Abstract
This essay focuses on the important, but often taken-for-granted, roles that mentoring and collaborative inquiry play in rethinking childhood studies and situates our work in a time of resurgent racism and xenophobia in the United States—as well as invigorated movements to affirm human rights and social justice. It represents a co-mentoring dialogue, spanning over a decade, about the complexities of embodying critical, activist scholarship within dominant (White, Western, heteronormative, and Global North) assumptions about childhood, families, and communities. Our co-interrogation of these deeply encoded assumptions has been driven by a shared question of how to span the seemingly disparate discourse communities of critically engaged scholars and mainstream early childhood professionals in a variety of community contexts. These efforts have been guided by learning from Indigenous and Global South epistemologies and Black and Chicana/Latina/Mestiza feminisms. To illustrate what continues to be a reciprocal mentoring relationship, we use critical personal narrative to discuss key influences, literature, pedagogies of place, and exigencies of sustaining critical childhood studies movements in the current moment.
Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. (Traveler, there is no road. The road is created as we walk it [together].)
In this essay we reflect on the ways our work and lives have been informed and strengthened by Black feminism, Indigenous and Global South epistemologies, Borderlands writing, and reciprocal mentoring within the broader movement to radically rethink childhood studies. Our purpose is to call attention to the heightened importance of sustaining and extending this work through continued movement-building founded upon the pillars of scholarship: teaching, research, and service—although our focus here is at the meeting place of service and teaching (broadly conceived to include mentoring and facilitating communities of practice (CoPs); Lave and Wenger, 1991). Toward this end, we use critical personal narratives and a shared discussion of the roles that place and relationships have had on our work as we have moved, both physically and metaphorically, on our separate and shared scholarly journeys.
This Special Issue of Global Studies of Childhood is timely, in part because it prompted conversations about our work in a time of tumult, for example Great Britain’s referendum to leave the European Union; the candidacy and ultimate election of Donald Trump as US president, which appears to have brought greater permission for public displays of xenophobia, ableism, Islamophobia, hetero/sexism, and denial of the #BlackLivesMatter movement (New York Times, 2017); reactionary responses to immigration in Europe; Brazil’s political and economic upheaval; and the Syrian tragedy. As we prepared to write this essay, prior to the US presidential election, we discussed how our students engaged with—and resisted—our social policy, critical advocacy, and children’s rights courses and how seemingly more students were asking, “Does it matter? What can really be done?” (It is hopeless). We also engaged in discussions on whiteness, alliances, and what it means to do embodied work for institutional change in neoliberal times. We found ourselves somewhat stymied. Now, post-election, we find ourselves engaging with students around the additional question, “What now?”
Three key insights emerge from our conversations that have bearing on this question. First is the important role of “place pedagogy” in change efforts (Somerville et al., 2011). This is a perspective on critical pedagogy premised upon the recognition (1) that relationships to place are constituted in stories and other representations and that one aim of critical analysis is to denature dominant storylines to facilitate the telling of alternate narratives; (2) that our bodies are sites of place pedagogies of change because place and personhood are co-generative; and (3) that “deep place learning” occurs within “contact zones”—places where power-imbued cultural differences intersect, discomfort reigns, and easy answers are not to be found (Pratt, 1992 in Somerville et al., 2011: 6). We frame our narratives and discussion through these three principles.
Our second insight involved the centrality of co-learning through available, if not widely enacted, practices of mentoring in graduate education and how that common and taken-for-granted approach to education shapes one’s scholarly being (Nagasawa and Swadener, 2015; Swadener et al., 2015). Wenger et al. (2002) describe CoPs as “groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis” (p. 4). CoPs rest upon forming bonds, a sense of common purpose and identity, by being with colleagues who share related ideas and problems, even if their perspectives on these differ (Swadener et al., 2015). We view the shared experiences between doctoral students and mentors, in which a more liberatory project is explicitly at the heart of mentoring relationships, as foundational for the kinds of “critical communities of praxis” for which we advocate. This practice, of course, is not unproblematic and free of the oppressive forces of sexism, classism, ableism, racism, and so on that are endemic in higher education (Dodson et al., 2009; Margolis and Romero, 1998).
