Pedagogists and educators engaging ethical-political dimensions of early childhood education

Abstract

This article explores how pedagogists (pedagogical leaders) and early childhood educators engage in ethical-political work within everyday practices in early childhood centers. We argue for modes of educator engagement that foster rich educational experiences while preserving the ethical-political dimensions of education. We draw on a project that focuses on educating educators to re-envision quality in Canadian early childhood education. The research is situated within postqualitative approaches that resist universal categories, attending instead to the situated, relational, and contingent nature of research. In a postqualitative manner, we offer four stories—educators and pedagogists working in the midst of complex circumstances, rethinking early childhood education’s lexicon, composing educational spaces, and forging situated curricula—that highlight the complexity of the educator-pedagogist relationship. The article emphasizes the need to rethink traditional professional learning models, with significant implications for early childhood education.

Pedagogists and educators in early childhood education

Professional learning for early childhood educators in North America typically follows a traditional model where the primary goal is to equip educators with new skills and updated knowledge to apply in their daily practice (see Borko, 2004). Within this traditional framework, educators are often seen as technicians who receive and then apply knowledge rather than as political actors engaged in a broader vision of education (Dahlberg and Moss, 2004). This view is sustained by an entanglement of neoliberal logics—focused on efficiency, regulation, outcomes—and developmental discourses that frame children and educators within normative, staged progressions. In Canada, these forces are further entangled with colonial logics (Tuck, 2013) that position early childhood education as a mechanism for normalization and assimilation, regulating which forms of life are deemed legitimate, valuable, and educable. These intersecting logics produce a context in which educators are governed by a demand for measurable results and curriculum is often reduced to developmentally appropriate activities designed to prepare children for school.

Alternative views of education and educator engagement—as exemplified in the work of scholars who advocate for approaches to professional learning that are innovative, sustainable, continuous, and enacted with, rather than for, early childhood educators (Dahlberg and Moss, 2004; Devlieghere et al., 2023; Elek and Page, 2019; Page and Eadie, 2019; Peleman et al., 2018; Schachter et al., 2024)—rely on a role that is referred to, depending on the context, as a pedagogista, a pedagogical leader, or a pedagogist. The Italian pedagogista role is understood through Reggio Emilia’s early childhood project. Giamminuti (2024a) argues that the pedagogista cannot be thought of as someone who delivers professional development for educators. She uses the term formazione to highlight the reciprocal relationship between pedagogisti and educators, emphasizing their roles as public intellectuals rather than mere technicians. Another instance of alternative engagements with educators can be found in Belgium, where Devlieghere et al. (2023: 666) advocate for pedagogical leaders whose role is to create a “pedagogical culture” that considers “the diversity of professional roles in childcare and how these roles interact to create a reciprocal space where reflective practitioners can thrive.”

Situating our work alongside such international alternative approaches, in this article we focus on how pedagogists and early childhood educators in Canada engage together in pedagogical processes. Employing post-qualitative approaches, we offer insights into an unexplored dimension of the pedagogist-educator nexus: how ethical-political work unfolds through everyday experiences in early childhood centers. We draw on fieldwork in a project Early Childhood Pedagogy Network intended to support early childhood educators’ daily practices and create rich early childhood education spaces (see Early Childhood Pedagogy Network (ECPN), 2025). The project was inspired by Dahlberg et al.’s (2024) reformulations of quality early education environments. In Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care (Dahlberg et al., 2013: 3), they argued that quality is not “something to be achieved” but rather “a problem, something to be questioned”; thus, “early childhood institutions can be understood as public forums situated in civil society in which children and adults participate together in projects of social, cultural, political, and economic significance” (78). Working toward this vision of early childhood centers as vibrant educational gathering spaces, our project introduced the pedagogist role in Canada (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2023; Vintimilla et al., 2023).

Pedagogical leadership roles have long histories in Italy and Belgium; the pedagogist role in Canada emerged in conversation with these inheritances while attending closely to local conditions. It does not replicate the European models but responds to Canada’s specific social, historical, and political landscape of early childhood education. The term pedagogist as a formal role in Canada was chosen by a group of early childhood educators and scholars committed to collectively reimagining what pedagogical leadership could be, in dialog with the pressing conditions educators navigate daily (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2023; Vintimilla et al., 2023; Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020). This reimagining was grounded in a recognition that the intersecting logics of developmentalism, neoliberalism, and colonialism shape early childhood education in Canada. The pedagogist role was created to respond to these conditions—not to offer corrective interventions in educators’ practice but to engage with educators in resisting and reconfiguring the taken-for-granted foundations of early childhood education.

