Exploring the role of Black feminist thought in pre-service early childhood education: On the possibilities of embedded transformative change

Abstract

As a Black feminist scholar who teaches in an early childhood studies program, the author has witnessed how dominant theories and methods used for pre-service early childhood education and care disconnect students from their lived experiences. The detachment of social location in theoretical text, and particularly in developmental discourse, is not isolated to the field; it is instead a result of the fragmentation of knowledge, which is central in the modern colonial project. The author explores what the possibilities are for Black feminist scholarship in pre-service early childhood education and care while unpacking the many racial and intersecting injustices in the field. The dominant research and pedagogy practices in early childhood education and care have limitations, with omissions of the nuances of the critical engagement of students, families and community more broadly through lived experience. When assumptions of detached and ‘objective’ knowledge are centred, then ideas that challenge norms and the status quo are omitted or peripheralized, when they are included. The article explores the possibilities of what the author calls ‘embedded transformative change’ – a change that is central to pedagogy and research in the field of early childhood education and care as opposed to being placed at the margins. Through embedded transformative change, members of pre-service early childhood education and care programs can think of themselves as active agents in change and liberation.

Keywords

anti-Black racism Black feminism Black feminist thought early childhood education pre-service race racism

The state of anti-Black racism in early childhood education and care

Recent events in Ontario, a province in Canada, have laid bare the insidious nature of anti-Black racism in early childhood and kindergarten to Grade 12 (K–12) education settings. In the fall of 2021, a four-year-old Black child was removed from their kindergarten classroom in handcuffs by police in Ontario's Waterloo Region (Duhatschek, 2022). A similar act occurred in the Peel Region, a suburb of Toronto, when a six-year-old Black girl was handcuffed by her wrists and ankles for approximately 30 minutes in 2016 (CBC News, 2020). The two highlighted incidents are severe examples of anti-Black racism and the policing of young Black children; however, systemic racism in the education system has been well documented (Dei, 1996; James and Turner, 2017). The experiences of anti-Black racism faced by Black children, families, educators and the community are situated within a system that disenfranchises those who transgress the White, heteronormative, non-disabled, middle-class trope of teaching, learning and childhoods (Brady, 2017). Anti-Black racism is not merely a US issue, contrary to dominant Canadian culture's claims to multiculturalism and positioning as the friendlier neighbour to the north of the US border (Thobani, 2007; Villegas and Brady, 2019). Systemic anti-Black racism is not passively accepted by members of the Black community, despite how it is epitomized. The recent incident of the four-year-old child being handcuffed has sparked a ripple effect of Black community mobilization by various parents, families, scholars and community members; however, organizing efforts in the community are not linked to this single issue, and are sustained and ongoing. There is an active level of engagement and community organizing that is sustained in combating systemic anti-Black racism. Decades ago, Keren Brathwaite was a founding member of the Organization of Parents of Black Children. Unconnected to the Organization of Parents of Black Children, yet certainly extending its legacy, is an organization that was co-founded by Black mothers and educators: Parents of Black Children. Parents of Black Children actively serves the community through advocacy and reporting of harm towards Black children to affirm Black life in educational spaces. One of Parents of Black Children's (2022) recent reports documents what they term ‘system abuse’ – the systemic forms of anti-Black racism occurring within the school system and among multiple institutions such as childcare centres, child welfare and the police. Years of tireless community advocacy is what prompted the introduction of Bill 67 on Racial Equity in the Education System Act by Member of Provincial Parliament Dr. Laura Mae Lindo in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario (2021). Bill 67 would ultimately amend the Education Act to embed a racial equity perspective, leading to actions such as mandating that all school boards undergo mandatory anti-racism education. Although the focus of this bill is the K–12 system, there are opportunities to transform early childhood settings.

Members of the early childhood sector have long called for a dismantling of anti-Black racism. For example, a recent well-circulated petition on Lead Now organized by early childhood education and care (ECEC) activists, leaders and scholars called for mandatory anti-racism training in the sector (Anti-Racism ECE Ontario, 2021). Black early childhood educators have strived to foster space through the founding of the Community of Black Early Childhood Educators, which is part of the Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario. Black early childhood leaders such as Natalie Royer (2021) have amplified the issues of anti-Black racism in the field and called on colleagues in the field to take an inward look at institutional injustices. The introspection that Royer advocates requires members of the field to challenge the overarching discourses, ideology and assumptions of childhood.

