Abstract
In this article, the authors encourage the consideration of the use of Black women’s memoir to inform pre-service early childhood education by exploring Mary Herring Wright’s memoir of growing up Black and deaf in the southern USA in Sounds Like Home and bell hooks’ memoir of childhood in Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. In their engagement with Wright and hooks, stories of childhood, longing and memory appear as valid forms of knowing that attend to issues of power, hegemony and social inequity. The authors further demonstrate that the standards of practice promoted within the Ontario College of Early Childhood Educators, particularly ‘Standard II: Curriculum and Pedagogy’, understand knowledge as valid primarily if based on empirical and developmental ways of knowing. Black women’s memoirs and counternarratives, engaged with from an interpretive disability studies perspective, trouble this by suggesting that memories and stories of childhood also serve as valid and important forms of knowledge in pre-service early childhood education training and beyond . How might one encourage and support a disability studies approach to inclusion in pre-service early childhood education settings? How might such an approach help blur the child–adult binary that often appears in pre-service early childhood education, and in almost all the relationships that children have with adults? Melding the creative and the critical, the authors argue that Black women’s memoir can deepen our understanding of belonging and love, and therefore is a necessary intervention in educational institutions embedded within a normative order that creates binaries between children and adults.
Introduction
Pre-service early childhood education (ECE), as with any form of education, is not without room for reflection, growth and improvement. Within educational institutions, professional knowledge is often deemed a highly trusted source of information on child development, learning theories and children’s learning experiences. Rational, codified and formal, the presumed validity of professional knowledge, elevated above other ways of knowing, suggests that knowledge formalized by institutions is crucial to pre-service education. This may also explain the various standards and competencies expected of registered early childhood educators (RECEs) in Ontario, Canada (College of Early Childhood Educators, 2017). Such standards and competencies may be laid out in a Code of ethics and standards of practice, just as they are for Ontario’s RECEs by the College of Early Childhood Educators (2017). These standards, codes and competencies reflect the knowledge expected not only of educators but also of the children we are expected to educate. The formalization of institutional competencies relies on a child–adult binary. Such a binary draws distinctions between what children and adults know, and often leans in favour of the authority of adults. This results in the prevalence of adult-centred perspectives on children and childhood education in professional knowledge. However, we suggest that these binaries can be blurred through memory and story, and further suggest that Black women’s memoir can deepen our understanding of belonging and love, which characterize our relations with each other and the children we teach.
Recognizing perspectives on children and childhood education in professional knowledge as ‘adult-centred’ gestures to the importance of questioning what it means to know the world and how we know what we think we know. Knowledge takes many forms and is incredibly complex. Moreover, knowledge is produced, rather than something that someone has or does not have. The assertion that RECEs must have knowledge in order to do their work presupposes the possibility that some may not have the ‘appropriate’ knowledge to practise ECE. Rather than contest what is and what is not appropriate knowledge for practising ECE, in this article we instead wrestle with the construction of knowledge, drawing attention to the absence of other ways of knowing that may inform pre-service ECE.
Black women’s memoir offers alternative ways of knowing childhood, belonging and love. In this article, we encourage the consideration of the use of Black women’s memoir to inform pre-service ECE by exploring Mary Herring Wright’s memoir of growing up Black and deaf in the southern USA in Sounds Like Home and bell hooks’ memoir of childhood in Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood.1 The possibilities of memory within childhood, teaching and education have also been theorized by other scholars, such as Farley et al. (2022). Their research demonstrates how teachers’ memories of schooling impact and inform their understandings of childhood (e.g. see Farley et al., 2022; Sonu et al., 2022). In line with this work, we conceptualize memory as a way to reimagine teacher education, specifically in the context of pre-service and in-service ECE. We build on this research by taking the promise and possibilities of memory as it appears in Black women’s memoir, and connecting memory, story and storytelling to love and belonging within pre-service and in-service ECE practice.
In our engagement with Wright and hooks, stories of childhood, longing, resistance and memory come to the fore as valid forms of knowing that attend to issues of power, hegemony and social inequity. In conversation with Wright and hooks, we demonstrate that ‘Standard II: Curriculum and Pedagogy’ of the College of Early Childhood Educators (2017) understands knowledge as valid primarily if based on empirical and developmental ways of knowing. Although empirical data and development may shape how we ‘know’ children, this is by no means the only way of understanding children or childhood. We argue that Black women’s memoirs and counternarratives, as we engage them from an interpretive disability studies perspective, trouble the professionalization of knowledge by suggesting that memories and stories of childhood serve, too, as valid and important forms of knowledge in pre-service ECE, which allow us as researchers and teachers to reimagine belonging and love within and outside of the early years classroom.