Recognition of these realities heightens the importance of the current discussion because of the confluence between the broader neoliberal turn (e.g. evidenced by the rise of managerialism, free market logics, and anti-state discourse in public/education policy; see Dahlberg and Moss, 2005) and four demographic shifts anticipated in American higher education, but which may have relevance for other national contexts: (a) ethnic diversification, (b) increasing demand for postsecondary education, (c) an aging population, and (d) a predicted wave of retirements affecting the professorate (Morrison, 2003). Within these intersecting forces, intergenerational transfer of critical perspectives and practices is of paramount importance to not just sustain critical childhood studies but to also link this scholarship to the current movement moment, indicated by surging post-inauguration protests of a US presidency operationalizing what appears to be a patriarchal, White nationalist, and corporatist policy agenda. It has been a long time since critical praxis has had such currency, and there is activist wisdom to be shared with generations raised into neoliberal docility, which is not to say that this has not been happening, but rather that activism has moved into popular consciousness in the United States and elsewhere, in ways not seen since the 1960s.
Our final, related, insight is influenced by Julio Frenk’s May 2016 speech on the scholarship of belonging, which contributed to our discussion of the roles that higher education can play simultaneously as spaces of stronger inclusivity, as contact zones, and as a means of bridging separate isolated sites of action. We discussed this in light of evidence of a possible discursive shift toward more progressive grassroots movements (e.g. the Movement for Black Lives, the Bernie Sanders campaign, the Standing Rock Sioux protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline, and, most recently, global, post-US inaugural Women’s Marches), public discussion of wealth inequality, student-led protests of institutional racism on campuses, and other potentially transformative issues. Change efforts are influenced by zeitgeist, so the troubles of our times reflect opportunities as well (Nagasawa, 2015). In the first sections of our essay, we each discuss our experiences with critical pedagogies and non-dominant/non-Western epistemologies and ontologies with a focus on the people and readings that influenced our work.
Se hace camino al andar
Beth
On 21 January 2016, the day after Trump took office, I marched in Phoenix with over 20,000 people in one of over 700 Women’s or “Sisters” Marches worldwide. I marched the route twice. First, I marched with student leaders of Local to Global Justice (a coalition of student and community activists) and then went further back in the march and joined my daughter and her family, including my 7-year-old granddaughter who was very excited to “march for women’s rights” and about the “kitty hats” many of us were wearing. She has since joined me in other actions, which often have included children with handmade signs and an understanding of justice that I have long written about. Many of us of a certain age were asking, didn’t we march for women’s rights, civil rights, disability rights, peace, and social justice years ago? Why are we still marching? Like many, I was moved and energized by the experience of joining with well over 2 million people in the United States and all over the world marching for human rights. I spent that day in a combination of marching, organizing with Local to Global Justice after the march, and discussing the day with my granddaughter.
These recent experiences have been an occasion to reflect on the connections between my familial feminist activism (O’Brien and Swadener, 2006) and the many sites of “reciprocal mentoring” I have been a part of with students over the past 35 years. I begin this section with some thoughts about my attempts to enact critical, anti-oppressive pedagogy and some of the opportunities for collaboration that have shaped my work and my commitments. I frame this section in the broad notion of pedagogies of place (Somerville et al., 2011) and share specific examples of the forms that reciprocal mentorship has taken with doctoral students, ways that we built critical CoP that reflected our social justice commitments, and the role the Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education (RECE) movement has played in this work.
I have long sought to decenter and critique Eurocentric and patriarchal master scripts in my teaching and graduate mentoring, engaging in “transparent pedagogy” that reflects my commitment to anti-oppressive practices. From teaching courses on cultural diversity in early childhood, race, class, and gender in education, and critically framed social studies and home–school–community method courses during the first two decades of my career in higher education to my current work in Justice Studies, including teaching with several cohorts of students in Indigenous contexts, I have sought opportunities to engage in critical pedagogy and socially engaged scholarship that reflect pedagogies of place and a sense of belonging. While in Pennsylvania, I did collaborative ethnography with Friends School (Quaker) teachers regarding social problem-solving with young children; with a move to the Cleveland, Ohio region, I worked primarily in urban schools and began using an anti-oppressive, ally framework, connecting my work in Africa to local initiatives and collaborating with a kindergarten teacher who enacted anti-bias curriculum. For the past 16 years, since my move to Arizona, I have worked with Spanish immersion preschool and bilingual Head Start teacher projects, with the Center for Indian Education, and with Indigenous early childhood educators and community leaders in undergraduate through doctoral programs.