A prevailing ideology within ECEC is childhood innocence, with roots in developmental psychology discourse and arguably childism; it extends the practice of assigning children to neat categories or stages of life. The developmental framing of childhoods permeates the field and, as a result, children are deemed ‘too young’ to comprehend or engage in dialogue regarding topics of race and racism, let alone sustain systemic racism. Childhood innocence results in the colour-blind approach dominating many of the settings in the field, resulting in a disavowal of racism (Berman et al., 2017; Boutte et al., 2011). And even when educators aspire to implement a culturally responsive education, they feel a lack of access to resources to do so, consistently resulting in sporadic pedagogical practices in this domain (Alaca and Pyle, 2018). I pinpoint attempts to implement culturally responsive pedagogy that aims to centre the cultural experiences of students from non-dominant backgrounds, which is not inevitably the same as anti-racism education, which aims to disrupt and challenge systemic racism and power (Dei, 1996). It is also worth noting that an anti-bias approach is not akin to anti-racism either in ECEC, and education as an anti-bias approach aims to address biases in individuals, while anti-racism addresses systems. Curricular changes are warranted yet insufficient without examining the deeply entrenched power dynamics that children observe, such as in full-day kindergarten settings with the relationship between Ontario certified teachers, who are largely White middle-class women, and early childhood educators, who are mostly racialized working-class women (Abawi, 2021). Pérez (2019: 30) describes the lack of women of colour in early childhood spaces, appealing for more intentional hiring and centring ‘epistemologies of the south to share the center stage’. How can the issues of anti-Black racism, systemic injustice and power be disrupted in ECEC settings? I enter this conversation as a Black woman researcher and community activist, grounding many of my experiences in community organizing, scholarship and my reflections as an educator in pre-service ECEC. I think there are possibilities for holistically centring Black feminist approaches to disrupt systemic anti-Black racism and the many intersections of oppression.

Black feminist approaches provide opportunities to disrupt White Eurocentric ways of knowing and being. Scholars such as Cynthia Dillard (2000) describe the practical ways that Black feminist epistemologies centre Black women's experiences as juxtaposed to White dominant claims to objectivity. And so, in this article, I centre Black feminism to counter anti-Black racism and recentre Black women's self-definition and situated knowledges (Collins, 2000). In line with Black feminism, I employ storytelling as a form of recentring and reclaiming, as well as disrupting normative ways of knowing and being in ECEC and beyond. The article is organized into four main sections: a review of the literature; the theoretical framework; what I advocate for in pre-service ECEC; and embedded transformative change .

Review of the literature: issues and possibilities for disruption in early childhood education and care

There exists a plethora of possibilities to disrupt anti-Black racism, developmentalism and childhood innocence. For instance, some reconceptualist scholars and professionals advocate for changes in ECEC that can incorporate various aspects of children's lives, rather than centring on dominant and normative tropes (Kessler and Swadener, 1992; Murris et al., 2020). For example, the paucity of queer ECEC professionals and queer theory in early childhood settings and higher education reinforces a one-size-fits-all dominant, heteronormative approach (Davies, 2021). Queer ways of knowing and being are disenfranchised, creating environments where queer educators need to conceal, if possible, their identities and experiences to survive heteronormative institutions and settings. When there is ‘acceptance’, queer educators flourish, and so do children in ECEC, as they learn about non-hegemonic and non-dominant intersectional experiences (Davies, 2021). Davies (2021) explores the possibility of learning from queer theory and queering pedagogies and masculinity in ECEC, and demonstrates the prospects for extending the practice of queering beyond gender and sexuality. As such, a queering approach can lead to disrupting dominant developmental discourses that limit the agency of children and the whole child, and extend to the possibilities of queering anti-Black racism and other oppressive systems.

The hesitation in ECEC to discuss race, gender, class, indigeneity, disability, sexuality, immigration status, larger geopolitical issues, religion, ethnicity and language stems from the childhood-innocence approach, as discussed above. Scholars have long identified the assumption that racism and discrimination do not materialize in ECEC settings (Bernhard et al., 1998, cited in Berman et al., 2017: 53–55). Some reconceptualist scholars have pinpointed the importance of centring children's diverse realities and experiences by employing an anti-bias approach, moving beyond diversity (Derman-Sparks and Edwards, 2010). The anti-bias approach requires introspection on the part of the educator, who rethinks their positionality and privilege in order to teach and learn. However, Pacini-Ketchabaw and Berikoff (2008: 260) postulate that anti-bias and multicultural approaches ‘mask processes of racialization by understanding racism as an attitudinal issue that can be overcome through teaching tolerance and celebrating diverse cultures. Therefore, interventions take the form of addressing children's attitudes in a developmentally appropriate manner’.