Methods
An interpretive approach to disability studies informs this article. In education, studies of disability are prevalent. Researchers who conduct studies of disability make disability and disabled people the subjects of analysis, often attempting to determine the causes of and solutions for the problem of disability (Titchkosky and Michalko, 2009). It is important not to conflate studies of disability with ‘disability studies’. According to Titchkosky and Michalko (2009: 6): ‘disability studies, in its various expressions, understands disability as a disruption to normalcy and thus as problematizing it. Disability, then, becomes the occasion for disability studies to interrogate normalcy, to make it an object of study’ (our emphasis). Distinguishing interpretive disability studies from its other articulations means encountering one’s own consciousness as entangled in how we are expected to make sense of difference. An interpretive disability studies approach, as we understand it, is informed by the wisdom of disabled, Black and Indigenous storytellers and artists, where stories make our everyday lives. As King (2003: 3) says: ‘The truth about stories is that that’s all we are’. Telling stories while simultaneously having stories told about us, others and experiences in a world of stories is an approach to critical inquiry that is influenced by interpretive disability studies.
With an interpretive approach to disability studies, the practice of reading is integral to the stories we encounter daily. Reading, as we understand it, is an interpretive social act that activates stories and their meanings. Stories often come to us as texts. On the relationship between reading and text, Smith notes: The linear text conceals my transition from cafe lunch to workroom. And you, wherever you are, are reading. There is a movement in time: I writing now, and you reading then; I writing then and you reading now. The text lies between us, organizing our relation. (Smith, 1999: 53)
The ‘interpretive’ in interpretive disability studies
The descriptor ‘interpretive’ contributes a distinction to current disability studies approaches in that it nods to the significance of interpretive methods, such as an interpretive sociological approach, that theorize ‘the interrelation of bodies, environment, and knowledge’ (Titchkosky, 2008: 40). An interpretive approach to disability studies is moved by a politics of wonder (Titchkosky, 2011), where questions about the meaning of disability in relation to the interpretive nature of our embodiment arise in, through and by the stories we tell and are told as storied beings. With interpretive disability studies, our life experiences and thoughts are integral to interrogations of normalcy and studies of how disability is made to matter in our everyday lives (Titchkosky, Cagulada and DeWelles, 2022). Thus, an interpretive approach to disability studies can be informed by various life experiences as well as disciplines of thought – for example, decolonial, Indigenous, Black feminist and critical phenomenological thought. Disciplines of thought constantly and consistently produce, sustain and resist meanings of disability through a myriad of stories about what it means to be human. These disciplines are reflective of the world in which we are embedded, shaping our interpretations of the world. An interpretive approach, then, suggests that everyone brings a unique orientation to disability studies’ interrogation of normalcy, framed and influenced by our life experiences and the disciplines of thought that move us. Indeed, interpretive disability studies calls us to return to our experiences as meaning-making sites that make disability matter in different ways. An interpretive approach to disability studies allows us to study the social act of perception through the force and omnipotence of story. We interrogate normalcy through and by storytelling, focusing on the normalization of knowledge in pre-service ECE education. ‘Normalcy’, ‘the norm’ and ‘normative’ are slippery concepts and often difficult to define. Garland-Thomson (2009: 30), for instance, in Staring: How We Look, describes normal as ‘shaping our actual bodies and how we imagine them’. In this way, normalcy is not so much a thing but rather an ideology, which shapes our perceptions and imaginations of what is ‘average’, ‘usual’ or ‘expected’. Norms and conventions, as Garland-Thomson describes, shape and structure our social realities – including the social realities that structure the interactions we might have within early childhood. Disability studies questions the normative and seeks to understand how norms, normalcy and normative conventions are constructed. Disability studies disrupts the College of Early Childhood Educators’ (2017) standards of care, which might appear to RECEs (both in-service and pre-service) as ‘just the way things are’ . We understand any standard, code and/or competency to be activating particular meanings about knowledge, community, care and childhood.
Within the documents outlining RECE practice is a collection of stories that risk producing uniform understandings – or single stories (Adichie, 2009) – of what childhood, knowledge, teaching and memory mean in the early years and for the early years teacher. Even ECE standards have a certain memory to them – memories of, for instance, what came before current ECE practices and what is expected to come next in an area that seeks to prioritize equity, diversity and inclusion. An interpretive disability studies approach to single stories of childhood, knowledge, teaching and memory begs the question: How might embracing multiple stories of what it means to know and remember ourselves in relation to our childhoods begin to disrupt institutional surfaces (hampton, 2022) – that is, institutional expectations and practices – for early years teachers?