Doing unlearning oppression/ally work has also involved reading germinal works by scholar activists, including Black and Chicana/Latina/Mestiza feminisms (e.g. Anzaldúa, 1987; hooks, 1994; Lorde, 1984; Moraga and Anzaldúa, 1981; Morrison, 1970, 1992; Vega, 2015). This project has also been informed by indigenous epistemologies and decolonizing methodologies and was initially shaped by Faye Harrison’s (1991) work on decolonizing anthropology, Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999) much cited book Decolonizing Methodologies, and more recently by Bryan Brayboy’s (2005) work on Tribal Critical Race Theory. I have also been influenced by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2014) and Elizabeth Sumida Huaman (e.g. Huaman and Sriraman, 2015) through our work together with two Pueblo Indigenous graduate cohorts earning PhDs and master’s degrees in Justice Studies. This has provided an opportunity to rethink ways in which graduate pedagogy occurs and foregrounds indigenous epistemologies and ways of being and learning together—an extension of my work in sub-Saharan Africa— initially in Senegal and The Gambia and, since the early 1990s, in Kenya and South Africa. This has brought me together with students/colleagues/collaborators, including Linda Rogers (Rogers and Swadener, 1999), Kagendo Mutua (Mutua and Swadener, 2004, 2011; Swadener and Mutua, 2008), Bekisizwe Ndimande (Ndimande and Swadener, 2013), and John Turia Ng’asike (Ng’asike and Swadener, 2015)—collaborations which have deepened my understanding of indigenous methodologies and the anti-colonial project.
I have also continued to interrogate what it means to support decolonizing research from my standpoint as a White middle-class woman in the Western academy. Some of my recent work cautions against persistent White privilege and power and the dangers of becoming part of an “ally industrial complex” (Indigenous Action Media (IAM), 2014). By this I mean how easy it is to use the shield of White privilege to say one is in ally, when facing few if any of the same risks that those who experience systemic forms of oppressions I do not deal with daily, or to slip into a role of helper which only reflects the missionary zeal of patterns of colonization. I have also continued to unpack, with Kagendo and others, what it means to have differential access to higher education, use of certain theories, and—importantly—material resources to travel and complete collaborative projects that bridge the global North and South. Reading the word and the world through these powerful lenses continues to feed my activism and work to this day.
Given that this essay is a collaboration and dialogue with Mark Nagasawa, we have been discussing a decade (2001–2010) during which an exciting opportunity for rethinking early childhood education was created at Arizona State University (ASU). Joe Tobin and I were both hired, and several years later, Gaile Cannella joined the early childhood faculty. I look back and—without romanticizing this time which did take place in a patriarchal, top-down environment that frequently undermined faculty voice—recall the many opportunities to collaborate. This was the context in which I first began to discuss reciprocal mentoring.
Mark and I, and other former graduate students from this time, have often reflected on what enabled this critical CoP in early childhood to thrive. Like most communities or alliances, there must be strong relationships, reciprocity, and respect. Laughter, sharing potlucks and other social events, and community engagement also strengthened our student/faculty community. Some of my most powerful memories of this time include co-founding Local to Global Justice with graduate students (in education, Justice Studies, and law) at the time the 11 September 2001 attack occurred and organizing a teach-in, which continues today as the Local to Global Justice Forum and Festival. At this intense time of trying to stop US invasions and prevent war, and protecting civil rights and liberties, this gathering of community and campus activists for a weekend of workshops, skill shares, music, and healthy food was a form of “occupy,” in that we felt strongly that using the university space for organizing was critical to its community service mission. When a presidential debate came to our campus in 2008, Local to Global Justice was part of organizing over 20 related events, in coalition with other groups in the Phoenix area, from a “truly free market” to marches, installations regarding Iraq War casualties on a campus green, and Indymedia coverage. Working on such issues with graduate students at the table served, for many, to deepen the sense of community that transcended a binary of scholar and activist.
Another feature that supported this CoP was a diffuse boundary between “formal” and “informal” learning. Most of our students took theory and methodology courses from Joe and social policy/critical advocacy and children’s rights courses from me, and we served on many of the same dissertation committees. We also team-taught “professional development” seminars that provided collaborative learning opportunities around common scholarly tasks (e.g. writing grant proposals, writing for publication). These differed from our other seminars because they blurred with celebrations and other social gatherings.