A critique of the anti-bias approach is also articulated by Escayg (2018), who describes opportunities for the enhancement of such an approach through anti-racism. Similarly, for pre-service educators, King (1991: 135) states that ‘dysconscious racism is a form of racism that tacitly accepts dominant White norms and privileges’. King removes the attitudinal dimension of implicit bias, in line with Pacini-Ketchabaw and Berikoff's (2008) critique, and examines the system of racism rather than individuals. Scholars have since extended King's dysconscious racism in pre-service educators to examine the intersections of race and disability. Hancock et al. (2021) extend dis/ability critical race theory (see Annamma and Morrison, 2018) by entrenching dysconscious racism as an analytic frame, so that pre-service ECEC students can acknowledge their own positionality and biases rooted in racism and ableism, and provide new imaginaries through their fieldwork placements to support ‘children of color’.¹ As a salient parallel, some researchers have questioned whether Ontario childhood educators are sufficiently trained to teach Indigenous children, and to support Indigenous families and communities (Lamb, 2020; Milne, 2016). Individual and collective transformation ought to take place to lead to action.

Anti-black racism takes form in ECEC in a plethora of ways, and there are opportunities to support Black children through realizing Black futurity by giving space for the mundane (Nxumalo, 2021). Neo-liberalism leads to a desire for quick-fix solutions to resolve complex issues. For example, Alaca and Pyle (2018) describe how educators experience feelings of inadequacy of preparedness to incorporate culturally relevant pedagogies in kindergarten classrooms. Centring the mundane in Black life can aid educators in not simply pursuing quick-fix solutions, and instead provide space for the fullness of Black life and futures (Nxumalo, 2021). Rather than inadequate solutions to anti-Black racism, there are possibilities of fully integrating anti-racist approaches in early childhood education (Escayg, 2019; Escayg et al., 2017).

At this juncture, there is hope for social justice and equity in early childhood (Nxumalo and Adair, 2019). Critical anti-racist and social justice approaches can combat the disavowal of racism in education (Escayg et al., 2017). Many of the policies and documents used to guide the field omit race, propagating the widespread silencing of systemic injustices such as race in the field (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2006). Added to this, assumptions of Whiteness imbue the ideals of who embodies the role of the pre-service ECEC student learner in the larger imaginaries of educators. By challenging these ideals, Black, Indigenous, queer, disabled and racialized intersectional pre-service ECEC learners can embed their own lived experiences as part of the pedagogies they are exposed to in their programs, and, with support from their educators, they can incorporate their lives and histories in their own practices.

Framework: unravelling the fragments of the modern colonial logic in early childhood education and care

In neo-liberal educational contexts, there is a fragmented approach to knowledge that truncates lived experiences from teaching and learning (Brady, 2017; Dei, 2017). Schooling then centres on the mastery of knowledge rather than practices and principles of sharing and relationality (Dei, 2000). Global South scholars describe everyday colonial practices, which are known as ‘coloniality’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mignolo, 2007). The fragmentation of knowledge, the compartmentalization of thought, hierarchies of ideas and the categorization of childhood through neatly identified stages are features of modern colonial knowledge, which manifests in a multitude of forms. Mignolo (2007) calls for epistemological disobedience through delinking, which opens up many possibilities in ECEC. The Cartesian approach of disciplines, fields and stages can be disrupted by way of delinking, which moves away from fragmentation. Returning to Milne's (2016) research on the disconnect between southern Ontario educators teaching Indigenous children, there are fundamental differences in the epistemologies of Euro-colonial ways of knowing and Indigenous knowledges, and among the largest can be the fundamental clash because of the supposed universality of western/colonial discourses in education.

The existing hierarchy of professions, combined with the milieu of a woman-dominant field associated with care work, results in professional disenfranchisement, where the field is hedged between being absolutely necessary and also lacking worth. This paradoxical position is due to the blurring of social reproduction in the public and private spheres. Care work, hence, is regarded as being lower on the rungs of hierarchal, heteropatriarchal and racial structures. Ironically, the overrepresentation of developmental psychology is widespread, despite its roots in scientific, western colonial frameworks that inevitably marginalize ECEC as a field, and despite the larger contexts of the situatedness of ECEC . Children are deemed to be incomplete adults and, as becomings, in need of development, rather than beings (Wells, 2021). Confining children to stages plunders opportunities to celebrate their lives as they are rather than who they will become.