Simply put, pedagogists work alongside educators to enact situated, dialogical, and transformative pedagogical projects in early childhood centers. A pedagogist challenges assumptions/beliefs/values, thinks through theoretical frameworks that guide practices, and engages with educators in thinking/doing with ideas. A pedagogist walks with educators to address their own practice as ethical-political by attending to how their practice involves ethical and political decisions. Through these processes, pedagogists support educators to bring educational spaces into existence rather than only providing a service for families. In our work, as in the Belgian and Italian contexts, we differentiate between the roles of educator and pedagogist (Vintimilla et al., 2025). While educators carefully and meaningfully engage in ongoing curriculum making with children, pedagogists support them by reading and interpreting the educational context, intercepting and interrupting dominant narratives, asking unconventional questions about pedagogy, and discerning pedagogical possibilities (Vintimilla et al., 2025).

In their work with educators, pedagogists ask: What conditions are we living in that we want to interrupt? What conditions do we want to foster? How do these conditions and historical legacies implicate educators, children, and early education? How do we co-create pedagogical conditions that foster more livable lives for all in early childhood (Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020)? With a series of pedagogical commitments guiding their practice (Vintimilla et al., 2023), pedagogists challenge the structures and habits of early childhood education, ask novel questions that transform the traditional early childhood lexicon, and interrupt the status quo by cogenerating pedagogies that create livable futures for all. In settler colonial Canada, where our work takes place, creating livable worlds entails refusing developmental narratives rooted in colonialism. Thus, pedagogists push back against narratives that rehearse what Wynter (2003) calls the story of Man: the universal human progressing toward rationality by acquiring more and more knowledge. Recognizing that “childhood is a critical site in which this colonial story of the human is made out to be a common-sense truth” (Knight, 2024: 838), pedagogists actively disrupt the humancentrism embedded in practices such as developmentally appropriate practice and child-centered approaches (Land et al., 2022).

Pedagogists also refuse the developmental narratives embedded in neoliberalism’s notion of a society driven by competition, calculation, economization, and individual choice (Roberts-Holmes and Moss, 2021). Wary of developmentalism’s responsible, autonomous, self-regulated, self-disciplined, and entrepreneurial child, pedagogists nurture the possibility that other worlds are possible by cultivating webs of mutuality and collectivity among humans and more than humans (Roberts-Holmes and Moss, 2021; Taylor, 2013). This entails, for instance, foregrounding Indigenous and/or Black relational onto-epistemologies (Nxumalo and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2023) and opening up to the invention of modes of subjectivity not yet delineated (Skott-Myers and Skott-Myers, 2024).

The remainder of this article unpacks the threads we touched on above. We begin with a brief overview of the Canadian and British Columbian early childhood contexts to provide international readers with a grounded understanding of our research. Following a thorough description of our project and methodological approaches, we address how pedagogists and educators collectively engage ethical-political dimensions of early education through four related stories: working in complex conditions; rethinking early childhood education’s lexicon; composing educational spaces; and forging a situated curriculum.

Early childhood education in Canada and British Columbia

In Canada, early childhood education has been fragmented, with the country’s 10 provinces and three territories responsible for early childhood programs and the federal government providing primary funding. Early childhood settings include full-day center-based group care, part-day preschool, and family child care provided as a service to families by an array of nonprofit, for-profit, and public agencies, including local and Indigenous governments and public institutions. Currently, the federal government is developing multilateral agreements with the provinces, territories, and Indigenous leaders to forge a Canada-wide system (Beach et al., 2023). Despite significant changes, early childhood education is still perceived as a service for families rather than a right of children (Moss and Mitchell, 2024).