Furthermore, how might focusing on stories as knowledge support a disability studies approach to inclusion in pre-service ECE settings as well as blur the child–adult binary? The Code of ethics and standards of practice does state that ‘[r]egistered early childhood educators (RECEs) co-construct knowledge with children, families and colleagues’ (College of Early Childhood Educators, 2017: 10). And this co-construction of knowledge is valid and crucial in the lives of children and the practice of ECE. But, even within co-construction, binaries and hierarchies may exist. While teaching children is an act of love and service, and while all children need love, support and advocacy, a child–adult hierarchy may exist in teaching relationships. We therefore encourage readers, pre-service early childhood educators and teachers in pre-service ECE programs to think carefully and critically about care and dependency, and how these might be conceptualized in ways that do not position children and adults in a hierarchy, where adults are unquestionably in a position of higher power and authority over children.
Through our reading of the memoirs of hooks and Wright, we craft stories and memories that demonstrate how teachers and children, guardians and children, and adults and children exist together in spaces wherein various ways of perceiving everyday life come into contact. Both hooks and Wright draw on memory to tell stories – memory and story, then, exist together. Between children and adults are memories and experiences of childhood – and it is these memories that tie our worlds, albeit different, together (Farley and Boldt, 2021; Farley et al., 2022). It is through these stories that we also come to understand what it might mean for adults and children, and children and teachers, to belong with each other – together. Sometimes, belonging means telling different stories and resisting the stories we are expected to consume and become. Encouraging students to think differently about belonging, not as a means of fitting in but as a means of resisting taken-for-granted expectations and assumptions of learning and living, is a powerful act of love.
We adopt Wright’s and hooks’ resistance to the normative and taken-for-granted as a frame of analysis throughout this article. As we show, both resist a taken-for-granted sense of belonging – of being in school, of being with family, at home and even with themselves. Their paths of resistance are not without struggle, however, as finding a sense of belonging can be a difficult and arduous journey. Importantly, alongside Wright’s and hooks’ stories, we wonder: What is the relationship between the construction of a ‘problem child’ and desires of resistance, of belonging and, crucially, of love? As hooks (2009: 2) says on belonging: ‘Like many of my contemporaries I have yearned to find my place in this world, to have a sense of homecoming, a sense of being wedded to a place’. In their memoirs, both hooks and Wright navigate these yearnings in different ways, of desiring place and homecoming, and wanting to author their own life stories in the face of childhood pressures to be normal. In what follows, we explore how belonging emerged in our reading of Wright’s Sounds Like Home and hooks' Bone Black.
Wright’s Sounds Like Home and hooks’ Bone Black
We begin with a review of a story, a memoir, called Sounds Like Home: Growing Up Black and Deaf in the South, by Mary Herring Wright. Wright tells stories of her childhood in North Carolina. Over the course of her book, Wright moves from life in Iron Mine, where she is born and raised, to Raleigh, where she attends school at the North Carolina School for the Blind and Deaf, and then back to Iron Mine again. The North Carolina School for the Blind and Deaf is a boarding school where she and her fellow deaf and blind classmates live and learn together over the course of the school year. Once the children are finished for the school year, they return home for the summer. Wright takes us through a few of these trips home to Iron Mine and then to Raleigh for school. In this analysis, we describe the themes that emerged. For the purposes of this article, we focus on the themes of childhood and belonging.
Wright’s experience of home, for instance, is intimately tied to notions of belonging and authority. She describes her sadness upon leaving the familiar surroundings of her family’s farmhouse for the first time, evoking in readers a sense of her love for the people and places that define her family’s farm and farmhouse as home. Throughout the book, readers can feel Wright’s love for the home that is her family and Iron Mine, especially where she dedicates a few paragraphs to her first experience of leaving Iron Mine and saying goodbye to her family for the first time (Wright, 2019: 82–84). She cries an endless stream of tears as she leaves the familiarity of home for the new and unfamiliar place that is the North Carolina School for the Blind and Deaf: This couldn’t be me sitting here on this thing [the train] carrying me away from home, the fields and woods, Queen [her dog] and the other days, the schoolhouse, and the church. I saw them all in my mind and cried harder. (84)
In the first part of the book, we encounter the sounds, smells and feelings of Wright’s home. Her love for Iron Mine shines through her various descriptions of the places that mark this sense of home. In one particular passage, Wright describes herself and her brother, Sam, not yet being old enough to help their family with berry-picking. Instead, they watch their family’s truck being loaded up with berries and afterwards accompany their dad to the market in the hopes of getting ice cream (29). Wright’s return to this memory of berry-picking paints a vivid image of how she remembers home – that is, fully, deeply and through the human sensorium: During this time, the smell of strawberries, honeysuckles, and dust hung heavy in the air, along with the heady smell of wild magnolias. We’d sometimes gather at the house of the strawberry hands after supper. Sometimes there’d be sanctified ones, and they’d have preaching, praying, and singing … . The night, bright with silver moonlight, would be alive with black shadows and the sound of young voices, laughing and singing the verses to the games we played, high and shrill, happy to be alive and young. (29)
Wright’s experience of home is embodied, and she remembers it at every turn of her being-in-the-world. One summer after another end of a school year, Wright vividly describes her return home in relation to her love of her mother: ‘The house always looked small and strange when I first walked in, but I loved it dearly. And Mama – I couldn’t get enough of looking at her’ (117). Later, Wright recalls the excitement of going to the Sea Breeze as ‘the beach Blacks went to for entertainment’ (117). Wright’s experience of home is, of course, also framed by the time in which she grew up, when, in the mid 1920s, beaches and other public places were marked by segregation. Indeed, it seems that Wright’s experiences of home and place are significantly shaped by how she experiences belonging within and to multiple worlds.