Because the orientation of children as incomplete and developing adults is a dominant approach in pre-service ECEC, what can be said of Black, queer and disabled children who do not fit these normative ideals of childhood? Further, a homogenous fixation of childhoods does not explore the power dynamics within racist, capitalist and patriarchal structures. The fragmented orientation of the developmental approach is not the only issue; rather, the universality of Euro-colonial knowledge is detrimental to pre-service ECEC. The universality of Eurocentric knowledge is something that Indigenous knowledge scholars have critiqued as one of its key pillars (Dei, 2000; Simpson, 2004). The modern colonial logic originates from the Enlightenment era, and later the Scientific Revolution, and it positions western colonial thought as all-encompassing. The problem of universality is the assumption of objectivity. While pre-service ECEC learners can engage in theories on development and identify earlier theorists’ contributions to the field, this should not be the single approach to their training and education. If developmental discourse is driven in tropes of objectivity or as a universal characteristic of childhood, then children and families from disenfranchised communities are cast aside, and so are pre-service ECEC students and researchers who do not fit these dominant configurations of normativity. The dominant universality of developmental discourse is why some scholars have long called for an anti-bias approach to disrupt taken-for-granted ideas of children, families and communities. As noted above, scholars have extended the critiques of moving beyond anti-bias approaches (see Abawi, 2021; Janmohamed, 2005; Pacini-Ketchabaw and Berikoff, 2008). Further, to combat anti-Black racism and delink Euro-colonial ontologies and epistemologies, anti-racist, anti-colonial Indigenous knowledges and Black feminist intersectional orientations to pre-service teaching and learning are pivotal. The universality of Whiteness, maleness, ability, heteronormativity, citizenship, and middle-class, English-speaking and Christocentric orientations further excludes those from intersecting positionalities who do not fit these ideals of humanity. This leads to the pathologizing of disabled children, families and communities in ECEC. The pathologizing of children who do not fit the prevailing norms is further exacerbated for Black and Indigenous children (Essien, 2019; Ineese-Nash, 2020). Wynter's (2001) critique of Man disrupts the ideals of who is categorized as Man and, by extension, human. Perceptions of Man can be extended to the discussion of pre-service ECEC programs, where members can disrupt the characteristics of who is human and deemed worthy of life while also serving as a way of critiquing the assumptions of objectivity.

Black feminist thought as a site of resistance in early childhood education and care

Pre-service ECEC programs have countless possibilities for disrupting systems that centre on dominant ways of being and knowing, and one approach is Black feminist thought. Part of the disconnect comes from practices of disembodying knowledge from lived experiences, which reifies the dominance of objectivity in schooling contexts and beyond. Through the fragmentation of knowledge, pre-service ECEC students are unable to access their lived experiences in relation to their education. Many higher education students have not lived their childhoods along set stages and have a plethora of experiences, from migration to sexuality to being unhoused, as well as their parents’ engagement in transnational family arrangements. Such varied experiences complicate the types of knowledge that students tend to access in pre-service ECEC programs. Black feminism is rooted in situated knowledge, which is the lived experiences of Black women who resist multiple oppressive systems (Collins, 2000). Black women's positionality becomes a starting point for theorizing about our experiences.² This provides an opportunity for pre-service ECEC practitioners to engage their own lived experiences and understand their social location, and how this colours their experiences and relationality, or not, to the literature and theories they access in their educational journey. Black feminism, therefore, challenges objectivity by recentring Blackness and women across multiple spaces of gender, race, class, sexuality, migration status, disability, language and religion. From as early as Sojourner Truth's (1851) speech, ‘Ain’t I a woman?’, as Black women, we have claimed our positionality and entry into political and social contexts that disenfranchise us by challenging efforts that merely analyse gender or race as non-intersecting domains. Crenshaw (1989) articulated this phenomenon by coining the term ‘intersectionality’ – a Black feminist concept that denotes the unique experiences of Black women at the intersection of their race, gender and class. Our embodied ways of knowing and being serve as a means of disruption.

In this section, I draw attention to and analyse Black feminist and intersectional research in ECEC. Black's (2018) intersectional study discovered the homogenizing of professional expectations in the ECEC field through a failure to acknowledge Black women's subjugation through raced, gendered and ableist hierarchical power structures within the workplace. Thus, Crenshaw's (1989) concept of intersectionality nuances the professional experiences and expectations of early childhood educators in childcare settings and beyond. However, sites of oppression, whether it be the workplace, the classroom or both, are part of larger structures that are deeply rooted in systems of racial capitalism that permeate the ECEC space (Nxumalo, 2019). The processes of accumulation and extraction fuelling the climate emergency and reproducing a lopsided distribution of wealth between the Global South and the Global North within racial-capitalist hierarchies are sustained through widespread inequality and its justification. According to Nxumalo (2019: 169), new imaginaries and strategies in ECEC should be carefully attended to so as not to work in the ‘service of those who benefit from racial capitalism’. The racial-capitalist system works to benefit a few by marginalizing many, all while maintaining hierarchies of oppression that become normalized. Pre-service ECEC programs can be a forum to disrupt these forms of oppression. Further, Black women's positionality is in direct conflict with such normalizing ideologies because of the raced, gendered and classed social locations we occupy, and is hence understood through deficit-based ideas if not situated in the broader sociopolitical contexts. Nxumalo (2019) identifies neo-liberal multiculturalism as a site for identifying deficit discourses in ECEC, and articulates that such an identification creates avenues for disruption in both research and practice. Pérez (2019) describes how the positionality of educators of colour can disrupt Whiteness in the classroom and encourage them to engage their own ‘cultural intuition’ anchored in Global South ways of knowing and being. By transgressing the boundaries of representation and conformity to White normative structures, Black feminist ECEC scholars posit the possibilities for decolonial disruption. Capturing the brilliance of Black children of colour can also extend the possibilities of speaking back against Euro-colonial and normative constructions of childhood.

