Abstract
This article details a two-year small pilot project investigating possibilities for enacting slow scholarship reading practices with first-year undergraduate early childhood studies students. We follow the emerging push to think with “slow” practices as an antidote to the consumptive, reproductive, fast-paced knowledge politics of the neoliberal university. To begin, we review the literature on slow scholarship in the early childhood studies and education context, before sharing the structure and content of the course that housed this slow-reading experiment. Then, we analyse student responses to an optional online questionnaire that gathered insights into their reflective experience of slow reading. We argue that slow reading disrupts quotidian student subjectivities and opens space for reconfiguring our relations with knowledge, which stretches beyond the post-secondary context into work with young children and families. To conclude, we offer provocations for cultivating slow-reading practices.
For the 2022 and 2023 Fall semesters, we—two professors of early childhood studies at a university on Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee lands in the nation currently known as Canada—decided that we would experiment with the practice of slow readings with first-year undergraduate students who, as a requirement of their degree programme in early childhood studies, are enrolled in a 12-week curriculum course that focuses on children's environments. As co-leads for the course, we work with an entire first-year cohort of approximately 120–60 students. Over many months, we engaged in meaningful deep discussions where we debated the concept of slow scholarship, reflected on our experiences with teaching the course, and debated issues that might arise from such an approach. We thought critically about our teaching practices that at times mirrored traditional modes of teaching in the academy, where knowledge is framed as a commodity and, therefore, the role of a professor is to expose students to a breadth of palatable information to be acquired, memorized and assessed/performed such that individual students possess increased marketable expertise and employability (Biesta, 2015; Todd, 2018). We considered how we might engage students with their readings because we did not want to position course content as a benign resource that exists only to be consumed and possessed. We wanted to invite students to think carefully and thoughtfully with the concepts that were presented by a range of authors and consider how these ideas could influence students’ practice.
Our discussions led us to a conclusion that instead of the typical 12 weeks of readings, with one or two scholarly pieces to focus on each week (in addition to videos and podcasts), we wanted to engage with four readings over the entire semester. We wondered what would become possible if we spent 2–3 weeks patiently working our way through each article and unpacking/deconstructing the concepts over time rather than rushing through the ideas in one lecture and then shifting to another topic the following week. Having taught this course previously for many years, we found ourselves in a pandemic-hangover context where reading an avalanche of new information each week was not feasible for students, nor was it, we hypothesized based on our experience, a meaningful or engaging pedagogical experience for students. To tackle the overwhelming amount of content advanced with 12 to 24 readings in a course had become, we noted, a technical endeavour where we asked students to become rapid consumers of what felt akin to disposable knowledge; knowledge that we did not have time to tie deeply to students’ ethics, politics and pedagogical intentions as emerging educators just beginning their process of learning to live well with young children and families (Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020).
We struggled with the risks of drawing only four readings into our semester-long course, wondering if there would be ample theoretical nourishment for the provocations that we wanted students to consider as they thought through how children perceive, get to know and engage with their environments, and how we might design environments with (instead of for) children. That our course was located in a university degree programme was also a consideration: would a course with only four readings receive negative feedback for being too thin and/or having too low a rigour load for prevailing and power-laden narratives about what a university-level programme must expect of students? This felt especially tangible amidst the dehumanizing prevailing narrative of junior undergraduate classes needing to serve a “weeding-out” or “setting the stage” function that presumes to already know—and to make highly consequential exclusions based on—the skills and dispositions that first-year students must demonstrate to succeed at their studies. We also felt hesitant with reclaiming the word “slow” in the context of early childhood studies, where historically “slow” was imbued with a diagnostic tone and assigned to individual children as a deficit marker of difference. Turning to the literature on slow scholarship, we decided to (1) take seriously and refuse the context students face in the fast-paced university, where we ask those who will do the difficult, complex, rich work of supporting children and families to digest information rapidly and reproduce their learnings didactically to then be assessed on their technical prowess and ability to rehearse knowledge, and (2) create our classrooms as an unfamiliar “slow” space where we intentionally asked how selected sections of a reading link to questions of pedagogy, ethics, politics and world-building with children. It was important to us to disrupt the highly individualist and extractive economy of knowledge that we could see bubbling through our course and instead think otherwise about how we read collectively, and how we read in the name of pedagogical thought instead of in the service of consuming knowledge.