In British Columbia (BC), where the Early Childhood Pedagogy Network is located, child care moved from the Ministry of Children and Family Development to the renamed Ministry of Education and Child Care (previously the Ministry of Education) in 2022. The education requirements for early childhood educators are minimal. In group and preschool programs, educators must hold a 1-year certificate, while early childhood assistants must complete a single approved course at the college or university level. Some educators complete a 2-year diploma, allowing them to receive an infant/toddler or special needs certificate to practice. In a classroom with children aged 3–5, only one educator needs to hold a certificate; the other staff may be early childhood assistants. In an infant/toddler classroom, one of the educators must also hold an infant/toddler certificate (King’s Printer, 2023). There are no educational requirements for family child care providers.

The B.C. Early Learning Framework (BCELF) is available as a curriculum document in all early childhood programs across the province, but its use is not mandatory. Developed by the provincial government in collaboration with stakeholders and consultation with Indigenous partners, the framework puts forward language, concepts, and pedagogies that challenge the ongoing legacies of colonization and calls for a commitment to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada (2015) calls to action in education. Between 2008 and 2015, the TRC heard from over 6000 people, most being former students of Indian residential schools. The findings revealed that Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families to assimilate them into settler society, and many children experienced trauma, abuse, violence, and death. The TRC put forward 94 calls to action for federal, provincial, territorial, and Indigenous governments to implement policies and programs to address the harm caused by residential schools and begin a journey toward reconciliation. Early childhood education in BC (and throughout Canada) is obligated to respond to the TRC’s important findings and recommendations. One critical initiative was development of the Indigenous Early Learning and Care Framework (Government of Canada, 2018), where the federal government committed to funding early learning and care programs led by Indigenous peoples and rooted in Indigenous knowledges, cultures, and languages that reflect the aspirations of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis families and children. Currently, Indigenous-led early childhood systems are transitioning from conceptual frameworks to implementation (Beach et al., 2023).

The BCELF holds an expansive educational vision in which early learning centers “serve as places of dialog in which community members discuss, share, and debate the values they hold about knowledge, education, and how to live well together in ways that are respectful, local, and meaningful” (Government of British Columbia, 2019: 12) Notably, the BCELF adopted the role of the pedagogist as a pedagogical leader working directly with educators and children in early childhood centers.

The Early Childhood Pedagogy Network (ECPN) Project

The almost two-decades-long project focuses on the education of early childhood educators in the western Canadian province of BC. Its pilot stage reenvisioned quality early childhood education beyond a mere evaluation process, engaging educators in creating meaningful, rich educational spaces (see ECPN, 2025). Integrating more than 10 years of learning from this pilot project, as well as others’ findings and recommendations, the project rolled out the pedagogist position across BC in metropolitan, urban, semi-urban, rural, and remote areas. Currently, we work with 22 pedagogists in more than 80 early childhood education centers.

Each pedagogist works with approximately 45 early childhood educators to engage in ongoing pedagogical and curricular processes. Elsewhere we called these processes pedagogical narration, which involves “documenting moments of practice, critically reflecting on those moments,” engaging educators and children in dialog that extends the moments, “considering the relationship between our beliefs (theories) and our pedagogical actions as provoked from these moments, and then returning to practice settings to experiment with pedagogical intention” (Hodgins, 2019: 26). Drawing on post qualitative approaches, we view pedagogical narration as a process methodology of gathering “incomplete traces” rather than a methodology that collects and analyzes “data” in themes. Post qualitative inquiry, as explained by Elizabeth St. Pierre who coined the term in 2011, “doesn’t have preexisting methods of data collection like interviewing and observation that begin with the humanist subject” (St. Pierre, 2021: 5–6). With a post qualitative orientation, stories or insights happen “in the middle of things, in the threshold, as theoretical concepts and data constitute one another in our analytic practice of thinking with theory” (Mazzei, 2021: 198).

In the stories we present below, we draw on traces from a research component of the ongoing pedagogical project to revisit the analyses of pedagogists’ detailed field notes and video/audio recordings of “emergent, relational, and dialogical processes” (36) from five pedagogist settings over 1 year to illustrate how ethical-political work unfolds via the pedagogist-educator nexus within everyday experiences in early childhood centers. The insights that follow emerged from our careful rereading of these traces. Shifting from representing what educators learned while working with pedagogists to focusing on their “experimentation and the creation of the new” (St. Pierre, 2021: 6, see also St. Pierre, 2023), what proceeds are four related stories that embrace the complexity, fluidity, and unpredictability of pedagogists’ and educators’ collaborative work.

