purpose of pedagogical processes remains the same as previous systems – to arrive at a renewed state of ‘objectivity’ – and that the purpose of pedagogical documentation is to reach a purer form of ‘truth’ or ‘consensus’. Objectivity is like a bullying frenemy, ‘under-mind-ing’ and even gaslighting us with the notion that the values, beliefs and thinking of educators are not reliable tools for interpretation and pedagogical decision-making. Our students’ perceptions are not neutral and do not come from ‘nowhere’. In course-writing and discussions, we have come to pinpoint some contradictions and mixed messages that are evident in our training programs’ and the sector's guidelines.

Within a developmental framework, students plan for what is most easily measured – the skills a child has already mastered. An activity is set out that involves neither attempts nor approximations (i.e. a zone of proximal development) but rather an easy ‘achievement’, rarely engaging either ‘co-learner’ in the process of wondering ‘How does learning happen?’. Significantly students never engage in confronting the oft-repeated cautions of how these developmental frameworks are not to be used or conceptualized – it is ‘not a lock-step, universal pattern that should be achieved according to a specific timetable, nor is it intended to be used as an assessment tool or checklist of tasks to be completed’ (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014a: 17). Yet, never clarifying for ourselves how these frameworks can be relied on for ethical, holistic, equitable curriculum and pedagogy, we feel trapped in an Escher-like staircase of relativity. The rules and laws of working with developmental frameworks ‘work’, except when they don't.

Indeed, similar to other jurisdictions globally, Ontario's early years pedagogy, How Does Learning Happen? (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014b), and Kindergarten Program (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2016) have been revised with the intent to shift to methods of ‘pedagogical documentation’ and ‘collaborative inquiry’ for curriculum and program design. This shift is grounded in processes of engaging in multiple perspectives to discern the meaning and complexity of children's learning – to engage in study and research processes as the foundation for pedagogy. Yet, despite attempts at reform and revision, the interpretive space that these documents open up continues to be dominated by the ‘basics’ of child development, where interpretation is quickly truncated by identifying the ‘right’ skill and reaching a quick consensus on how to ‘support’ that skill. The same program-planning practices persist, with set scripts dominating what students seem to be sanctioned to ‘see’ and ‘record’. Outdoor time is still valued for ‘gross motor skills’, creative activities for ‘sensory motor’ and ‘fine motor’ skills, and games for ‘co-operation’ (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014a). Students navigate placement by mimicking activities that feel ‘tried and true’ to themselves and their mentors, rarely risking new pathways or inquiries with the potential for taking up new images of children as ‘capable of complex thought … to consider a more complex view of children and the contexts in which they learn and make sense of the world around them’ (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014b: 17). The mechanisms of developmentalism – specifically objectivity – seem to switch off interpretive processes, ‘under-mind-ing’ our students before they can even begin.

In relation to our roles as faculty and field liaison, Karyn Callaghan has offered a guiding light and provocation that helped us to discern some generative intentions for change:

Our profession is ostensibly built on relationship. However, one of the first skills taught to students in most ECE programs is to be objective observers – that is, to be detached, deny emotion, describe children's ‘behaviour’ in clinical language, and see them as ‘other.’ … I have come to see this constraint as a kind of violence that is done to both educators and children. (Callaghan et al., 2018: 24)

Reading the word ‘violence’ to describe everyday child observation practices was at first shocking – a sickening feeling in the stomach that made us take notice that core personal values were being challenged by Karyn, a beloved pedagogical leader. More significantly, her co-authors are early childhood educators from our local communities, working to decolonize and indigenize within their First Nations childcare programs – implicating us to delve further and amplify. Taking this up as collaborative reading in coursework, we inquired in tandem with our pre-service students on these ideas. We were provoked further as students often chose this particular section for their Short Response Paper assignment and responded in a myriad of ways that contributed much thinking and feeling to collaborative ‘critical reflection’ discussions. That Callaghan et al. (2018) write personally, contextually and emotionally about the sorts of systemic change they value and work towards seems particularly impactful to students, ranging from those for whom the reading resonated to those for whom the reading trod on their taken-for-granted assumptions. Together, we aimed to begin and ‘linger’ with what mattered most – our/their pedagogical inquiry questions and pedagogical commitments, as emerging from our collective encounters. We experienced and observed shifts in thought, feeling and action.