Pedagogy, for us, names an educational process concerned with “ongoing critically reflective boundary-crossing dialogues” (Hodgins et al., 2020: 6). This means that, should we take up the proposition of slow reading, we must do so toward intersecting the boundaries we inherit in the typical classroom: efficiency, clarity, certainty, normative assessment (Di Paolantonio, 2023; Osberg and Biesta, 2021; Todd, 2022). Pedagogy “endeavour[s] to animate early childhood education as a site of creative transformations…by exploring the concept of life” (Berger and Argent, 2020: 197); that is, pedagogy asks how we can live well with children where “through pedagogy early childhood education has to create everyday situations and practices for engaging in alternate relational economies” (Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020: 637). For us, this means that any dive into slow reading must take seriously that reading and knowledge are relational practices entangled, quite literally, with world-making because how we grapple together with knowledge shapes how we nurture more liveable worlds collectively. It is important for us to note that pedagogy, as we learn from our colleagues, is not bounded to the formal classroom. Many early childhood studies undergraduate students move into interdisciplinary practice spaces, like hospitals, community services, activism and policy, and to think with pedagogy as the crafting of a collective life remains deeply relevant to their work.
Our methodological intentions
After receiving approval from the university's Research Ethics Board, we collected qualitative data from students based on their experience with slow reading over the course of each semester. We situated this very small research project as a pilot of a larger project that will continue in the Fall 2024 course delivery. At Weeks Four, Eight and Twelve (after the semester had ended) we distributed an optional online Google Form questionnaire that asked students four questions: (1) What happens to how you read (your reading practices) when you return to one article/book chapter/piece over multiple weeks?; (2) What is your experience of following the list of reading practices offered?; 1 Are some reading practices more impactful for you than others? How?; (3) Do you think that slow reading is a practice you might use in other classes or in professional contexts? How? Why? Why not?; and (4) How do the concepts of slow thinking, slow reading, or slow scholarship influence how you think about your work with children?
In total, we gathered nine student replies in 2022 and four responses in 2023. We turn to these student engagements in the sections that follow not to prove any best practice related to slow reading, but to configure this article as a pedagogical reflection of our own experience with slow reading and to offer forward an invitation for others to consider how slow reading might open toward meaningful learning in other contexts. As such, the low number of student replies is not of great concern to the argument we make, as we position this article not as an empirically generalizable case study or proposed best-practice framework to be widely implemented, but as an exploration of how slow reading unfolded in our own classrooms with a particular group of students. We also contextualize the low response rate within the fast-scholarship culture of the university, where making time to fill out a questionnaire that does not represent an immediate payoff for students is incredibly difficult amid their high workloads, employment, or caring responsibilities beyond the academy.
We begin this article by situating slow reading within the slow scholarship movement. Then, we briefly share an overview of the course structure where we cultivate a slow-reading practice with students. We then think with two of the questions we asked students, focusing on how slow reading influences how they think about their own work and then, their work with children and families. To conclude, we offer forward the questions that we continue to grapple with as we think with cultivating slow-reading practices with undergraduate early childhood studies students.
Slow scholarship
We come to slow scholarship first through the work of Stengers (2016) who argues that the research university has become a site of rapid knowledge accumulation, losing sight of its philosophical commitments. Per Stengers, “for many scientific researchers, to slow down and lose one’s time with questions that do not directly contribute to the immediate and evaluable progress of their field is even something akin to a sin—to a temptation a true scientist knows he has to resist. However, there is no fast philosophy” (p. 5). The economy of the university is one of transit and production; relations and chaos and mess hold no power in the face of increasingly urgent pushes to create the most efficient, translatable, instrumental, marketable programmes and students. Stengers continues, arguing that standing up to the machine of the “fast” university requires “the demanding operation which would reclaim the art of dealing with, and learning from, what scientists too often consider messy, that is, what escapes general, so-called objective, categories” (p. 10). This, for Stengers, is the ethos of slow science: a reacquainting with the uncertainty we have learned to forget in service of expediency. There is nothing easy about such a project; there is no roadmap we can follow to slow our scholarship, as such a formalized procedure would be all too easily captured into the logic of production required by the fast university. As Stengers proposes, “this may be the challenge slow science should answer: to enable scientists to accept what is messy not as a defect but as what we have to learn to live and think in and with” (p. 10). Taking mess as a rich vein of life is not, we want to point out, so far from thinking with pedagogy, where we take seriously the work of life-making in complex worlds with children and families. For us then, to think about enlivening Stengers’s propositions for slow science in our early childhood studies course, we knew we needed to cultivate reading practices that trafficked in uncertainty and speculation—mess—and not in repetition and replication. We needed to find a way to create a classroom culture that held space for doing reading and engaging articles through processes that “must be,” as Stengers writes, “slow, difficult, rich in friction, pulling and tugging between diverging priorities” (p. 11). To read slowly then, is not only to literally slow down—for example, reading 4 pages in preparation for each class instead of 22 pages—but requires that we slow down our rhythm in the classroom so that we can get to know the readings for the careful, pedagogical messes that they intentionally weave. This is a practice of reading that asks of us to become philosophers, as Stengers might argue, and not consumers nor scientists. To read slowly, we need to learn to read otherwise, where the otherwise stands in the face of reading for only keywords or jargon, generalizable practices, readily applicable actions, or large-scale conclusions that reach beyond their borders to prove their mettle. Instead, we needed to learn to read with students, collectively, for ethical and political questions, and for how the readings felt in their bodies as they got to know their ideas and stories. We needed to centre slow reading as a practice of really getting to know a reading—of becoming familiar with what is strange about the proposals a reading advances or the unsettling a reading offers of traditional early childhood studies practices.