Stories from the Early Childhood Pedagogy Network (ECPN)

Working in the midst of complex conditions

Educators in the project work within complex and often difficult to navigate neoliberal conditions that not only position them as service providers but detach them from their pedagogical obligations. All teachers involved in the project shared that they had little time to dedicate to curriculum making or attending carefully to pedagogical narration processes. As Roberts-Holmes and Moss (2021) explain, neoliberalism, with its emphasis on “competition, calculation and the exercise of individual choices,” ensures that educators perceive themselves as employees of “businesses offering commodities for sale” rather than as educators offering an educational experience (90). In this context, many educators initially felt unprepared to collaborate with a pedagogist, believing they lacked the time and resources to incorporate “additional” tasks into their many daily responsibilities. More than one educator said, “too much is happening in the centre to work with a pedagogist.”

To expand, a pedagogist was asked to wait to visit a classroom because there were new educators who needed time to establish classroom routines before they could think about pedagogy and curriculum. Another pedagogist was asked to wait because many new children had joined the program, and the educators suggested they needed time to settle in and learn the classroom expectations before pedagogical engagements could be considered. In another instance, a center director, concerned for the well-being of both educators and children, wondered if the pedagogist should pause the curriculum project because challenging behaviors had emerged among the children. Understandably, the educators felt overwhelmed and unable to attend to the curriculum.

Rather than offering strategies to ameliorate or manage the challenges educators were immersed in, these three pedagogists worked with the educators by focusing on how neoliberalism shapes and constrains both practices and subjectivities. As Roberts-Holmes and Moss (2021) explain, pedagogists attend to how the neoliberal project “works remorselessly to produce subjects. … to convert the normative ‘you should be’ into the actual ‘this is who I am’” (92). Recognizing that we all “internalize neoliberalism’s images, accepting them as natural, normal and desirable, a state of willing consent not grudging acceptance” (92), pedagogists propose modes of resistance that bring pedagogy to the forefront. Working with the concept of pedagogy as “concerned with the creation of a collective humanity, but not necessarily the individuality of a person” (Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020), these pedagogists turned toward the tensions embedded within the educators’ concerns.

In the case where it was assumed that the presence of new educators precluded pedagogical engagements, the pedagogist and educators worked together to reframe the idea that a classroom needs predesigned, normative routines. The pedagogist invited both existing and new educators to consider the classroom as a place where a culture is created by considering children’s lifeworlds and histories, educators’ approaches, and past/current center-related happenings. By rethinking the role of the educator—not as a technician who applies knowledge (e.g. a predefined classroom schedule) but as someone who creates an educational space that supports a life-worth-living with children—conversations emerged about pedagogical commitments that would bring established and new educators together.

When new children joining the classroom appeared to be a detractor to pedagogical engagements, the pedagogist invited the educators to think through the concept of caring relations. Educators challenged themselves regarding how they and the existing children could receive new children into a culture/life that would shift in response to new members. Without taking for granted the existing relations in the classroom, the educators worked to form new caring relations that would welcome the new children. In other words, the pedagogist and educators rethought the classroom as a permeable space that constantly changes in response to the lives that constitute it. As Giamminuti (2024b) writes, “the intimate knowledge that teachers possess of everyday classroom events is metaphorically and literally brought to the table to affect all those present and invite change” (60).

In the example of children with “difficult” behaviors, the pedagogist and educators collaborated to engage with the classroom conditions by rethinking the problem beyond an individual child’s behavior. The pedagogist invited the educators to consider how they could collectively create conditions for children’s differing ways of existence to flourish in the classroom. For instance, pedagogist and educators challenged the idea that children must behave in a particular manner to be considered proper contributing members of the classroom. After reflecting on how the center’s practices and culture might welcome children differently, the pedagogist and educators reworked the rigid classroom schedules. In other words, they reworked their relationships with the clock and time (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kummen, 2016). In paying attention to what happened during the day, they noted that the busyness of a clock-based routine prevented them from engaging with children to build and sustain pedagogical relationships. Moreover, busyness allowed only some lives to flourish.