At this time, a growing number of international students from Kenya, Turkey, China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan came to study at ASU. Our advisees spanned education policy, cultural foundations, and early childhood, which added richness and complexity to our exchanges. The co-learning was further layered by employing students on large funded projects, including statewide evaluations of an early childhood professional development project and a new early childhood state agency focused on creating a coordinated early childhood care, education, and health system. Working in close proximity on these complex statewide projects provided occasions to enact reconceptualist praxis within mainstream projects, led to additional collaborations, at least one dissertation (Peters, 2012), and several publications and national presentations (e.g. Ciyer et al., 2010; Nagasawa et al., 2014). Concurrently, we were engaged in bilingual and indigenous teacher education projects that involved many of these same graduate students as instructors.
Around the same time, our CoP faced a critical moment in its existence. In 2010, the College of Education at our university was disestablished as part of a targeted reorganization. Our graduate students were among those organizing other students and allies, first to fight the disestablishment and then to do all they could to assure that students whose majors were being eliminated would still be able to finish. A number of faculty members left in the immediate years following this reorganization, so having mentorship while completing dissertations was a major issue. It was out of this need that we organized our first dissertation support group (in spring 2010). Our meetings, similar to other project meetings, graduate student gatherings, and event planning sessions, included food and mutually established guidelines for a safe space (e.g. voice balance, confidentiality, and reciprocity), with the addition of “accountabilibuddies” or writing partners who provided “synergistic co-mentoring” while letting each other know they were not alone in their struggles (Swadener et al., 2015).
Writing partners met in coffee shops, were in touch via texts and phone calls, and provided mutual support, editing, and discussions that helped the writing process. Meetings of the full group and discussion on our “graduation or bust” listserv included a check-in from everyone, setting 2-week goals (we met bi-weekly) and discussing specific concerns that participants had encountered (Swadener et al., 2015). Over the years, 64 doctoral students from this group have successfully defended, and at the time of this writing, I have started a new group in the School of Social Transformation that includes PhD candidates in Justice Studies and Women and Gender Studies. All these experiences, from working closely with graduate students in Local to Global Justice, seminars, the peer support writing group, and a number of reconceptualist research collaborations, contributed to the sense of a critical community of practice that was fueled by theoretical discussions, shared passions for social justice, facilitating children’s voices in scholarship, and both working and playing with those who would become long-term friends and colleagues.
Mark
I am much newer to this work and initially found much of what Beth has described to be foreign and strange, having been raised under the implicit dictum, “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” These reflections act as a sort of testimonio of an awakening from a very mainstream perspective on children, and my professional relation to them, their families, and their communities, to a more critical one which arose by being confronted by indigenous scholars—and by being supportively challenged by our wider CoP. I recount aspects of this journey, not to claim either exceptional singularity or representativeness but rather because there may be parallels between my experiences and others’. Furthermore, I think that these journeys provide small examples of the transformative potential of engaging with indigenous epistemologies, borderlands perspectives, and queer theories of color (e.g. Cohen, 1997; Moraga and Anzaldúa, 1981; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). Sharing stories such as these is a foundational practice in sustaining and expanding movements to radically rethink childhood studies and practice with children, their families, and with/in their communities. Finally, I believe that this movement is served by recognizing and valuing the intimate spaces of mentoring relationships situated within a curriculum and community of scholarship, the importance of which has become very apparent to me as I transition into a new role in a context where these perspectives are not seen by many as related to childhood.
A new practice context
Moving to Chicago from Arizona to join the faculty at the Erikson Institute, an independent graduate school of child development, has been an opportunity to engage in an identity reorganization by leaving a safe space of like-mindedness and familiarity and entering an institutional and community context in which notions of at-risk childhood are largely unquestioned (cf. Swadener and Lubeck, 1995). However, I temper my critique of this because Chicago is a particularly visible case of the American social problems of racial segregation, wealth inequality, and related community violence. CNN Money recently declared it “America’s most segregated city” (Luhby, 2016), widely known for alarming rates of violent crime—62% more shootings in the first half of 2016 than New York and Los Angeles combined (Sweeney and Gorner, 2016)—and which offers a stark argument against any claims of a “post-racial” United States, with the poverty rate for Chicagoans who are Black three times higher than that for Chicagoans who are White (Bogira, 2013). It is a place where binary constructions of race, class, and gender are visible everyday: White/Black, Northside/Southside, rich/poor, the public discourse of state-sanctioned violence focused on Black men/the invisibility of state violence committed on Black bodies of all genders, and so on.