There is a rich and emerging avalanche of scholarship focused on slowness and slow scholarship. Hartman and Darab (2012) set the context for thinking slowly in the academy, arguing that “work intensification via an altered temporality becomes a technique deployed at a particular historical juncture that expresses unequal relations of power between managers and intellectual workers within the cultural logic of the corporate university. It also dictates the emergence of particular pedagogical practices” (p. 56). They show how the capitalist university works to promote fast scholarship that is easily marketable, efficient, applicable and transferable, and that it does so in the service of humanist progress. Slow scholarship, they argue, is about crafting slow pedagogies that make possible slow subjectivities; ways of being together in education that hold space for “engaging with ideas through deep reflection, experiential learning, and reflexivity, ultimately resulting in critical insight, creativity, and innovation” (p. 58). What this means for our experiment with slow reading is that we must carefully locate our project amid the ebbs and flows of the academy, knowing that the impulse to read quickly produces students as consumers and knowledge as a transaction. To interrupt this is to ask the students to inhabit a different student subjectivity, one that might feel unfamiliar and not yet articulated. In another thread of thinking about slow scholarship, Ulmer (2017) writes of a slow ontology, asking, What if—in response to a rapidly increasing pace of academic production—scholars adopted a Slow Ontology? Because this question involves more than slowing the pace or volume of scholarly production to invoke underlying issues of ontology, it asks not how we can find a slower way of doing scholarship, but how we can find a slower way of scholarly being. (p. 202)
Bozalek (2017) also writes of slow scholarship, this time in the context of writing retreats. For Bozalek, slow scholarship incites “attentiveness, care, thoughtfulness and quality rather than quantity and production” (p. 40). Proposing slow scholarship as a tendril of a response-able pedagogy, 2 Bozalek argues that slow scholarship “requires an openness to the world, an activeness in the world and a patience for the response in encounters and events” (p. 53). Relevant to our slow-reading experiment, this means that to read slowly is to work to understand how readings are part of world-making, both with children and within the academy. There is, as Bozalek writes, an “activeness and a patience” to slow reading, where we think together with students about what a reading opens up for possibilities for children's learning and we concurrently resist having too technical a conversation about how a reading directly translates into best practices to integrate into students’ own work. This is a tricky balance, one that requires us to let go of our habits of technocratic practice and to focus instead on imagining how we might set into motion educational processes relevant to children's complex worlds. We aimed to create a safe classroom environment that encouraged our students to experience and embrace slow reading as a pedagogically sound approach and to be open to how slow reading can be honoured with children. This movement from our post-secondary classroom to the context of working with children was important to us. We wanted to invite students to think about how slow reading can be reimagined towards creating space and time for children to experience their world by engaging in and with experiences that matter to them.