These examples highlight that pedagogists practice with an obligation to meet the current conditions of the early childhood centers. Rather than creating ideals or judging educators for what happens, their role entails thinking with educators about the conditions that constrain pedagogical processes, and how they might create conditions for alternative worlds to emerge that would be more livable for all.

Rethinking Early Childhood Education’s Lexicon

Using a particular lexicon is another way neoliberalism infiltrates early childhood education. Moss and Roberts-Holmes (2022) write that taken-for-granted and everyday terms such as “‘outcomes’ and ‘quality’, ‘testing’ and ‘assessment’, ‘interventions’ and ‘programmes’, ‘evidence-based’ and ‘best practice’, ‘investment’ and ‘human capital’, ‘preparation’ and ‘readiness’” (97) reflect the dominance of neoliberal discourse in early childhood education. An essential aspect of the pedagogist-educator relationship is to problematize this vocabulary that positions children as subjects to be molded predictably and universally, preparing them to contribute as adults to the market economy.

To illustrate, here is an excerpt from a conversation that Chelsea, a pedagogist working in remote communities, had with early childhood educators:

Some of the narratives which become truths in early childhood education are ones that maintain early childhood education as a colonial project. Early childhood education is an instrument for colonization because there is a narrative of fixing children. Encounters with the child who needs intervention are prevalent.. .. I’m sure we can all think of moments and times when this discourse of intervention takes place.

Chelsea thinks with concepts and expressions that are unrecognized by neoliberal early childhood discourses. The use of “unfamiliar” language invites educators to talk about how everyday practices are always already implicated in colonization’s legacies. Chelsea continues:

I also live with the tension that many male voices are prominent in northern narratives. I choose to engage with feminist notions of storytelling that invite voices often unnoted and attend to who’s included and excluded. Whose stories are told? Whose are silenced? An example is that many of the stories in the north are told from male perspectives, including the ones that have been my thinking companions to encounter the specificity of northern lives.. .. So I wonder how women’s and children’s stories come to bear in making worlds in the north.

In this conversation, Chelsea offers language that provides opportunities for educators to consider other possibilities and different ways of thinking and interpreting early childhood education beyond the familiar neoliberal lexicon.

Significantly, although many educators readily acknowledge the problems of language that describes children in neoliberal terms, they struggle to imagine other ways of thinking early childhood. Unfamiliar language is not always accessible for educators because they have been educated in a system that demands they become good neoliberal educators. Educators expressed their “frustration”, with the language Chelsea used during their dialog, describing it as “too academic.” Recognizing the struggles, Chelsea did not revert to “familiar” (read neoliberal) language to meet educators where they were. Instead, she and the educators talked about why using “unrecognizable” language is important in early childhood education in Canada, where Indigenous peoples endured violent acts through the education system (ECPN, 2025).

Importantly, these conversations with educators are not intended to correct or offer them best practices but to create space for educators to critically reflect on what happens in their classroom and what inherited values and beliefs regulate their practice. Inspired by Rinaldi (2021), Chelsea entered into a conversation with educators holding an image of the educator as more than a technician—a competent co-researcher committed to creating conditions that disrupt inequities and injustices. Within this image of the educator, Chelsea reconfigured the early childhood lexicon to shift practices shaped by colonial logics and intentions (Moss and Mitchell, 2024).

Departing from traditional professional development in which educators are consumers of ideas made digestible and accessible, pedagogists offer unfamiliar ideas, concepts, and theories that support educators to engage in pedagogical processes differently. St. Pierre (2000) writes that to think differently is “surely the hardest work” educators will undertake in their practice. Therefore, it is unsurprising that disrupting unquestioned and uncontested language, knowledge, and ways of being can evoke tension among educators and pedagogists. Yet, pedagogists take seriously St. Pierre’s (2015) caution that being “theoretically impoverished” leaves us “ill-equipped to critique the dominant and normalized structures” that create inequities (29:45).