Another example of objectivity's ‘under-mind-ing’ of students and educators is evident in the current provincial Practice guideline: Pedagogical practice (College of Early Childhood Educators, 2020: 24), published by the regulatory body for the ECE profession in Ontario. It warns practitioners repeatedly to uncover their own ‘values, beliefs and biases’, positioning these as problems to be neutralized rather than important to the processes of critical and intellectual thought:

How do you address your bias and beliefs in your pedagogical practice?

When considering your approach to pedagogy, think about other factors that influence your practice, including, but not limited to: your cultural beliefs, values, perceptions and biases about: children and how they learn; the role of families; your role as an educator. (College of Early Childhood Educators, 2020: 4)

We are to examine our own belief systems, then, to uncover and eradicate our ‘biases’ (subjectivities), using reflection to achieve a more contextualized form of objectivity, which is essentially flattening and undermining the thinking of educators and the purpose of education – what we have named here as ‘under-mind-ing’ students’ intellectual capacities.

Langford (2007: 342), in her influential study connecting pre-service students’ taking up of child development with being considered ‘good early childhood educators’, found that, in this process, ‘good ECE students are expected to abandon deeper cultural practices’. This is the ‘violence’ of child development and of enacting objectivity, where difference is reduced to a flattened, whitewashed version of what is acceptable in the role of an educator practising and performing ‘diversity’. It objectifies and ‘under-minds’ pre-service students, yet this way of teaching ECE is seen as neutral and ‘good’, and ‘best practice’, and reifies the white cis-gendered, feminized educator identity.

Langford’s (2007) work is grounded in feminist theory, which again students respond to with interest when taken up in coursework – but more often deem it ‘safer’ to apply such notions of gender equity to questions of children's spaces and play. That children's expression should not be limited by strict gender expectations seems a worthy, achievable goal; yet pre-service students themselves express anxiety about ‘stepping on anyone's toes’ by resisting gendered expectations of themselves, being there to politely ‘serve’ children and families. To add context for international readers, the early years workforce in Ontario is, like in many other jurisdictions, subject to lower pay and professional recognition compared to other education workers; the workforce is feminized and also racialized (Abawi, 2021). Langford and her colleagues’ (2022) ongoing work in this area is particularly accessible for pre-service education in the form of an engaging website.⁴

Our work, then, seeks to recover subjectivity from its history of being painted as untrustworthy, unreliable, invalid, unmeasurable and biased. We see subjectivity as a relational and rigorous intellectual space that summons us to attend and respond ethically to the conditions of our times in the real-life everyday moments, knowing that we can never live or work outside of our biases. Rather, we must cherish and protect the right to examine and engage them so that we may take up the ongoing work of disrupting the perpetuation of oppressive structures that are reproduced through ECE, and open up to other possibilities. Not least is the hope for our students to have fulfilling work that is sustained through lifetime careers and positions them as intellectual, creative, ethical beings, where their teaching day starts and continues with ‘good work’, as articulated by Jardine:

Good work takes time because good things are complex and demanding of us and our attention and devotion … we are struggling with a topic that is and has perennially been tough in its telling: time, the worth-whileness of learning, and how that worth is to be sought and cared for. (Jardine, 2013: 20)

Inviting subjectivity to the party – or engaging subjectivity and its affordances

How, then, do we welcome ‘subjectivity’ as an ongoing partner in our processes of interpretation, as good work, rather than showing it quickly to the door, with suspicion or disdain? What is ‘subjectivity’ and what could it mean to create conditions for sustaining and valuing its role in interpretation and making-meaning in curriculum design? As Jardine suggests, bias is part of interpretive, hermeneutic processes – such as sharing in storytelling, creating shared meaning:

Like in the making of a fabric, each person gathered experiences their own bias in and amongst and against and in concert with the bias fabric itself – and this seeming paradox (‘the bias of the fabric’/ ‘the bias of the listener’) is part of the story's hold and why we are held together. The fabric pulls each of us differently as we each pull at it from here and there, and it also holds us together at the same time. (Jardine, 2013: 2)

Jardine’s (2013) provocative metaphor of the bias in fabric echoes our stance that there is only subjectivity and that this is our starting place. When we see ourselves as part of the fabric and that our bias in the fabric is what holds us together, it brings us into closer relation with each other and helps us to notice how we are always already in relation with each other. This is much more attuned to Callaghan et al.'s (2018: 24) proposal that we need to work in ways that bring us into ‘the kind of relationship that one can have with another human being; a relationship that is curious, respectful, and aware of and questioning assumptions’. Subjectivity, then, asks us to intentionally acknowledge our subjective positions and engages us in interpretation as a valid and valuable method for co-creating curriculum with children and pre-service educators.