In the context of early childhood education, Clark (2022) writes about the connections between the hurried child and hurried higher education. For Clark, “the underlying values, structures, and procedures in the Higher Education sector will in turn impact on the preparation of early childhood educators and on day-to-day engagement with young children” (p. 6). Clark argues that the “hurried child” is a symptom of the hurried university, where students are pressured to become experts (or, the hurried educator) in as expedient a mode as possible, such that they succumb to standardized, universalizable practices of learning and assessment concerned only with producing trained professionals who can provide sufficient custodial care necessary for parents and guardians to return to the (fast) workforce. This logic is all too readily transferred into children's lives and children become subject to the question “are we asking young children and those who work with young children to run ever faster to maintain their place and ours in the world?” (Clark, 2022: 10). The epidemic of “fast” life, whereby “the value of the present moment for children becomes almost invisible in the face of what looms ahead” (p. 21), emphasizes the ethical and political contours of thinking with slow scholarship: do we want to perpetuate modes of being that forever temporally locate university students and early childhood educators in terms of their economic value, and children in relation to their future market contribution? Here we hear Stengers’s (2016) cautions against science that resolves in the name of progress and forgets complexity in favour of productivity. What is the purpose of education in early childhood studies and/or education? Is it to perpetuate the facade of fastness and rapid knowledge accumulation with an eye pointed perpetually into the future, where it is the ability of the student, educator and child to be efficient and productive that matters? Or might we instead grapple in complexity, in mess, in pedagogy, asking instead how we need to grapple with knowledges to build more liveable worlds together? This pipeline that Clark articulates, where the hurried child is never separate from the hurried student and the hurried adult who were educated in a hurried academic environment, weighs heavily on our thinking about slow scholarship in our course, because we want to intervene in the logic of hurriedness, but we want to do so in such a way that agitates the conventions of hurriedness as it manifests in dominant logics in the field (like normative child development and objective child assessment checklists). Put differently, our interest in intervening in the hurriedness that envelops early childhood studies is not academic. It is an ethical and political commitment to creating classroom rhythms that dwell in the messy realities of figuring out how to live well with children and families.
We situate our project of experimenting with slow reading alongside a larger project in higher and early childhood education to nourish alternative knowledge-sharing practices that refuse the rapid consumption of content and subsequent acquisition-application cycle that capitalism demands. Our orientation to slow reading finds affinities in feminist proposals for doing reading (including Alaimo, 2016; Shotwell, 2016), writing (including Helin, 2019; Page, 2017), storying (including Blaise et al., 2017; Haraway, 2016; Nxumalo, 2018) and citing (including: Ahmed, 2013; CLEAR Lab, 2021; Land and Montpetit, 2023; Tuck et al., n.d.) as situated, vulnerable, eclectic and relational processes. From this scholarship, we hold that the engagements with knowledge-sharing that we make possible and impossible with students are world-making processes grounded in rigorous accountability. As Nociti and Blaise (2024) offer, “reading [writing, storying and citing] across temporalities, scales, disciplines, and genres draws attention to the complex relations humans share with weedy worlds” (p. 1). Further, our project learns from scholars who intervene in Euro-Western ontological systems and disrupt epistemic inheritances loyal to white supremacy (e.g., Bang et al., 2022; Rowe and Tuck, 2017; Singh, 2018; Todd, 2016). Thinking with this scholarship, we take seriously that our reading practices with students are deeply political encounters with colonial knowledge systems; encounters with a necessarily relentless risk of reproducing or contravening colonizing knowledge-sharing structures. We stay near to McKittrick's (2021) mediation on the reciprocity, responsiveness and difficulty of living with knowledge wherein “we risk reading what we cannot bear and what we love too much and then we let it go, revise, and read again” (p. 34).
Reading otherwise, we propose, might mount one such intervention as we refuse to let the knowledges the readings offer become subject to rapid consumption and instead insist, sometimes irritatingly, that we must sit with each sentence, each concept, each story told in a reading, mulling it through and imagining all of the complexities that animate how we might carry it with us into our practice with children and families (and—a subject for another article—our own research). Slow reading matters because it opens the possibility for slow pedagogy and for slow childhoods, and we understand slow or unhurried childhoods as those that have the time to participate in meaningful, responsive learning and life.
Course structure
As mentioned previously, we structured our course around four readings. The course at hand is a first-year, first-semester course on understanding children's relations with their environments. Accordingly, there were a few key propositions that we wanted to centre throughout the course that align with our own approach to research and practice, and that we wanted students to carry right from the outset of their time in our programme. To begin, we wanted to assert that children are capable and competent actors in coming to understand and create their environments. Then, it was important that we understand how children are co-curators of their spaces. Next, we took seriously that children have existing rich relations with their environments. Finally, we wanted to take up how children's worlds are always part of entangled human and more-than-human common worlds. This central contention, that children are capable and competent co-curators who already have complex relations with human and more-than-human places, guided our selection and trajectory of readings in the course. While we read different articles/chapters in 2022 and 2023, we read only four to five pieces during both offerings of the course. Our course assessments aimed to echo the slowness we tried to cultivate through our reading. In both 2022 and 2023 we asked students to get to know one area of their immediate community extremely well through creating a 3-min. “cellphilm” 3 about how children might grapple with the complex politics relevant to that place, and then at the conclusion of the semester, students gathered into small groups to create a podcast to share their experiences in lingering with the lived places they selected, discussing what each place might mean for their understanding of how children get to know, experience and co-create their environments. In 2023, we built upon our intention for slowness by creating a semester-long in-class imaginative mapping assignment where students were invited to, patiently and through acts of return, envision what a more liveable community with children might look like, including its material, geographical and social characteristics.