Composing educational spaces

Unlike traditional methods of professional development that primarily seek to address deficiencies in educators’ knowledge and skills (Rombaoa Tanaka et al., 2020), pedagogists actively engage educators in co-creating educational spaces. To describe this process using Di Paolantonio’s (2024) words, pedagogists:

understand education as offering us a place where we can constellate, encounter, cultivate, and tend to a more worldly transgenerational sense of time. In the shelter and withdrawal that education potentially offers, we get a chance to pause and to linger long enough with things between us so that we may come to sense and make sense—to wonder and spur a thinking—of the configurations demarcating our own time: configurations forged from the memory of what is no longer here and from the anticipation of what is not yet present. Education is thus the place par excellence in which the transgenerational sensibility—the significance of inheriting and “passing-on” the world—can be most readily felt and collectively cultivated. (3, emphasis in original)

Creating educational spaces implies careful attention to what is inherited, to present circumstances, and to the possibility of shaping the future differently. To illustrate how pedagogists embrace education in such complex ways, we reflect on a comment from Rian, an educator in a small, one-classroom center, about working with Gloria, a pedagogist, in a curriculum inquiry. This reflection shows the difference between fixing educators into specific subjectivities and collectively engaging in an educational endeavor.

When Gloria started working with me, it all kind of clicked and came together. And so, rather than thinking in small, little boxes of projects that don’t connect, working with the pedagogist brought all those ways of thinking together into one space. I’ve always worked in doing projects, having an intention, but then working with Gloria brought that into a longer timeframe. And then the intentions became broader than just for that project. The intentions became centre-wide intentions.. .. Wondering and pondering became broader than just the children and myself and Gloria.

From a traditional professional learning perspective, one might argue that, under Gloria’s guidance, Rian is developing professionalism and self-confidence in her practice. We might even interpret Rian’s reflection as an instance of successful professional learning, where a change has occurred in Rian, making her a “better” educator. We might say, for instance, that Rian’s competence around curriculum inquiry improved. In broader terms, we could conclude that Gloria enhances Rian’s practice and increases opportunities for her to grow and develop her expertise. We would then need to identify the necessary strategies to reproduce this instance of professional development to support other educators to change their practices. Yet, these are technocratic interpretations that assume education is a one-directional futurist project with a known trajectory. They imply predefined competencies and dispositions required to practice as an educator. Roberts-Holmes and Moss (2021) describe these interpretations as neoliberal visions of education that position the educator “as a technician and a bundle of skills and competencies” (156).

Without denying the transformational dimension implied in Rian’s reflection, what’s important is her renewed relationship with early childhood education. To explain, Gloria, like other pedagogists, works with educators to enact transformative relations that respond to, and (re)compose with, the times in which we live, to world more livable futures. The key is to avoid instrumentalizing the future, that is, shaping a future already known, a future that upholds hegemonic systems and discourses. Inspired by Todd (2023), we suggest that “the future” Gloria is composing is not “tethered tightly to our present in any chronological sense”; nor are we “setting the present up as a time of transition to a better ‘then’ in the future” (Todd, 140). For Gloria and other pedagogists, “the flow of time is far more vast than what we can imagine or indeed hope for. The future is not simply a desired horizon or goal” (Todd, 140). Todd writes:

Futures—that time of “not yet”—open up in ways that consistently exceed our intentions and desires, and we are therefore continually surprised, disturbed, challenged, disappointed, and astonished by our encounters because what is happening now is not what we expected it to be. (140)

When Rian explains that “wondering and pondering became broader than just the children and myself and Gloria”, she speaks of transformation, yet she cannot list a series of behaviors, knowledge, and skills that she gained through her work with Gloria. She refers to this transformation as “broader,” encompassing “a longer timeframe”; she says “it clicked and came together”, Working alongside Gloria, Rian’s relationship with early childhood education transformed, from working with children on a project as a discrete unit, to engaging in inquiries that are lived in the classroom’s rhythms, flows, and culture. Rian is disrupting the idea of working with routines limited by chronological time—for instance, what occurs at circle time or before snack time.

Further, the vagueness of Rian’s words is important. The changes she refers to are neither predictable nor universal. Instead, they are contextual and responsive to her pedagogical commitments, the conditions she works in, the children in the center, and so forth. Rian is thinking with a sense of education that extends beyond herself: She experiments with ideas, not to define her practices in advance but to open them up toward modes of living that need to be invented in the process. Transformation occurs through ongoing critical engagements in Rian’s everyday practices rather than through “transmission of theoretical knowledge or training of discrete skills” (Lazzari et al., 2013: 136) that can be applied to many situations in the future.