All children belong and exist within multiple worlds – including the early childhood classroom. The classroom not only blurs the boundaries of home and school, but also continues to blur and complicate the relations between children and adults. Consider, for instance, one of the expectations of the College of Early Childhood Educators’ ‘Standard II: Curriculum and Pedagogy’: RECEs co-construct knowledge with children, families and colleagues. They draw from their professional knowledge of child development, learning theories and pedagogical and curriculum approaches to plan, implement, document and assess child-centered, inquiry and play-based learning experiences for children. (College of Early Childhood Educators, 2017: 10)
It is, however, not only the professional knowledge of Blackness and race of the time that fills Wright’s memories. Filling her memories of childhood are the feelings she associates with the Sea Breeze, her home and her family. She remembers the excitement of the beach, the happiness of summertime in her hometown, the livelihood of fragrant honeysuckle and strawberries at home. These feelings, as she shows, culminate in a form of knowing herself that deviates from the ways the professional knowledge of the time defined and essentialized Blackness and disability. Therefore, following Wright, other ways of knowing – knowing beyond the knowledge of child development, pedagogy or curriculum – can and should inform ECE practice. Wright and hooks give us richer and more nuanced ways of understanding childhood. We can know children in terms of their development but we can know them – and their worlds – as so much more.
How do we know where we belong? This is a question we consider in the following section.
Belonging in different worlds
Earlier, we referred to a few of the worlds that Wright inhabited as a child, such as the hearing world, the deaf world and the world that she feels is home. Within these multiple worlds, Wright also draws readers into her childhood experiences of segregation. This is reflected immediately at the beginning of Wright’s book as she describes the town of Wallace, the closest town to her community of Iron Mine. In Wallace, the White-owned businesses were located on Back Street while the Black-owned businesses were located on Front Street (Wright, 2019: 3). On relations of race within Iron Mine, Wright describes Iron Mine as a mixed neighbourhood, where the ‘kinship of the Black and Whites wasn’t discussed in public’ (4). She then says: ‘Everyone seemed to get along as far as race relations were concerned’ (4). Wright presents this information to readers in a matter-of-fact fashion, without apparent bitterness, sadness or anger, showing perhaps the embeddedness of segregation in Wright’s life growing up in the South during the 1920s.
‘Race relations’ and segregation, as they influence Wright’s belonging to different worlds, explicitly appear again when she tells us that ‘[t]he North Carolina School for the Blind and Deaf was for Black children’ (89). The White blind children attend their own school in Raleigh and the White deaf children attend another school somewhere in North Carolina (89). Layers of segregation seem to be at play; the Black blind and deaf children and White blind and deaf children study in segregation while also being segregated from non-deaf and non-blind children. Wright then also mentions that her school and the school for White blind children in town, despite being segregated by relations of race, ‘were under the same superintendent, George Lineberry, who was White’ (89).