Having now discussed our theoretical and pedagogical relation to slow science and having detailed our course structure, we move on to discussing two of the four central questions that we asked students to respond to as they reflected on their slow-reading experiences. We want to emphasize again that we are never making an argument for generalizability nor for over-interpreting student responses beyond the small scope of a single course with a low student response rate. Instead, what we are hoping to do in what follows is share our pedagogical reflections and offer forward some provocations for continuing to think with what slow reading makes possible and impossible for learning with students about children's relations to their environments.
Understanding students’ slow reading practices
What happens to how you read (your reading practices) when you return to one article/book chapter/piece over multiple weeks?
Students found that they could create a rhythm of return as they were asked to revisit a piece over multiple weeks and that this opened up a different subjectivity—one beyond the rushed student consumer—for reading. One student reflected that, Returning to one piece over multiple weeks has allowed me to fully immerse myself in the text and truly understand, interpret and reflect on the reading. I have found that I deeply understand the concepts in the reading, and grasp every idea presented rather than a select few. I also approach the reading more open minded, less stressed, and not resentful of the fact that it was assigned [emphasis added]. It leaves a more positive connotation in my mind for the class and what is being taught, which in turn makes me want to do the reading and makes it easier to focus on the text.
I have found thus far that I am able to understand and retain the information being read a lot better when returning to one article/book chapter/piece over multiple weeks. Personally because it takes the pressure off memorizing tons of information each week, I am more likely to really understand what I am reading [emphasis added] and put more effort and thought into what I am reading as there is not a seemingly unreachable goal of pages that must be read each week. Revisiting [emphasis added] has made it more manageable and thus more enjoying.
Here, the student is putting forward the idea of a slow-reading pedagogy of revisiting, where to revisit is to work to understand what a reading means in the student's context. To “really understand what I am reading” is to pause, to grapple, and to mount a response to what each proposition offered in a reading might mean in different moments of different work with children. It draws students in; it subsumes us all, differently, in the life of an article. Slow-reading pedagogies of revisiting are, as the student shares, a counter to the rapid accumulation of information asked for in traditional hurried reading practices. This is important because, in our experience, quickly accumulated information often lasts only for the temporal period of directly engaging and rehearsing the reading and might not linger with students beyond the efficient reading needed to succeed in a class.
Another student respondent noted that “I start to carefully consider little details in the readings. What I also find is that I end up making many more connections between the readings and my own personal life [goals] [emphasis added] than I normally would when I do a quick read-through in one sitting.” Here we propose a slow-reading practice of becoming implicated. Rather than holding readings at arms-length, as technocratic documents to be consumed, memorized, and expelled in class discussions and assignments, slow reading created possibilities for students to become implicated—to see their own lives woven within—the readings. This is incredibly important in the early childhood studies and education context, where students will be guided by their pedagogical intentions (Vintimilla et al., 2023) in their work with children and families. Students have to stand for something; they cannot do all modes of practice in all moments. Such a model is consistent with the fast university expectation, where readings are automatically ascribed a truth power through virtue of being assigned, and students are taught that their practice must integrate as many perspectives and practices as possible. What slow reading invites is a refusal of such logic. Instead, it asks students to consider how a reading feels in their body as they engage with it: Does this align with their pedagogical intentions, with the ethics and politics that guide their relations with children and families? This tugs students into the imperfect propositions that the readings offer and advances the idea that all readings come from somewhere, they have a history, and they open something up—they have a life as we envision what they might mean in their own work. This reading practice of becoming implicated is important because it counters the universalism of knowledge, which is especially important in the reconceptualist early childhood studies and education space, where for so long knowledges about child development were considered to be universal truths and wrought immeasurable violent consequences for diverse children. Now, there is a growing pulse of scholars and practitioners who counter the universalization of knowledge about children, arguing instead for locally and culturally meaningful ways of understanding children's growth and development (Burman, 2016; Castañeda, 2002; Dyer, 2019; Silin, 2018). Being implicated in course readings is good practice for learning to engage with knowledge beyond universalism, because it makes clear that the knowledge perpetrator (the student, the professor) is bound up in the politics and consequences of the knowledges they choose to integrate—their pedagogical intentions—in their work with children and families.