The transformation that takes place through the pedagogist-educator relationship is part of an educational project through which subjective transformations open up futures without predefined directions. This is an important difference between traditional early childhood education professional development models and what the pedagogist role brings to early childhood education. For us, the educational project in which pedagogists and educators engage is “opening the future up to something beyond [predetermined] hopes, dreams, and convictions” (Todd, 2023: 140). The change that is happening is “part of this beyond” (Todd, 140).

Forging a situated curriculum

What takes place in early childhood classrooms (in the child-educator relationship) matters deeply in the expansive pedagogist-educator relationship outlined above. Taking inspiration from Malaguzzi (Malaguzzi and Cagliari, 2016) and Rinaldi (2021), pedagogists in Canada steer clear of helping educators implement a curriculum or create an inquiry project that they can then duplicate across different classrooms, academic years, and groups of children. From these Reggio thinkers, pedagogists understand curriculum as a situated, unfinished process—one that takes form through relationships, ongoing interpretation, and attentiveness to the particularities of place and time. As Malaguzzi writes, referring to the Reggio Emilia programs he founded, curriculum is a process of doing/making:

We have always refused to make a programme, because the risk of a caged-in programme is that in some way it generates caged-in experience. But this originality [in our work] is formed through a very long process, which is the process of research, the process of curriculum project and planning, the process of controlled execution, of evaluative analysis of the results, and the process of decisions. This process also affects every action we carry out. There is a situation when we think, when we carry out research about the things we know and a project on the things we would like to do. (Malaguzzi and Cagliari, 2016: 296)

Working alongside pedagogists, educators engage in designing situated curricula. Pedagogists support educators to create curriculum, or, as we have written elsewhere, they weave, knit, and stitch curriculum (Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020). Curriculum emerges from carefully considering current conditions—the lives of children and educators in a particular place, at a particular time. The curriculum is never a set of preknown activities but is a careful response to pedagogical intentions. For pedagogists, supporting educators through a process of curriculum making involves carefully considering the inherited conditions and the possibilities they collectively envision.

To illustrate, we draw on an inquiry project that Teresa and a group of three educators worked on for 9 months. The inquiry, called The Gathering Tree, followed pedagogical documentation (Rinaldi, 2021) as a vital practice for curriculum making. In her role as pedagogist, Teresa is committed to getting to know the place where she works and, through this process, inherit its legacies. Thus, it is important for her to collaborate with educators and children to design situated inquiries that reflect the specificities of living and working on Indigenous land during a time of ecological crisis. In other words, Teresa is moved by the question “How might we create curriculum that disrupts colonial, anthropocentric logics?”

A 50-year-old maple tree became the central figure of the inquiry. Through careful observation, Teresa—eschewing the detached observation focused on developmental markers common in much neoliberal practice—noticed that the large maple held significant relational importance for children in the center. She brought her observations about the tree’s significance to the educators and invited them to craft curriculum with the tree rather than about it. Thinking carefully about modes of engagement that would allow educators and children to interact with the tree in ways that didn’t reduce it to an object for their benefit or a subject to learn factual information about, she aimed to help them meet the tree differently: as a protagonist within the relational assemblage of the early childhood center. Teresa worked with educators to pose questions to children, encouraging them to cultivate children’s drawing practices. Over months, drawing created opportunities to notice both seasonal changes and the tree’s relationships with myriad more-than-human others in the center, such as insects, weather patterns, wind. In this way, Teresa and the educators engaged with children’s relations with the more-than-human world rather than focusing solely on the children (Land et al., 2022). A curriculum that responded to the pedagogical intention “how children might collectively live in the 21st century in a colonial land” slowly emerged as Teresa supported the educators to engage with the complexities surrounding the tree.