When coming to understand and work within a reframing of ‘subjectivity’, the explanations of Rinaldi (2006), in particular, have opened up space to think and act differently in our curriculum courses, perhaps because she discusses the concept in the context of early years programs:

In all these choices, we attempt to allow the subjectivity of each child and each teacher to emerge in relation to his or her relationships with others. And here I would like, once again, to underline the importance of this value of subjectivity in the way that we have described it. The relationship between subjectivity and intersubjectivity, in my opinion, is fundamental not only on the cognitive (and psycho-pedagogical) level, but also on the political and cultural level. I believe that this issue is vitally important for the future of humanity itself: the relationship between the individual and others, between Self and Other, is a key issue for our futures. (Rinaldi, 2006: 139)

To clarify, with Rinaldi, we do not mean that we are switching to a simplistic view of subjectivity, or that subjectivity in itself is good and that the learning that comes out of it is good. What we do know is that the kind of encounters that we are coming to value cannot happen without it. Perhaps what we value about subjectivity is that it involves implicating ourselves, and that this is a strength that allows educators to enter into the program in ethical relationality. As Rinaldi (2006) urges, this is a key issue for our/their futures, and it demands space to confront harsh realities and avoid a monolithic future.

A guiding principle now is to begin and continue with readings and assignments that have rich potential for critical reflection, challenging the status quo and demanding argumentation. Yet these readings are often viewed as ‘difficult’ or ‘hard’ by colleagues and students – they have required us to confront and rethink many of our expectations and assessment of pre-service students. As Jardine’s (2013) analysis of the Taylorization of the education system illustrates, the assumption is that the efficiency of education depends on it being broken down into smaller fragments, and that we must start with the basics before moving onto bigger concepts. This way of teaching persists in pre-service ECE, where students must first understand child development before they can move onto more difficult critical thinking, and ‘[m]atters such as “inquiry” are nothing but opulent and luxurious and unnecessary leftovers’ (Jardine, 2013: 9).

We assert again that working with subjectivity is ‘[g]ood work [that] takes time because good things are complex and demanding of us and our attention and devotion’ (Jardine, 2013: 20). In this way, we see subjectivity's potential as a rigorous interpretive tool for ECE. Vintimilla, in their ‘Encounters with a pedagogista’, documents such work with educators, which is framed by difficulty and ‘putting-into-question’ and ‘engaging in complicated conversations’:

certain encounters … were rife with possibility to explore different understandings and significations … those pedagogical encounters where intersubjectivity (between children and adults) mediates life as a relative, dialogical process arising from a pedagogy of listening (Dahlberg and Moss 2005; Rinaldi, 2006), where relation and radical dialogue take precedence over precept. (Vintimilla, 2018: 28)

Consequently, this is how we begin now from the first week of class – engaging in conceptual and challenging communication, questioning and listening.

Creating conditions that value subjectivity: thinking and questioning, together

Beginning to create conditions for thinking with subjectivity in the classroom and in field placement, then, requires creating space and time where students’ thinking, feeling, half-thoughts and questions are valued. Offering students difficult readings in their introductory courses obligates them to construct their own original responses, share them with others and listen to those constructed by others, and then sometimes co-construct a new response. The exciting, difficult ideas that pre-service students encounter in the readings often resonate with their sense of and longing for equity and justice, and a critical search for meaning. More importantly, students’ life experiences, sociocultural histories and social locations become worthy interpretive tools when framed within individual and collective critical reflection and ongoing thinking and questioning.

When students take a lead in collaborative discussions on the value of subjectivity and questioning normalized educational standards, their life stories and capacities for understanding anchor into difficult critical concepts that challenge their classmates in generative ways. For example, when assigned Bernhard's (2002) foundational work in reconceptualizing long-held definitions and applications of child development, students who connect with the ‘illustrative cases’ in the reading challenge their classmates to confront assumptions and new ways of thinking, together. Often highlighting the following excerpt, students share their own experiences of school life with a learning disability or of systemic racism within education systems (i.e. ‘real-life’ case studies are taken up in the reading). These emotional intellectual dialogues engage their classmates not only to confront their own assumptions, but also to question the assumptions of the education systems and hierarchies in which we live, learn and teach:

In any given society and historical period, there are always struggles between modes of representing the world. The results of a power struggle determine the dominant representations that are accepted as ‘truth’. This position has been defended by a number of theorists including Foucault and others. Bourdieu and Passeron pointed out that educational institutions are charged with enforcing this ‘truth’ and assessing children according to more or less arbitrary cultural standards. (Bernhard, 2002: 48)

Judith Bernhard has a way of writing and interpreting that telescopes the reader from a helicopter view of theoretical constructs and policy to zooming in on rich, detailed, emotional case studies. Seeing themselves, their classmates and their communities represented in case studies, and stretching to begin to read, talk, listen and write within post-foundational theoretical frameworks, has become a valuable course experience that frames many course structures and assignment processes.