How do the concepts of slow thinking, slow reading or slow scholarship influence how you think about your work with children?
This question invited the longest responses from students, which we take as a sign that students take seriously the importance of questioning how their classroom work influences what they make possible and impossible in their work with children and families. One thread of student responses focused on infiltrating the hurried systems of early childhood education that students are inheriting: I feel that they [slow thinking, slow reading, or slow scholarship] influence how I think about my work with children in the sense of understanding children better and the problems in childcare systems that need to be fixed a lot better. As well, this approach has made me re-evaluate how much pressure is put on children in the context of fast thinking [emphasis added] and reading even from a very young age and makes me think about how I could change this in my approach to teaching in the classroom setting.
The concepts of slow reading, thinking & scholarship make me rethink the typical models [emphasis added] we use for teaching, and prompt me to further explore new concepts in regards to teaching, that may similarly benefit students, so that I can implement them in my own practice.
Here too, this student is gesturing toward a reading practice that is expansive and systemic, that “reads” the work of reading beyond only the physical reading a student encounters and instead questions how the way that we are asked to read positions us as actors in a system of knowledge beyond the pages of an article. These are complex links; there is nothing easy about thinking through how slow reading in the classroom inspires possibilities for rethinking the knowledge dynamics at play in the early childhood studies field. This creates a reading practice of vast appreciation, where students begin to understand that their ways of reading are modes of engaging knowledge, and that their modes of engaging knowledge shape how they will share different knowledges with different children.
This focus on how reading has larger consequences than simply just literal reading practices was echoed by another student: I’ve been surprised to see that the concept of slow scholarship has had a significant impact on my view of children from an educator's standpoint. In taking the time to discuss sections of the reading with my class has allowed me to not only get a much deeper understanding of the reading, but also gain insight to other people's perspectives on the reading as well. Because of our discussions, words like “muchness,” “pedagogy,” and “capable” are things that I’ve begun to think about frequently when talking about children, [emphasis added] and I think I’ll continue to do so, well into the future when I’ve begun my work as a child care worker.
A third iteration of students’ thinking about how slow-reading practices influence their work with children is an emphasis on wanting to move slowly with children. As one student offered, It helps me understand that things take time. If as a student, I feel overwhelmed with all this new information in such a short period of time how can I as a teacher expect a young child to comprehend and understand everything they are learning in a short period of time as well.
The concept of slow reading could impact the way I think about how children learn and understand new concepts and the time frame that it takes to learn those new things. Learning new information can be overwhelming and doesn’t/shouldn’t be rushed, it should be taught in a way that really helps you understand and offer room for discussion and questions.
We want to be careful to not make a technocratic argument here—we are not arguing that students should copy our in-class reading practices directly into how they read with children. We also do not think that this is what students are proposing in their responses. Rather, what students are getting at are the pedagogical possibilities that slowness might open in their work with children. This is a question of how slow learning is not just about literal slowness but is about reframing our relationships with knowledge. Reframing our relations with knowledge sounds, to us, like the profoundly world-shaping work of someone who supports children and families in education spaces.
Provocations for cultivating slow-reading practices
As we conclude this article, we want to offer forward a few provocations that are decidedly not best practices for integrating slow reading across classroom contexts, but that invite our fellow educators in early childhood studies and education to consider how and what slow reading might make possible in our relations with students, children, and teaching. First, we want to propose a reclamation of the word slowness, wrestling it from its diagnostic, minoritizing histories wherein it was applied to labelling individual children and their uncommon rhythms of learning, and instead see slowness as a practice of becoming implicated, revisiting, thinking systemically, grappling with the unknown, and seeing knowledge politics as the work of world-making with children. We want to put forward the idea that slow reading creates possibilities for thinking with students about the knowledge politics of our times: where does hurried reading come from? How does it make us as particular complying, productive, efficient, instrumental knowledge-seeking subjects of the academic? Are these relations that we want to perpetuate with children and families—and how do we disrupt the relations with knowledge that we inherit? Then, we want to propose slow reading as a process of reinventing how we might read together with students. If we do not see slow reading as a tool of the individualist, extractive knowledge economy so ripe in higher education, then what becomes of our reading practices? That is, how do we read collectively with students, and with our messy worlds, in post-secondary education?
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