Erikson Institute is a place to which students and faculty (including me) are drawn to be part of practical solutions. In my interpretation, Chicago and Erikson as a microcosm are places where the constructs of race, class, gender, and so on are material. So introducing the argot of poststructuralism and using postcolonial critique to decenter scientistic truths about children, families, and society (Bloch, 1987; Soto and Swadener, 2002), while engaging with the “gritty materialities” (Apple, 2001: 63) of the surrounding city, have been a central challenge as I perform my new role. However, as I struggle to communicate the value of critical childhood studies with my colleagues (fellow faculty, students, and community partners), I have been both chastened and buoyed by remembering that it was not so long ago that I held similar views.
Kotonk: reflections on a colonial identity
The school climate that Beth describes was unlike any I had ever experienced before as a student. I have a lifelong ambivalence about schooling and have never felt that I belonged. Some years ago, I dropped out of a graduate ethnohistory program dissatisfied with abstractions, academic distance, and with serious ethical concerns about conducting research on other(ed) people (Deloria, 1970). I felt a need for concrete engagement with other people and saw working with young children and their families as a morally superior escape from the messy complications I encountered in school. Time and reflection have taught me that I was mistaken to think these activities gave me absolution from the objectification/subjectification of the Other (or that one type of activity is inherently more or less engaged).
By a series of happy accidents that led me from a preschool classroom to the state capitol, I found myself in Beth’s Social Policy and Early Childhood seminar. As a former preschool teacher, and even as a policy analyst, I felt more than a little lost. The subject matter, the language, mystified me—especially the idea of decolonizing the field (Soto and Swadener, 2002; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). Oddly, given prior studies, colonization was far away, historical, and happened to other people. What did this have to do with teaching kids or creating systems to increase quality in early childhood programs and schools? However, I found an entry point by following the guidance that “… we can begin with our own modest lived experiences …” (Soto and Swadener, 2002: 52). So that is where I started.
A path appears
I am perhaps four or five years old. My dad asks me, “You know why you a kotonk [kuh TONK]?” I shake my head, no. “Because when I go li’ dis [knocks gently on my head], it goes kotonk, kotonk.”
Later in college …
I am walking across campus, wearing a Hawaiian sovereignty t-shirt that my dad had bought for me when he went back home for a class reunion. I hear a familiar-sounding voice call out, “Ey brah, nice shirt!” Apparently it is a student involvement day and the Hawaiian club has a table. A mixed group of Asian, Pacific Islander, and haole (white) students is standing around it. Several give me shakah (the familiar hang-loose hand sign, hand held up, middle three fingers bent down, with the thumb and pinky extended). I smile and return the greeting in the “cool” way (backwards).
A few years later … We are on our honeymoon in Hawai’i. It is like a heritage tour. There are family gatherings and lots of eating—Spam musubi, sashimi, poke, poi … We visit old houses and haunts, churches and hongan-ji, the stores where we used to shop, the closed down sugar mill in Waipahu … I can almost smell the gunpowder from fireworks and the burned sugar cane smoke that was so sweet and acrid that it used to give me a headache. I can almost see the floating lanterns bobbing in the surf at the Haleiwa Obon festival, the sound of the breaking waves behind the pounding rhythm of taiko drums … We took flowers to graves. [I should have also taken mochi, mangoes, cigarettes, and whiskey.] … We are eating saimin at my favorite restaurant, the Ocean View Inn, near Kailua Harbor. I notice a couple of mokes looking at me [wearing my sovereignty t-shirt]. They give me stink eye.
I am a kotonk, a term used in Hawai’i to refer to mainland-born children of Hawaiian-born Japanese parents. By the existence of the term, I have no claim to any but the most distant connection to Hawai’i, although as a child I sought to pass, since I would live with my extended family in the summers. My family were locals, and by extension I found an identity that I longed for growing up isolated on the Mainland. However, I had never had to trouble this identity and therefore did not see myself in colonial processes.