When we educators look out at a classroom of black faces, we must understand that we are looking at children at least as brilliant as those from any well-to-do white community. If we do not recognize the brilliance before us, we cannot help but carry on the stereotypic societal views. (Pérez, 2019: 29)

Understanding Black brilliance as a pedagogical practice is a form of resistance against colonial conceptions of Blackness and the deficit orientation to Black childhoods. Teaching the histories of Black, Indigenous and racialized communities in teacher education programs, employing anti-bias education and intervening based on the educators’ own understandings, experiences and perceptions of race, is a way to decolonize ECEC (Pérez, 2019). Interventions that centre educators’ situated knowledges are a foundational feature of Black feminist thought. Storytelling in Black feminism is a form of praxis for challenging oppressive systems. Pérez et al. (2016) analyse child narratives by employing a Black feminist analytic framework. One example is the story of Elsa, a Latinx pre-kindergarten student who was asked to leave the room by an educator for not following an incomplete prompt while playing, and was sent to another space to ‘play games’; however, that was a space for children to be assessed, where the student was then labelled as ‘special’ (Pérez et al., 2016: 71). The pathologizing of Black and Brown children in education is rampant, as identified earlier (Essien, 2019). Pérez et al. (2016) unpack the uneven power structures that situate Whiteness at the top of a racial hierarchy, as well as the dynamics of power between adult educators and children, and how the story of Elsa reinforced this. Employing a Black feminist analytic framework, they highlight how the child was disenfranchised from that classroom learning space due to their raced and gendered subject position. By centring Black brilliance, pre-service ECEC programs can challenge colour-blind/colour-evasive, supposedly neutral tropes of childhood, and engage the students’ own experiences to analyse the systems that reinforce deficit-based approaches in education.

In response to exclusionary practices, Black feminist thought provides an analytic framework to disrupt the racist, capitalist and patriarchal structures that disenfranchise Black students, educators and staff. Black pre-service ECEC programs can benefit from transgressing the confines of the overwhelming discourses of development, and understanding one's own positionality in relation to their practice. As Nxumalo and Adair (2019) highlight, ‘school-readiness’ discourses – the expectation that students should be ready for their education before entering school – reinforce single stories as normative through a system that produces a White, middle-class, ableist and heteronormative core, which further marginalizes students from lower socio-economic and racialized backgrounds. Nxumalo and Adair (2019: 671) articulate Black feminism as a critical source to confront inequity in ECEC and state: ‘thinking with black feminisms enables educators to make visible the workings of intersecting oppressions in children's families’ everyday lives’. Extending notions of childhood beyond the individual creates space for Black families and communities. Prominent notions of the child are fragmented from the community, family and environment, which is counter to many Black childhood experiences. For pre-service ECEC programs, engaging the multiple intersectional sites through Black feminisms provides for nuanced understandings of the multifaceted sites of privilege and oppression. Pérez et al. (2016) describe a photovoice project that was carried out in a pre-service ECEC course, which was combined with Black feminist thought. This Black feminist photovoice project challenged dominant norms while positioning pre-service ECEC students to anchor their analysis in their own childhood and experiences.

Engaging my positionality through storytelling: a method in Black feminist radical tradition and thought