In her early days at the North Carolina School for the Blind and Deaf, she also describes having to navigate layers of segregation within her school’s Black deaf world as she is perceived differently for having remnants of residual hearing. When Wright realizes that she is one of the few students at the North Carolina School for the Blind and Deaf who can communicate orally, she describes being made to feel that she does not belong by her peers. Writing about seeking acceptance from her classmates, Wright says: Deaf people are very distrustful of hearing people. They’re always suspicious that they’re being talked about or made fun for not being able to hear and talk. They sometimes resented me too because Nurse Stewart had told my teacher not to let me sign but to keep me talking to keep my voice strong. Therefore, when I talked or recited and they didn’t know what I was saying, they told me my mouth was just flapping and they didn’t believe I could talk. I got back at them by refusing to help them with homework or explain something to them so they soon left me alone. I was on my way to being accepted as one of them, but I wasn’t quite there yet. (110)
Wright tells us many stories of having to navigate layers of segregation on account of her Blackness and also on account of becoming deaf. Her experiences of belonging and unbelonging help us to wonder more deeply about representations of ‘professional knowledge’, ‘co-constituted knowledge’ and ‘child-centred practices/knowledge’ in that we are reminded of how racial hierarchies are storied into past and present understandings of what is held up as professional knowledge. It was not so long ago, as Wright’s story teaches, that people – children like Wright and her classmates – were forced to embody exclusions narrated by stories of anti-Blackness. This kind of remembering that Wright brings us into imparts significant lessons for RECEs, who, beyond professional knowledge, must wrestle with the ways children and families embody racial hierarchies, and with practices of anti-Blackness that nevertheless remain present today.
Resistance to belonging and belonging to resistance
We now turn to an analysis of Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, by bell hooks. Written in very short chapters that illustrate snapshots of hooks’ childhood, Bone Black is a memoir in which memories of loneliness, resistance, belonging and love are woven throughout hooks’ young life. However, hooks also confronts pain, loneliness and the violence of racism, sexism and abuse. Often, hooks (1996: 11) is deemed a ‘problem child’. We ask, then: What is the relationship between the construction of a ‘problem child’ and desires of resistance, of belonging and, crucially, of love? This question gets at the kernel of hooks’ memoir: love and its relationship to belonging and resistance (Goldstein, 1997; hooks, 1996; Vega González, 2001). Returning to ECE frameworks, and in particular teaching young children, love is at the forefront. This love is a beautiful and crucial element of ECE. All children need love, trust, care and support – but the ways in which we express these central elements of our relations with children must be carefully considered and, at times, changed. hooks explores the possibilities of re-presenting love, especially in relation to childhood, adulthood, memory and care.
At first blush, it might seem that belonging to something, to anything, to anyone, is a way of resisting the feeling of being a problem. Being a problem and particularly notions of the ‘problem child’ have been theorized elsewhere. Consider, for instance, Knight’s (2019) discussion of the ‘problem child’. Knight defines the ‘problem child’ as ‘an encapsulation of those who are constructed outside of Western understandings of childhood’ (72). Knight connects theories of childhood to coloniality and colonialism, and, in this way, resembles Farley’s (2018: 1) conceptualization of ‘childhood as placeholder’. Perhaps the ‘problem child’, as defined by Knight together with Farley, may broadly point to colonialism and coloniality, and single stories and constructions of the meanings behind childhood, as well as what it means to be a child – or to belong to a particular understanding of childhood. Belonging, then, might be wrapped in a taken-for-granted, dominant and colonial sense as well.
In addition to Knight’s (2019) crucial observation of the ‘problem child’ as tethered to constructions of childhood rooted in western coloniality, Erevelles (2019) demonstrates the connections between constructions of childhood, children and notions of ‘problems’. In ‘“Scenes of subjection” in public education: Thinking intersectionality as if disability matters’, Erevelles offers a thickened understanding of intersectionality and intersectional analysis. Rather than disability being added to experiences of oppression and dehumanization, Erevelles demonstrates how constructions of disability, or more specifically constructions of the ‘problem child’ and ‘disability as problem’, contribute to pathologization and horrible dehumanization. Erevelles (2019: 600), for instance, notes the awful ways that children were treated at centres such as the Judge Rotenberg Center, where methods such as electric shock were used against disabled children in an effort to ‘manage and control’ them. Erevelles, therefore, along with scholars such as Titchkosky and Michalko (2009), shows how dominant understandings of disability as a ‘problem-to-be-fixed’ connect with stories of the disabled child as a problem. Such a limited understanding of disability has dangerous consequences. Control and conformity, therefore, are aspects of belonging that neither hooks nor Wright want any part of.