The term local is used by people born in Hawai’i. In common usage, it is a pan-Asian/Pacific/European hybrid identity that carries with it a special insider status and is a legacy of the plantation (Takaki, 1984). Lum (1998) argues that … local culture developed out of a necessity: immigrant laborers and native Hawaiians found themselves in a plantation system on the lowest rung of the ladder and subject to deliberate efforts by the plantations to pit ethnic groups against each other … Sharing a common enemy, local culture has often been characterized as a culture of resistance against the dominant white culture and rooted in the struggles of the working class of Hawaii’s sugar plantations. (p. 12)
This identity is also tied closely (though not exclusively) to one’s ability to speak “pidgin English,” technically Hawaiian Creole English (Kawamoto, 1993; Tobin, 2000). Paralleling debates about Ebonics and African American English (Baugh, 2000), the use of pidgin versus Standard English in schools has been a defining struggle between locals and dominant Euro-American society (Kawamoto, 1993), as illustrated in this excerpt of power/resistance from local poet and novelist Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s (1996) Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, celebrated (by some) for its locally inflected depiction of working-class Hawai’i: English class, we got Mr. Harvey. Jerome looks at me and puts his middle finger on the desk to our worst teacher, because Mr. Harvey says for the fiftieth time this year: “No one will want to give you a job. You sound uneducated. You will be looked down upon. You’re speaking a low class form of good Standard English. Continue, and you’ll go nowhere in life … DO NOT speak pidgin. You will only be hurting yourselves.” (p. 9)
This interaction encapsulates the cultural and class struggle that lies at the heart of this sense of identity and which contradicts poi bowl (melting-pot) portrayals of democratic racial harmony in Hawai’i (cf. Gulick, 1978 [1937]). Historically, this was an insider–outsider conflict between non-White locals and White non-locals (Rosa, 2000); however, what is key, and now very much in dispute, is among whom the struggle is actually occurring.
As the descendant of im/migrants to what was the Kingdom of Hawai’i, I grew up thinking that I was a product of the American Dream. My great-grandparents, grandparents, great-aunts, and uncles had worked in the broader plantation economy, either as domestic workers or as laborers, but they and their children were eventually able to do better. By comparison, their work as tenants on a coffee farm, nursing assistant, construction workers, seamstress, and handyman were improvements over fieldwork, working the line at the pineapple cannery, or caring for someone else’s home and family. My parents’ generation, for the most part, did even better. Half went to college, my mother became a teacher and my father a sociologist, although he and my uncles enlisted in the military first. We were the model minority (Lee, 2010). However, the family hagiography, as many do, glosses over much.
Confronting my (appropriated) localness
Exploring the work of Hawaiian scholars has helped me to chip away at this gloss to see my place as a settler colonist (Fujikane and Okumura, 2000, 2005). Haunani Kay Trask (2000a) contends that the common narrative of plantation racism and hard times, told by Asian (predominantly of Japanese descent) immigrants to Hawai’i, is an ideological tool used to appropriate land, power, and identity (cf. Lum, 1998). While a growing body of local literature and histories (e.g. Kodama-Nishimoto et al., 1984; Takaki, 1984) have given voice to people who may not have had the opportunity to tell their stories publicly before, these stories do not acknowledge that local is a construct being used to erase immigrant. Furthermore, Trask (2000a) points out that many who claim a plantation heritage do not in fact have this in their background, and even if they do, this is not equivalent to the Hawaiian experience of conquest.
Rona Halualani (2002) adds to this argument a cogent analysis of Hawai’i’s place in the European–American–Asian imagination and how Hawaiians have been constructed as immigrants themselves through archeological scholarship, thereby freeing the land of Hawai’i from the ancestral claims of any one people. Locals and those identifying themselves as “Hawaiian-at-heart” have equal right to the islands, with the further insult that Ka Lahui Hawai’i [the sovereignty movement my t-shirt supported] is seen as counter to the “Aloha Spirit” and even racist. This scholarly knowledge of the Hawaiian works in concert with imagery contained in travelers’ accounts, museums, and the tourist industry to construct the Hawaiian as noble/wicked savages, objects of desire, but not people with any claim to reparations.