Reflecting on childhood, I think about relationality to family and the wider community, and how central that was to my experiences growing up. The term ‘extended family’ was not in my lexicon because even those who were not biologically related to me would be referred to as ‘aunties’. Understanding my childhood now – my Black childhood – I know that it transgressed the confines of ‘normal’ childhoods with nuclear families in suburban communities. I would spend my weekends with cousins and family members like my late paternal grandmother, travelling all through Toronto by public transit or in her little shared red car. We would visit other aunties and sit together chatting and eating roti with our hands, while I proved I could handle the dripping curry and pepper sauce, which was no small feat as a Canadian-born child. The women would problem-solve and discuss which hand they had in my grandmother's susu (see Hossein, 2016) – an ‘informal’ banking system that Black Caribbean women organize as a means of saving and generating income. My maternal grandmother, from Jamaica, would refer to this as a ‘partner’, but, as a child, I would understand it as ‘pardna’. My maternal grandmother later described to me some of the barriers she faced when moving to Canada in accessing banking services, loans and her first mortgage in the Greater Toronto Area. These systems come from African Indigenous banking systems (Hossein, 2016). Such ‘informal’ banking structures became entrenched in my childhood and weekend activities, where I learned how to do basic mathematical operations through quick mental math, take notes for record-keeping and help out however I could – and this was something I did with pride and honour, having been called on.

My paternal grandmother was an avid volunteer in political, community and social spaces. She loved to party, so I always looked forward to her getting dressed up and ‘ready for di road’ for Caribana. Her co-op apartment, located in Toronto's Parkdale community, was a base for other women and community members and family to get ready and excitedly walk over together to enjoy ‘a little lime’. Through this, I learned about my love for dance, the arts and Black expression. My paternal grandmother migrated from Trinidad to Italy, and then to Canada. She worked, went to school, and gained a number of ‘upgrading’ courses and other certifications. Both my grandmothers had more certifications than the average person can list or remember. This is not unique to their experiences, but quite common among Black women who migrate to Canada. They both engaged in domestic work at some point or other – cooking, cleaning and engaging in childcare duties for White middle-class families. I remember visiting some of these houses with my paternal grandmother on weekends. I would spend time playing with the children in their homes, in awe of the tall, endless staircases, rooms dedicated to gyms and multiple living rooms. When there were no children present, I would volunteer to help my grandmother with light cleaning duties while enjoying the satisfying scent of glass cleaner and wooden floor polish, which would tell me our job was done.

My maternal grandmother managed to purchase a home on the outskirts of Toronto, and it was there that I experienced a quiet life. This was thanks to her tremendous efforts, but also to her union job, which was a result of provincial racial equity legislation that benefited Black community members and allowed them to access jobs that were usually beyond their reach. I would read endless books, while she spoiled me with rice and peas, delicious breakfasts and tons of prayers. My mother and father decided not to stay together when I was a young age, but my mother maintained a relationship with my father's family, where I have more cousins than I can count. So, I grew up with my mother largely as an only child, although I have many siblings on my father's side and my mother had my sister later in life. My mother would be positioned as a single parent; however, she would always have her friends’ children over for weekends, or me at their houses, as well as my cousins from my father's side visit. She did this intentionally to ensure that I had a community around me. A scholar, Janice Fournillier asks whether Black single mothers are truly single (personal communication, 21 September 2021). This question causes me to reflect on my childhood and think that my mother was rooted in a community network of children and families, providing me with values and lessons that I learned were not limited to my own ‘home’ or my school. In the wider system that prefers heteronormative nuclear-family arrangements, my mother would be deemed a ‘lone parent’, although I know that, despite her struggles, she was never really alone. These experiences are not unique to children in the Black community. hooks (2015) describes the loneliness experienced by White women and how, during her college experience, they would revel in the community of women created by the women's movement. The experiences of community connectedness are something that Black women enjoy (Brady, 2020). Closeness with other women was not new for hooks, and this resonates with my experiences. I would visit family and friends when my mother ‘needed a break’ and without the guilt often perpetuated in White middle-class gender-normative structures.

Local care chains (for global care chains, see Wells, 2021) created avenues for women to advance their education and careers while maintaining community and Black joy. I also saw local care chains by White working-class mothers. The ‘park ladies’ – White working-class mothers – would watch over us children while our caregivers would run errands or go home to unwind from a stressful day, allowing for us children to play outside until sundown. All my mother would need to do in return would be to drop off Timr Horton's coffee and sometimes a couple of cigarettes, and, just like that, without helicopter or coddling approaches, these women would watch over all the children in the park while they chatted about their romantic relationships, bills, struggles, hopes and dreams on the park benches. They would also affirm us, reminding us that we were loved and cared for. These experiences bring to mind the unique experience of heterogeneity in Canada through Black women's intersectional social locations (Wane, 2009). Whether through race, class, disability, gender or religion, my childhood experiences reflect how culture is not static, and denotes the various ebbs and flows of the mutual aid networks created by women to foster change and maintain support.