As we strive to co-create critical collaborative communities with students in the classroom and in field placement, we draw on our experience with the Pedagogist Network of Ontario and works such as Journeys: Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Practices through Pedagogical Narration (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015: 36), which invites us to work with post-foundational theories and pedagogical narration to ‘view curriculum as an experiential, dynamic, relational process … curriculum that builds on the multiple and emergent influences of children's relationships with social and materials worlds’. An aspect of this reconceptualization that is particularly compelling for our pre-service students in their coursework has been the notion of ‘keep[ing] curriculum alive’ (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015: 129). Nxumalo illustrates pedagogical narration and interpretive processes in ‘Becoming Rapunzel’ (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015: 86–95). Through pedagogical narration, she expresses surprise, doubts, concerns and wonder at possible meanings of children's gender and racial identity construction in the context of imaginative play and arts representation. The narration begins with a sample of a child's artwork, which is simultaneously commonplace to our pre-service students (i.e. a child's self-portrait as a ‘princess’) and provokes emotion and curiosity as this biracial child has depicted themself with long blonde hair. The description and illustration of Nxumalo's processes offers clarification on how to co-create curriculum with children, rather than for children:

[An educator] engages with ideas that the children are bringing to the classroom and asks questions and develops curriculum to keep the ideas going. She creates new problems for the children, not solutions. The children don’t necessarily respond in predetermined ways. But it is precisely these unpredictable responses and turns that keep curriculum alive. (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015: 129)

When discussing this pedagogical narration in our pre-service classrooms, students have sometimes erupted into spontaneous refrains of ‘Let It Go’ (referencing the ice princess in Disney's Frozen), and musings about their own pressures for perfect images on social media. Some make connections to themselves, cousins, nieces, younger siblings; others are surprised that young children and their educators take up such deep, meaningful work together. In the beginning, the notion that the educator can have roles other than policing, supervising and directing children's ideas remains a paradigm shift for many students’ notions of curriculum as aimed at predetermined outcomes.

The educator's study processes are an essential part of the process of curriculum design and documentation. In field placement, using pedagogical narration has created conditions for thinking with subjectivity and exposed the ways that objective observation and child development are insufficient in addressing children's realities. For example, a student placed in a school-age program created some experimental curriculum plans connected to the children's intense interest in a popular character in a video game that they all played at home. However, she quickly came to realize that the game had violent subtexts that she had not initially understood (but realized that the children did, and that this was central to their interest). Rather than allow her to simply scrap or sanitize the curriculum plan, we engaged in a deeper conversation about ‘childhood innocence’. We encouraged her to write about these events as pedagogical narrations. We read together about childhood innocence and thought about how to create curriculum that responded to the children's inquiry. In creating these conditions for her to inquire, we acknowledged her anxieties and worries, and reassured her that children's interest in violence is quite human and not to be pathologized. We sanctioned and validated her curiosity about the children and the children's curiosities about violence. We shared readings, and she used her own JSTOR account to seek out readings on her own. We valued her approximations and wonderings as the work that she was being assessed on.

Noticing that what she was observing could not be sufficiently addressed by developmental frameworks, we released her from the efficiency work of the curriculum plan and made space for deeper thinking and reading. She was compelled to write her own paper on childhood innocence based on her experience and her readings and conversations. She wrote:

The ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic, the U.S. Election, Donald Trump and the Black Lives Matter movement were topics that children discussed socially. Facilitating discussions around topics such as U.S. Politics and Donald Trump, I realized my role as co-constructor by trying to understand what the children knew, what they wanted to know and what to do next. The level of complexity in the discussions, socialization and creativity brought forth by the children impressed me at first but quickly had me questioning myself as an Educator. Despite being an outspoken Feminist and obvious opposer of Donald Trump myself, I felt unsure with how to proceed with the discussions the children were having. Do I contribute to the commentary about Donald Trump? Do I engage but not put forth an opinion? How do I engage in this meaningful discussion without overstepping my bounds? I began to reflect on my practice and how perhaps the reserved practices of Educators I have worked with in the past have influenced me with the ‘we don’t talk about those kinds of things at daycare’ outlook.