These analyses began to problematize my nostalgia. Rather than a peaceful paradise or site of local/White struggle (Lum, 1998; Yamanaka, 1996), I came to the dislocating realization that Hawai’i remains an occupied nation (Trask, 2000b). However, given the lack of an audience for even the clearest legal argument in the face of the many social injustices the United States has yet to face, my existential dilemma has evolved into one of connecting the exotic to my current local realities in Chicago and more specifically with children and schooling.
Julie Kaomea’s work has both provided me with inspiration and some insight into the possibilities of decolonizing research in education by shedding light on the cultural and political struggles seen in the State of Hawai’i’s mandated Hawaiian studies curriculum. She accomplishes this through analysis and interpretations of textbook imagery and other content (Kaomea, 2000), children’s perceptions of kūpuna (elders) (Kaomea, 2003), and providing descriptions of the curriculum in application (by predominantly Japanese-American teachers) (Kaomea, 2005a). More specific to my teaching at Erikson Institute, which along with early educators draws many students who work in children’s hospitals, she has also written very powerfully about her experiences of being constructed as an “always already failing Hawaiian mother” by a neo-natal health care system that expected her to be, and saw her only as, an at-risk mother simply because of her indigenousness (Kaomea, 2005b). This piece was my first attempt to introduce an explicitly postcolonial perspective into a seminar linked to students’ field education, which led to a difficult but productive exploration of how professional cultures, institutional policies, and Euro-American ethnotheories of child development (and mother blaming) interact and play out in students’ field experiences.
Bolstered by that encounter, I have recently begun using Yamanaka’s Wild Meat and Bully Burgers, despite its problems, in my section of Foundations of Bilingual Education and American Schooling when we cover the binary assumptions (Spanish/English) embedded in language planning and policy, experiences of children who speak dialects of American English, and the erasure of race in language instruction when we engage in debate about the Oakland Public Schools’ brief attempt to recognize African American English as a medium of instruction (Baugh, 2000). As a final example, in my Social Policy and Advocacy Class, we work to understand the cultural and historical roots of the dominant storyline of contemporary Chicago, and therefore urban childhoods, using (among other things) Ta-Nehisi Coates’ (2014) account of the city’s engineered segregation through de jure and de facto housing policy in the mid-20th century, within the broader historical arc of conquest, slavery, settler colonialism, subsequent waves of im/migration, and indigenous critiques of “helping” professionals (IAM, 2014)—all as foundational to applied critical policy analysis and advocacy.
I hasten to say that these attempts are nascent, have not always gone smoothly (e.g. occasional course evaluations noting “liberal bias”), and are just small examples of what many others are doing in classrooms across the United States and world, which brings me to my concluding points. First, I never would have considered these ideas without a nurturing community of scholarship committed to turning dominant ideas on their heads. As I alluded to earlier, entering this CoP was bewildering and defamiliarizing, but now being a diasporic member of that community highlights its important role in my life and spurs my desire to replicate something like it where I am now. As I have struggled to recreate these experiences in Chicago, I have thought long about the question of what helped me to persist through my discomfort.
Interestingly, I found a belonging in school that I had never experienced through having my sense of cultural belonging dislocated, finding grounding in trust relationships with Beth, Joe, and our colleagues. For me, this was an unfamiliar experience of schooling—an alchemy of risk, discomfort, and relative safety, where we pushed each other intellectually and emotionally. At the risk of overidealizing, this was a space full of contact zones in which not knowing and being “legitimately peripheral” were generally accepted (it was graduate school, so there was, of course, some posturing). The under-considered notion of legitimate peripheral participation has been very helpful in considering my experiences. This is the idea that newcomers and not-knowers have legitimate social roles in relation to “old-timers,” as do newcomers to other newcomers and old timers to each other (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger et al., 2002). Within these relationships, my struggles to understand Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and so on, and accompanying expressions of internalized oppression, were not met with derision or subtle accusations of false consciousness but rather with a dialogic admixture of challenge and support. Of course there were misunderstandings and miscommunications, the navigation of which was key to our learning.
More specifically, my relationship with Beth has transformed from the more asymmetrical newcomer/old timer relationship into a reciprocal mentorship through time and shared activity: a research assistantship, post-doctoral fellowship, opportunities to participate with her in scholarly activism, and of course through co-authorship. And finally, given the often tentative status of early career scholars in the current age, I do not think that I would have had the courage to introduce these ideas into my own teaching, research, and community-based work if it were not for those who initiated these movements, represented by this Special Issue, which are essential to not just sustain these ideas and critiques but also to organize and provide support across time and space.