Reflecting back, many of the practices from my childhood can be demonized as child neglect; however, they are emblematic of the social reproduction practices which sustain communities that are under-resourced when it comes to formal childcare sites and access to services. Further, my childhood experiences, when merely understood through a White Eurocentric lens, would pathologize my diverse kinship experiences, villainizing them for not fitting within the confines of normative, White, middle-class nuclear arrangements. When an educator without such varied experiences in their own childhood would then ask how my weekend was in class on Monday, it is no wonder that I would not be able to answer, as their expectations and my experiences varied drastically. As such, Black feminism opens up the possibilities for introspection through storytelling, which challenges dominant ways of knowing and being.

Embedded transformative change

I am calling for embedded transformative change, which is an active and liberatory process and tool to radically shift the landscape of pre-service ECEC. Countless practitioners, researchers, professionals, students and scholars have already identified the urgent need to realize changes to the long-standing developmental orientation and approach in the field. Now there is an opportunity, through a Black feminist theoretical and methodological orientation, to create this change. As Nxumalo (2021: 1198) states: ‘Black children cannot wait’. I think of change not in the neo-liberal forms of add-and-stir solutions but rather in challenges to the system that are deeply rooted in counter-knowledges, lived experiences and decolonial praxis. I think of change in the sense of the long history of Black feminist radical thought and action. Elsewhere, I have described seven principles that can lead to a shift in rethinking the curriculum through a Black educator’s sociopolitical orientation: community-rootedness; humility and reflexiveness; rethinking the classroom in time and space; mentorship; love and care; storytelling; and bold acts of disruption (Brady, 2020). These principles, rooted in decolonial praxis and African Indigenous onto-epistemologies, are essential for creating educational experiences that do not fragment and create further hierarchies, and instead extend the possibilities for reaffirming spaces, practices and research. This section has four main ideas for engaging embedded transformative change in pre-service ECEC: active engagement and thought; an explicit and intentional orientation; centring peripheral knowledges and intersectional differences; and the engagement of Black women's liberatory orientation.

Active engagement and thought

The practice of active engagement in embedded transformative change challenges passivity in theory, research and practice, and operates as a means for members of the pre-service ECEC field to view themselves as active agents of disruption rather than passive consumers of knowledge through banked pedagogical models (Freire, 2000). By empowering pre-service ECEC students, educators and the community, we can collectively engage in a process of praxis to challenge systems of oppression, and act on those challenges through small acts of disruption to large-scale community-based change. To achieve an active orientation in pre-service ECEC, theories, concepts and practices all require critical realignment. For example, are Black and Indigenous children textually represented as passive recipients of systems that disenfranchise or are they actively centred to highlight their brilliance, joy and flourishing? Moreover, since historical injustices have long-standing impacts on the community, are historical injustices read through a passive voice, as accidental issues fixed in the past furthering the justification and normalization of ongoing forms of oppression? For instance, in a text, are the terms ‘slavery’ or ‘enslaved’ used to describe the transatlantic slave trade, or are the resistances and solidarity of Black and Indigenous communities omitted or erased? Active engagement and thought can serve as a basis for educators, students and practitioners in pre-service ECEC to critically analyse and read texts, inside and outside the class, and disrupt, question and reimagine our role in systems. Often, being active in the capitalist economic system is associated with productivity and meaningless, or a lack of understanding of labourers’ work and outputs; however, such a fixation on activity for the means of production further marginalizes disabled, queer, mothers, elderly, Black, newcomers and those without status, blaming communities for their experiences of injustice and systemic disenfranchisement. I am not calling for activity that directly links to productivity to only benefit a few; rather, I think of activity as community orientations and building, challenging and supporting. Active engagement and thought can be a means to challenge neo-liberal systems, resulting in robust social programs which benefit communities that are continuously excluded. Active engagement and thought in pre-service ECEC also serves as a site to challenge objectivity, neutrality and the idea of ‘that is just the way things are’ that are rooted in the modern colonial logic. It also serves as a means to challenge the hierarchies of knowledge. I often ask students in pre-service ECEC classrooms how their peers, friends, family and community members value their education and choice of program. Most of them, if not all, will share that, compared to friends in business or science programs, their education is ranked lower. I then challenge them to think about and discuss why this is, and how a field that is rooted in care, largely comprising women, is situated in broader contexts. Active engagement in their educational experience as we are living it can create avenues for embedded transformative change. Hierarchies of knowledge are a classic feature of Euro-colonialism, where taken-for-granted notions can be masked as objective and neutral. By critically and actively disrupting these stratification systems, members of the field can translate this active orientation into their practice.