This level of thinking and critical reflection could not have happened if the student had chosen to shut down the conversation, as she had witnessed by educators before. Instead, by opening up the space to engage with these difficult topics, the student was able to see that a developmental checklist did not value such difficult conversations, which are vital to children's well-being, engagement, expression and sense of belonging as citizens in their communities and in the world.

Creating conditions that value subjectivity: rethinking the rubric

To reiterate, while reconceptualized frameworks (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014b, 2016) have been helpful in reframing curriculum design processes, they have lacked an ‘unpacking’ or analysis of the inheritances of developmental frameworks and traditions of technical observation. Similarly, creating conditions in the pre-service classroom to reposition educators as ‘co-learners’ who engage in ‘critical reflection’ and ‘collaborative inquiry’ has involved us unlearning taken-for-granted practices in our approaches to post-secondary education, and challenged us to create conditions for more intellect, questioning and collaboration, rather than compliance, summaries and consensus, in course assignments. Further, beginning pre-service coursework within these practices rather than conceptualizing them as ‘later’/‘advanced level’, and building them explicitly into class time, course assignments and rubrics, has been essential to our process.

Reconceptualizing pre-service coursework and placement means reconceptualizing our own image of adult learners and disrupting the developmental image that critical thinking somehow comes after foundational knowledge is established. This ongoing unlearning on our part is a big nut to crack. Pre-service class time has often been centred on group assignment structures that nudge/reward students towards quick, efficient consensus and summarization. How do we create conditions where intellectual risk and diversity of thought could be generated and valued instead? With colleagues within our departments and across Ontario colleges, we continually experiment and pursue course design approaches that we find generative in disrupting and challenging these assumptions towards building a different sort of learning environment. A tension that persists within this collegial work is the notion that pre-service content and concepts are ‘covered’, assuming that repetition of a concept or idea is problematic and to be avoided (i.e. ‘I cover that in my course. Please don’t cover it in yours’). We have experienced transformation in our practice when colleagues have worked together to ‘linger’ (Jardine, 2017) with concepts with students, striving for and welcoming thinking across courses in more complex, sustained ways. We have come to think of ideas and theories as ‘threads’ that we have pulled and held together, taking them up and following them – aiming to sustain and ‘keep open’ the space to think and inquire about an idea. Rather than defining ‘mastery’ of an idea culminating in knowing/application, we have reframed our assessment of students to include meaning-making – challenging them to articulate their ethical and pedagogical commitments and formulate their ongoing pedagogical questions throughout the learning process. In this way, we are creating an ethos in the classroom out of which follow our expectations for assignments and grading criteria.

We value students’ intellectual capacities instead of underestimating or ‘under-mind-ing’ their thinking or capacity to engage in difficult readings and difficult knowledge. We do this by assigning original publications and authors’ work rather than textbooks, which truncate or simplify scholarship with the aim to value and note what puzzles, challenges, confuses or prompts one to ‘think, feel, and/or act’ differently (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014b). We offer explicit instructions, demonstrations and mentoring on how to linger, puzzle over and spend time with a reading, encouraging students to take notes like a ‘researcher’ – reading a bit and writing a bit, to work through a reading methodically, pull out key quotations that challenge one's own assumptions and/or society's status quo, and begin to formulate interpretations and implications for oneself, even/especially with half-thoughts and ongoing questions.

We value and invite student engagement in building a critical, collaborative learning community together (Arcus and Andersen, 2021). In resisting the individualization of child development and its false assertions that we can ultimately know everything, we make explicit to students the following:

Your goal is not to master or be an ‘expert’ on a difficult reading. Don’t necessarily tell us what you understood easily within it. But aim for sustained ‘thinking with’ the reading and being prepared to ‘think with’ other class members in sustained ways with the reading.

We also reconceptualize what counts as text by curating and bringing in podcasts, documentaries, novels and visual artwork to foreground multiple perspectives, especially those informed by the communities in which we are working and the social locations of our students.⁵ We share these examples not to switch or promote certain techniques per se, but to illustrate our collaborative experimentation, which has emerged from encounters with each other, colleagues and, most importantly, our pre-service students. We continue the struggle, as Moss (2010: 9) draws from Dewey, noting that democracy needs ‘to be reborn in every generation, and education is the midwife’.