This, perhaps, is what hooks pushes against. Belonging, therefore, in this taken-for-granted sense, might be a solution to being a problem. However, the solution to being a problem is not simply belonging, especially when we consider taken-for-granted notions of belonging, such as belonging as inclusion or integration. This is a key intervention for ECE practices. While creating a safe, secure and loving learning environment for all children is vital, belonging does not mean sustaining normalcy or existing adult-centred structures and expectations of children. As Norwich (2002: 493) notes, inclusion, and we would add belonging, ‘involves a change in social realities’. As we understand it, this means that belonging or inclusion into structures that already exist neither changes these structures nor our expectations of children. Belonging, then, can be better understood as an insatiable drive to resist and change the social realities that exist and inform our daily lives. Remarkably, hooks recognizes this as a young child.
hooks often resists certain expectations of belonging. She yearns for a belonging that is not simply a taken-for-granted sense of inclusion or integration. For instance, she recalls: We know that children are not born innocent or good … We know that children like to hurt. I do not want to hurt … They act as if this is another sign that I am not normal. It is seen as normal for children to want to play with hurting. I do not want to play. (hooks, 1996: 61)
Problematizing problem children
Children’s lives are characterized by an authority and control informed by adult-centred perspectives of childhood. We now consider WEB Du Bois’s (1903) The Souls of Black Folk, in which he writes: ‘Being a problem is a strange experience – peculiar, even for one who has never been anything else … It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon me’ (quoted in Phillips, 2013: 590). Du Bois draws attention to how the feeling of being a problem begins in the early years of life – in childhood. As Phillips (2013) succinctly notes, Du Bois describes this sense of himself as a problem through the intersection of childhood and race.
Similarly, the feeling of being a problem begins in Wright’s and hooks’ childhoods. Wright writes from the intersections of Black deaf girlhood, racism and sexism, while hooks writes from the intersections of childhood, specifically Black girlhood, racism, sexism and abuse (hooks, 1996; Patton, 1999; Vega González, 2001). Wright, when sharing her experiences of racism and being discriminated against for being deaf (audism) in particular, rarely describes desperately wanting to find acceptance. She does not tell a story of pining after her classmates’ approval when they tease her and tell her that she is not to be believed as a deaf girl who can still ‘hear’ a little bit. Rather, she tells us about getting her classmates to leave her alone by refusing to help them with their homework. This is important to reflect on as Wright, throughout her book, does not describe herself as someone who seeks acceptance, let alone as someone who easily accepts the authority of others. On the other hand, she seems to cast doubt on those who wish to impose any authority over her, especially if they suggest that they know her better than she knows herself – and especially, too, if authority figures suggest that she is nothing more than a problem.
Wright describes various instances where authority figures, such as the teachers in her school, act as if they know more than the students about the students. When describing the teachers placing students in different grades at the beginning of the school year, Wright tells us of a time when the teachers place her with the beginners. She writes: ‘I had finished the fourth grade at home and tried to tell the teachers, but no one listened’ (Wright, 2019: 88). Another student, whom they called Hill, also protested about being placed with the beginners, saying she was in the fifth grade. Wright sums up how the teachers responded to Hill: ‘The teachers decided she was blind and sent her to the beginners’ class for the blind students’ (88). Although Wright does not mention Hill again and we do not learn about whether she is blind, telling ‘the facts’ does not seem to be Wright’s aim in introducing Hill into this story. Wright, rather, seems to be drawing attention to how authority is taken up by the teachers as they disregard the authority of the students. Readers are granted a keen understanding of Wright’s perception of self, as she distinguishes between the authority of the teachers, the students and the decisions she feels adult authority figures ought to make.
hooks, too, recalls the ways that she is both overtly and covertly made to be a problem. In this way, hooks’ childhood resembles June Jordan’s (2000) in Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, where Jordan experiences parental abuse and neglect. To a similar extent, hooks is often explicitly said to be a problem. hooks (1996: 11), writing in the third person, notes: ‘She was considered a problem child. A child intent on getting her way’. As Du Bois motions towards, being a problem reflects the systemic oppression of racism, classism and sexism, and the intersections of each. Crucially, Du Bois’s words demonstrate how epistemologies of whiteness and structures of oppression intersect with ontologies – expected ways of knowing and being that perpetuate and reinforce dominant, oppressive narratives.
Patton’s (1999) review of Bone Black discusses these intersections well, calling attention to several instances of hooks’ childhood experiences at the intersections of classism, racism and sexism. In reference to Patton (1999), we explore and expand on some of these instances now. Consider hooks’ initial experiences of being a problem. One powerful example occurs while she is very young, in early elementary school. She writes about having to raise money by selling tickets in school, in order to ‘keep the school going’: ‘The people with lots of money can buy many tickets … Their flesh is the colour of pigs in the storybook. Somehow they have more money because they are lighter’ (hooks, 1996: 7).
Similarly, as Patton’s (1999) review also indicates, hooks writes about how the tickets being sold for the school are to be for a show – a pretend wedding, where all the girls are to be little brides. hooks resists this sexist practice (Patton, 1999), and this resistance is embodied in a young bell hooks, whose legs ‘would rather be running, itch[ing] to go outdoors’ (hooks, 1996: 9). When her ‘wedding’ dress tears, she hopes she will be left out of the wedding show. Disappointed that she must continue on in the show, she writes: ‘We are practicing to be brides, to be girls who will grow up to be given away’ (9; see also Patton, 1999: 166). Through these examples, hooks recalls her childhood memories in a way that brings forth a child’s experience of classism, racism and sexism (hooks, 1996; Patton, 1999; Vega González, 2001).