Explicit and intentional orientation

Earlier, I described the colour-blind approaches in ECEC (see Berman et al., 2017). The lack of the centring of raced experiences in childhoods, educators, families and communities results in a deficit-based view of race. Being explicit and intentional is significant because it advocates for naming the very issues that are creating barriers and injustice. Often, I note the discomfort in students saying the word ‘Black’. Walker et al. (2020) has advocated for intentionality by naming Blackness and actively shifting the ideals of colour-evasiveness in communicating with children. An explicit and intentional orientation is a feature of embedded transformative change in pre-service ECEC that can create paths for educators, students, practitioners and researchers to engage their own social location and perceptions of race and racism. Since pre-service ECEC is often thought of as outside the realm of discussions on systemic racism and various forms of oppression, by the time students enter graduate programs they express that they are upset that they have not learned about multiple experiences of childhoods earlier in their educational journey. Their discontent demonstrates that their programs were preoccupied with a developmental discourse, as a universal feature of childhood, rather than incorporating Black, Indigenous, queer, migrant, disabled and intersectional ontologies and epistemologies. Similarly, Black, White and racialized students in undergraduate pre-service ECEC programs express their deep-rooted disappointment in not learning about Black Canadian history when I share a documentary or text. They highlight how Black Canadian history has been erased not only from their educational experiences, but also from their communities. For example, students from the Niagara region in Ontario have never learned about the Black resistance taking place in their communities or the processes that made such neighbourhoods White in the first place (NOTLMuseum, 2021). These reactions from students with regard to learning about Black Canadian history point to what McKittrick (2006) notes in relation to the invisibility/visibility of Blackness in Canada. Explicit and intentional orientations are part of what I am advocating for as embedded transformative change, and can serve as a means of disruption.

Centring peripheral knowledges and intersectional differences

A recentring of peripheral South, women-of-colour knowledges is an act of epistemological disobedience (see Mignolo, 2007; Pérez, 2019). Anchoring intersectional differences in pre-service ECEC research and practice can create opportunities not to sway away from difference or view difference as deficit; rather, it can bolster new orientations in the field. For instance, when discussing global childhood in pre-service ECEC courses, I facilitate conversations where Filipinx students can critically reflect on and centre their own experiences and those of their parents and caregivers in transnational motherhood, domestic care and global care chains. By dedicating classroom time and space to centring peripheral knowledges, many of the students not only see themselves in a text, but can also rethink their intersectional differences as they relate to childhood, and connect Global North and Global South relations. Students are empowered to know that the social reproduction of their families through unequal power relations is what has led to the enrichment of Canada and White middle-class families. I see it as my responsibility to provide students with the opportunity to engage in class, especially if this is a component of their grade, but can only facilitate such a process if peripheral knowledges and differences come to the centre. The centring of peripheral knowledges then creates avenues to disrupt taken-for-granted norms and conceptions of family and childhood. Students then rethink how they have benefited from such systems, etched with the uneven distribution of goods, people and resources. Such an exercise allows for students to reflect on the complexities of childhoods, and that their own childhoods may not have followed the set stages as prescribed in development, serving as a challenge and a way to critically analyse theories and concepts they learn through the engagement of their own intersectional differences. Pre-service ECEC students do not need to ‘build up’ to discuss systems of power and oppression as it is part of their lived experiences. If the approach of needing a ‘build-up’ for ‘difficult conversations’ occurs in higher education, this can take root in ECEC practice, where the childhood-innocence discourse dominates.

Conclusion

In this article, I have articulated some of the pitfalls of the developmental discourse as stated by researchers in ECEC, discussed the framework of disruption, and reflected upon Black feminism and ECEC. I have explored the various critical scholarly orientations that can challenge dominant developmental and ‘normative’ ways of knowing and being. By offering Black feminism in ECEC, I see it as a theory and practice that is in tandem with critical scholarship in the field that challenges the status quo. Of particular note, I engage in Black feminism to reclaim my own subject position, as done through the storytelling in this article. I engage the possibilities of embedded transformative change, which are deeply rooted in Black women's ways of knowing and being, and centre on a liberatory praxis orientation, which is fundamental in Black feminist thought (Wane, 2009). Engaging in storytelling and disruption are means to challenge systems that oppress. Disrupting single theories, such as developmental psychology ideas, can lead to the recentring of members of pre-service ECEC who are often marginalized and, by extension, children, families and wider communities. Embedded transformative change in pre-service ECEC can be an ongoing form of engagement, disruption and praxis, with its roots in Black feminist thought.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thank you Paulyn Mandap for your research assistantship to support the investigation of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This article has been made possible through Faculty of Community Services research start-up funds at the Toronto Metropolitan University.

ORCID iD

Janelle Brady

Notes

Author biography

Janelle Brady is an assistant professor of Black Studies in the School of Early Childhood Studies, Faculty of Community Services at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research explores Black mothers' effective resistance strategies, race and racism in early years, and Black feminisms. She loves lattes, dance, hugs, and cycling.

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