Concluding thoughts: Toward a scholarship of belonging in childhood studies
Thus far, we have discussed how engaging with Global South and related onto-epistemologies has transformed us and our scholarly practices. As we near the end of these collaborative reflections, we cannot make the point strongly enough that the small work our intertwined narratives suggest were driven not only by engaging with ideas, stories and data but also by doing this within an ongoing co-mentoring relationship situated within both local and diasporic CoPs. Our paths are not so exceptional and, despite not being representative either, are reflected in allied work that is occurring across the globe. However, as we began this essay, recognition of this collective work has renewed importance in the current moment, and our central challenges, opportunities, and obligations are to locate critical childhood studies in the current moment.
In considering this, we are influenced by Julio Frenk’s (2016) recent remarks on the state of diversity in the academy, which focused on Drew Gilpin Faust’s notion of a scholarship of belonging. He argued that scholars, as people, and institutions of higher education, as places, have special roles within and obligations to society, purposes that can become de-emphasized with the neoliberal academy’s pre-occupations with narrowed empiricism and demonstrating social and economic return on investment (Nagasawa and Swadener, 2015). Frenk asserted that In a world that seems increasingly fractured and fractious our [emphasis added] sense of community is under threat. One of the most important ways in which universities can be exemplary is by embracing diversity in all of its dimensions—race and ethnicity, national origin, gender, language, economic assets, sexual orientation, religion, age, physical capacities. (p. 4)
However, simply increasing the numbers of Others on campuses and within the academic gaze is not nearly enough. Representation without cultures of belonging and climates of tolerance will not result in the transformed, multicultural academy he and others envision (Pope et al., 2014). Frenk (2016) further argued that “… it is the responsibility of every discipline to offer their work to these challenges” by focusing on remaking the academy by conceptualizing a scholarship of belonging, taking action, and critically evaluating these efforts (p. 9). What does this have to do with critical childhood studies? Everything.
For what has been one of the central purposes of efforts to trouble master narratives of childhood, if not to shine light on the innumerable, place-based, and embodied alternate storylines of personhood in order for us to enter (again and again) intellectual and material contact zones (Somerville et al., 2011)? There now exists a substantial body of work that destabilizes the seemingly firm foundations of global north/Western scientistic constructions of childhood that deny the possibilities and erase the existences of other childhoods (e.g. Cannella, 1997; Cannella and Viruru, 2004; Fleer et al., 2008; Kaomea, 2003; Lamb and Hwang, 1996; Tobin, 2000). This is, of course, scholarship that must continue—but with a conscious eye on the necessity of intergenerational transmission and movement-building which has never been more necessary.
Bearing in mind Frenk’s suggestion that scholars must explore the meanings of belonging, develop approaches to promoting this, and apply their scholarly tools to analyzing these, we offer some beginning thoughts—that we hope to engage in with others—about a scholarship of belonging and opportunities presented by the current movement moment. First, viewing past and current critical childhood studies scholarship as being about opening spaces for alternate personhoods, turning childhood inside-out (to borrow from Minh-Ha, 1991), and creating the potential for a deep inclusivity and transformed practice. Second, a scholarship of belonging in critical childhood studies uses this literature to create contact zones that involve tricky dances of safety and discomfort, for embodied, deep place learning cannot occur without recognizing, being with/in, and doing something, no matter how small, about the pain of colonialism’s living legacy. And yet there needs to be degrees of safety-through-human-connection to sustain the engagement necessary to even begin considering how to make amends. This is not easy to do and requires concerted practice—a social one. Third, we believe that this ethos should extend across contexts in recognition of our scholarly kinship. This is not suggesting agreement with each other, not in the slightest, but rather honoring our connectedness and having faith in the transformative possibility of dialogue. And finally, despite the heartbreak of current violence and persistent oppression, we suggest that there may be evidence of a discursive shift, at least in the United States, reflecting a climate more favorable to progressive grassroots movements, which can be seen as revealing cracks in what is too often treated as a totalizing and unassailable discourse/structure. To this list, we add the possibilities of second (and third and beyond) wave critical childhood studies that we are confident are being embodied in uncounted places and longing to be connected.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.