In their respective memoirs, Wright and hooks gesture towards the complexity of being made into problem children. Tying Wright’s refusal to help her deaf peers, who looked down on her ‘talking’, to hooks’ refusal to hurt, fight and play, we can understand the experience of belonging as socially and culturally mediated. Where Wright shares her experiences of audism alongside racism as a young, Black, deaf girl in North Carolina, hooks discusses the pain and loneliness she experienced on account of racism, sexism and abuse. Consider the following, written under the College of Early Childhood Educators’ ‘Standard II: Curriculum and Pedagogy’: RECEs:
1. Are knowledgeable about child development theories and understand that children’s development is integrated across multiple domains and within a variety of contexts and environments.
2. Are knowledgeable about current learning theories and pedagogical and curriculum approaches that are based on inclusion and inquiry and play-based learning. (College of Early Childhood Educators, 2017: 10)
Recalling the lessons on belonging found in Wright’s and hooks’ stories, we might question whether ‘child development theories’ and ‘current learning theories and pedagogical and curriculum approaches that are based on inclusion and inquiry and play-based learning’ can sufficiently address the complex experiences of resisting and refusing belonging amid overlapping forces of anti-Black racism, sexism, audism and abuse. How might knowledge about theories based on inclusion, inquiry and play-based learning adequately prepare RECEs to encounter children who refuse to belong via the normative ways they are expected to be included and to inquire and play?
None of hooks’ and Wright’s memories resonate with developmentalism. And although the standards of practice of the College of Early Childhood Educators (2017) state that teachers plan and implement activities for children based on ‘ability, cultural and linguistic diversity and Indigenous identity’ (10), diversity and especially notions of ability rely on a western, psychological focus on childhood and human development, which we explain below. And while developmental approaches to childhood and education are one way of knowing children and childhood, they are not – they cannot be – the only way we know children and childhood. It is, however, possible that development and developmentalism might be a certain way of remembering. When, for instance, teachers recall their own childhoods or memories from childhood, development might be woven in here as well. Teachers may recall stories or memories of their first days at school, the first time they read a word, tried a new food or smelled a new smell. All of these memories are, in a way, connected to development and to the senses. Perhaps knowing this is one way that memory and development can be thought about together, but it does not need to be the only way. Rather, through memoires, perhaps complexity and nuance can be added to memories of development, so that they are remembered (Millet-Gallant, 2016) in new, refreshing ways, both for adults and for children. We suggest that ECE standards might rely on memories and Black women’s memoirs as a way of addressing and reimagining expectations of children, adults and our relations. Connecting Wright’s and hooks’ stories to the standards of practice in ECE, if educators are to show care and love, and encourage genuine belonging in their classrooms, belonging must be reimagined, re-presented and reinterpreted, away from expectations of ‘normal development’. There are so many ways for children to be, to live and to learn – ways that cannot be measured or assessed. Perhaps the ways in which children learn, live, lead, and give and receive love are ways in which teachers and guardians may reach belonging together with children.
Analysis
Through our discussion of the overlaps between Wright’s and hooks’ stories, we have attempted to, as Smith (1999: 5) might say, ‘activate’ their texts. On further reflection on Smith’s encouragement to ‘activate’ the text, we might apply this to other texts as well, such as ECE documents. There is an expectation of RECEs to ‘activate’ knowledge and learning, and this is done in particular ways – ways that are expected of teachers. This might mean identifying developmental milestones and then ‘raising concern’ if these are not met. While this is one way to activate student learning, it is not the only way. There are other ways in which we can activate texts, or perhaps reactivate stories of development through, for instance, memory and remembering (hooks, 1989) . Such reactivation, we suggest, is also a means to bring children and adults together in learning, living and belonging.
Narrative as remembering
The meeting of worlds, people and stories in Wright’s collective remembering is complemented by what Lindgren (2012: 343), with Mary Louise Pratt, calls the ‘contact zone’, by which we take to mean the meeting of words, ideas and memories between adults and children. Adults and children are together in so many ways. They are together in curriculum documents, as in the ECE texts; they are physically together in the classroom; and they are together in our memories as well. Adult and child worlds are not as separate as they might seem. Memories of childhood fill adults, just as projections of adulthood fill the worlds of children. And, returning to reading and writing, as if writing about Wright herself, Lindgren (2012: 343) says: ‘Writing in the contact zone enables authors to negotiate these dual affiliations; their narratives bear the traces of both Deaf and hearing worlds’. Indeed, Wright negotiates dual affiliations throughout her story. She negotiates deafness and hearing, Blackness and Whiteness, belonging and authority, childhood and adulthood, friendship and loneliness. Wright’s experience of family, authority and belonging is tethered to her experience of her race, disability and childhood.