No model was applied in Teresa’s work. Engaging with educators in pedagogical processes that attended to children’s ideas and the center’s happenings, Teresa wondered if children’s interactions with the maple tree held potential to create worlds that were more inclusive and less violent than the one in which they currently lived. Teresa aimed to do more than just collaborate with educators to create activities for children. Her focus was not on helping educators guarantee that children learned about trees and met predefined expectations. She engaged educators in curriculum making as something that “is constructed through contemporaneous advances, standstills and ‘retreats’ that take many directions” (Rinaldi, 2021: 95). She and the educators worked together through “the complex and multiple strategies that are necessary for sustaining children’s” engagements (Rinaldi, 96). There was “chance and error” in the process, “which [were] definite and indefinite at the same time, carried out in the dialogue between children and adults” (96). Rinaldi’s words resonate with how Teresa approaches her collaborations with teachers on curriculum making:

The teachers are asked to abandon the set programme, the prescribed curriculum and the usual obligatory courses, and to join efforts with the children. The teachers must, therefore, have in mind a clear map of the cultural symbol systems and how these systems are constantly expressed and transformed. At the same time, though, teachers must never lose sight of the procedures, the paths, the particular ways in which children organize their behaviour and ideas in order to appropriate a piece of the world and of life. And here we also experience joy, excitement and growth along with the children. (99)

We want to highlight the situatedness of the gathering tree inquiry. Behind it is a profound concern about what might make a difference when an ecological catastrophe is upon us (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Blaise, 2021). Teresa was moved by a consequential question: What might we create together in the conditions we find ourselves in (in this early childhood center, the city we live in, and the world we inherit and inhabit)? This question informs and energizes the decisions she collectively made with educators, that is, the encounters, events, and movements they invited the children to engage with (Todd, 2023). Throughout the curriculum-making process, the children were invited to be in the world differently and experience sensitivities that capitalism and settler colonialism do not value. Teresa invited educators to consider the dialogical events and particular experiences generated around the tree as modes to open possibilities for the children to invent other (nonconsumptive, nonextractive) modes of being, knowing, and doing. Said differently, what took place around the gathering tree was not a transmission of ideas or concepts nor an implementation of an idea. It was the invention of a world that is not yet here (Di Paolantonio, 2024; Todd, 2023).

The situated curriculum Teresa and the educators intentionally designed for the early childhood center created a space that fostered open-ended possibilities rather than focusing solely on the most probable outcomes. Feminist philosopher Stengers’ (2017) distinction between probable and possible is informative here. The probable, Stengers explains, involves reorganizing or adjusting what has already occurred or is happening, following a logic of conformity. In contrast, the possible highlights the potential for new ways of being, thinking, and acting that can only be imagined as a persistent challenge to the current discourses defining the future (Stengers, 2017). As a pedagogist, Teresa works with educators to create a situated curriculum that both challenges hegemonic subjectivities, which are formed through hierarchical systems of value and submission, and attends to processes of subject formation that creatively forge more livable modes of relationship with others, with things, and with the world. These livable modes are not simply more inclusive; they involve cultivating forms of relationality grounded in reciprocity, accountability, and collective care. Such relationships resist normative developmental trajectories and unsettle human exceptionalism by making space for ways of being that do not conform to dominant educational expectations. Creating more livable worlds in this context entails cultivating pedagogical conditions that sustain diverse forms of life while actively resisting extractive, colonial, and neoliberal systems.

Conclusion

Based on Dahlberg et al. (2024: 138) notion that “there is no one correct technical answer to defining and producing a good education” and “there are only political choices to political questions” in education, this article explored how pedagogists and educators together address the ethical and political dimensions of early childhood education. We advocated for unconventional approaches to what is commonly referred to as professional development by exploring four areas of insight regarding educators and pedagogists: working within complex circumstances, rethinking early childhood education’s lexicon, composing educational spaces, and forging situated curricula. Importantly, these themes interconnect and cannot be understood in isolation, nor can they fully explain the ethical and political aspects of the pedagogist-educator relationship. Thus, this article does not aim to comprehensively portray the pedagogist’s role. On the contrary, as we showed throughout the article, the role has evolved within the landscape of early childhood education in Canada, informed by insights obtained through design and research efforts over the past decade. We hope our experiences and analysis spark further discussions about early childhood education as an ethical-political venture.

Within our research, rethinking the role of educators has been central to transforming professional development into a dynamic, practice-embedded process rather than a separate, skills-based activity. Rather than positioning educators as passive recipients of knowledge, a more compelling approach recognizes them as active participants in inquiry, experimentation, and collective pedagogical practice. This shift challenges traditional models of professional learning that treat educators as technicians and instead embraces their role as intellectuals engaged in ongoing dialog with children, colleagues, and broader social and ecological contexts.