Designing assignment grading criteria that value, support and make explicit intellectual processes has been important, as students value transparency in assessment. Certainly, processes such as critical reflection, formulating pedagogical inquiry questions, collaborative writing/co-constructing and pedagogical documentation have long been part of our course design, but we have worked to make them live more fully and explicitly in course descriptions, outcomes and grading criteria. Students earn their grades through their engagement and participation in pedagogical processes and, significantly, for their contributions to each other's thinking. These capacities are built in class through shared reading and co-writing practices that encourage students not just to agree with each other but also to provoke each other's thinking and engage in argumentation as pedagogical partners. Practices that have been generative include students choosing a ‘provocative quotation’ from an assigned reading (i.e. a lengthy quotation that challenged their own ‘status quo’ or sparked new learning/unlearning in themselves). This takes practice and feedback, as students often arrive with the habit of picking the ‘low-hanging fruit’, choosing quotations that they already know or agree with. In the first moments of a course, we ‘unpack’ how uncomfortable and ‘risky’ it can feel to start with the sections of a reading that challenge, perplex or unsettle us (Yet is this not how adult learning can happen?): ‘If you all arrive with notes on what you already know and feel comfortable with, then we’re just treading on familiar ground – rather than going to new places together’. Summarizing a reading is now framed as meeting ‘minimum expectations’. Students aim to construct ‘responses’ that include their thoughts, experiences, confusion and questions. That a student's ‘questions’ earn them ‘marks’/credit within a course is something that triggers complex responses (e.g. surprise, excitement, discomfort, suspicion or uncertainty). We have learned from/with pre-service students to explicitly name and include these critical-thinking processes in the highest level of a rubric: ‘formulating ongoing pedagogical questions’ and ‘noting/describing diversity of thinking within your group’.

We welcome and engage with different temporalities of coursework and placement requirements. It has been important to build our own capacities in designing class time for working with and returning to assigned readings over time, rather than ‘one-off’ discussion or assessment, and working with pedagogical narration and ongoing inquiry, rather than ‘one-off’ activities that focus on discrete skills and predetermined outcomes. Students earn grades through the submission of draft copies, contributing critical collaborative feedback to others, and persisting in design and revision processes. Our continued work involves engaging with students in repeated and varied modes of representation of knowledge from multiple perspectives – for example, perhaps beginning with a written summary paper, then revising and re-presenting it as a video response, digital storytelling or a website designed for/with different audiences.

In placements, which are assessed as ‘pass’ or ‘fail’, students demonstrate their capacity in curriculum design and implementation through writing pedagogical narrations and engaging in collaborative discussions about what they notice in the narrations beyond development, and even where the language of development lives in their/our thinking and writing. Students are offered current articles and texts to read that speak to the concepts and ideas which emerge from their writing and discussions, and use this to experiment with curriculum-making in ways that are then not formulaic. From the outside, this way of working seems messy and incomplete. However, it has been rich and complex – joyful in its challenges and experimentation.

Conclusion

Comfort: common strength. This is part of the work of teaching, to cast a tale where no one is damaged by living in whirls of words, ideas, images, apprehensions and joys that are partly beyond his or her ken, but, hopefully, no one is left quite the same. (Jardine, 2013: 3)

If you have hung in here and reached the end of our article, we consider you a ‘com-matriot’! Our hope is not only that you see yourself – your doubts, your attempts, your desires, your own journey – in our stories and theorizing, but also that you have read something that will unsettle, provoke and inspire change. We invite you to join us in this ongoing project. In this article, we have worked to engage subjectivity as valid and valuable, and to propose it as a rigorous interpretive tool for building the intellectual and relational capacity of students in the pre-service classroom and field placement. We have shared ways that we have created conditions for engaging subjectivity through processes of critical reflection and collaborative inquiry in co-creating critical collaborative learning communities. We recognize that it is not enough just to say that we are switching from objectivity to subjectivity, but that we need to transform our content, our temporalities, and the assigning of value to subjective learning processes. We conclude here in the midst of our ongoing experimentations and aspirations for our practice, sharing the ways our pedagogical commitments have shifted our work with students. Ultimately, what underlies our work is a hope that students will resist pressures to conform to being a ‘good educator’ (Johnston, 2019; Langford, 2007) and strive instead for ‘good work’ (Jardine, 2013).

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge here the students and colleagues we have worked with over the years and thank them for the beautiful, difficult and joyful work that we have done together. Because of them, we are not the same. A special acknowledgment to Kelsey MacKenzie who allowed samples of her field placement work and thinking to be included here.