Finding love and belonging
Similarly, hooks experiences pain, abuse, and systemic sexism and racism. As does Wright, hooks, too, ignites a desire for love and belonging. In hooks’ (1996: xi) words, this desire encompasses the ‘sometimes paradisical and other times terrifying’ (see also Vega González, 2001: 238) world that she navigates throughout her childhood. This paradisiacal and ‘terrifying’ universe of childhood – and even childhood memories – is salient. Memories of childhood teeter between these different terrifying and incredible worlds, just as the worlds of adulthood, parenthood and teaching may teeter between these universes. The College of Early Childhood Educators’ (2017) ‘Standard II: Curriculum and Pedagogy’ states that RECEs must acknowledge and differentiate instruction and activities to ensure the full participation of all children. This expectation is often tethered to taken-for-granted assumptions of belonging, or what belonging might look like for children in a classroom. While differentiated instruction is important, what happens if not all children feel they belong? Exclusion is unsettling. The promise of belonging is paradisiacal and fiercely desired by adults and children. We teeter between the promise of attaining belonging and the frightening possibility of losing it.
We can, however, learn from hooks’ early experience as a ‘problem child’ and Wright’s early experience of her vibrant childhood growing up Black and deaf. These experiences are tethered to their resistance against taken-for-granted assumptions of what it means to belong. This ultimately shapes Wright’s and hooks’ journeys towards love. The love that hooks (1996) finds deep within herself, within the ‘cave’ of her soul, informs her life and shapes her love for words, writing and stories. The love that Wright finds in memories of her family, of her dog, Queen, and of the colours and smells of her childhood shapes how she remembers her upbringing. It is to this love that hooks and Wright belong.
It is to this love, characterized by relationships, family, interdependence, memory, words and writing, that all children belong, and that we as adults also belong through our memories of our past selves as children, and our current relations and interactions with children. This love shapes desire and passion in ECE. Ultimately, this love moves us towards telling different stories.
Conclusion
We conclude this article with what is a beginning for Mary Herring Wright and bell hooks – the beginning of a sense of belonging and a sense of love (Danticat, 2019; Vega González, 2001). As Danticat (2019) writes, referring to Baldwin’s (1962) The Fire Next Time, love is very often part of a beginning. Specifically, Baldwin (1962) writes that love is ‘a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth’ (quoted in Danticat, 2019). Following Baldwin, love, for Wright and hooks, is a state of being – and it is a quest against familiar expectations of belonging and acceptance.
Finding belonging and love, as Wright and hooks teach us, does not mean an overcoming of loneliness; we also do not think that belonging is the opposite or antithesis of being alone. Being together can take many forms: it can mean being together with other people or it can mean being together with an artwork, with words or with thoughts. Therefore, part of finding true belonging for Wright and hooks means coming to this realization – that being alone is often done together. This realization, too, is part of a resistance to a taken-for-granted belonging, one that sustains the myth that belonging is the antithesis of being alone. Following interpretive disability studies and the ways in which normalcy can be interrogated and reimagined, we come to realize how belonging may mean being alone. It may also reveal the possibility of being alone together.
Through our analysis of Wright’s and hooks’ memoirs, several themes emerge, including belonging, care, love, and resistance to normalcy and normative expectations of children, adults and their relations – both within and outside of the early childhood classroom. Through memoir and memories, these Black women authors recall their childhoods, illustrating the birth of their own activism and their discoveries of resistance, belonging and love. We suggest that, through memoir and memory, the expectations set out in RECE regulations, particularly in the College of Early Childhood Educators’ (2017) Code of ethics and standards of practice for RECEs in Ontario, can be reimagined and re-presented through narrative remembering and a keener attention to love as a state of being and learning – both for children and adults. The worlds of children and adults depend on much more than notions of biological and psychosocial development.
Working from developmental theories and learning approaches focused on inquiry, inclusion and play-based learning is one way to activate knowledge and student learning. It is not the only way. We suggest that Black women’s memoirs are necessary interventions in the work and worlds of pre-service ECE. By engaging with Black women’s journeys of narrative remembering, we might begin to remember our relations to stories of belonging, resistance, childhood and love. Exceeding professional knowledge and academic theory, these are stories that can radically change the way we care for each other, ourselves and children.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
