‘I understand. And I’m with you’: RECE as Home,(un)Doing,Belonging,(dis)Place(ment) and (in)Security

Abstract

Drawing upon slow scholarship and autobiographical methods, this paper presents four vignettes constructed from virtual meetings across the span of several months. Although we had originally intended to write a more formal paper about the ways in which the reconceptualist movement connects to our own scholarship, the writing process became less efficient and more personal than we expected as we connected to each other around the idea(l)s of home, (un)doing, belonging, (dis)place(ment) and (in)security. Although we attempted to narrate the ways in which reconceptualism has been instrumental in shaping our identities and scholarship, we found that this paper became moreso a re-representation of reconceptualism-at-work.

This is not really our paper. It is an account of what happened when we connected by Zoom across the Atlantic, in the shadow of a paper that did not get written (at least not in the ways we thought it might). We had intentions of developing a more formal paper to trace our separate paths within the broader reconceptualist movement, but we didn’t write that paper in the time-space available to us. What happened instead was a layering of reconceptualist idea(l)s, movements, affects, and relations across time and space, presented here in four (re)constructed conversations. In presenting our conversations as a paper, we gather the narrative around several concepts: Home, (un)Doing, Belonging, (dis)Place(ment) and (in)Security. These were not the topics we had originally intended, but rather the throughlines which emerged between us as we tried–and failed (or not) – to coauthor the paper. Drawing upon both slow scholarship (e.g. Berg and Seeber, 2016; Collette et al., 2018; Mountz, 2015) and autobiographical narrative methods (e.g. Miller, 2005; Penn, 2019; Silin, 2018), this work confronts what emerges in the not-yet, when instead of writing the way we had initially planned, we engage in the critical work of ‘foregrounding relationality and interdependence, and honouring vulnerability and need’ (Bruce and Powell, 2022: 63). Through ‘affirmative, detailed and care-full practices’ of attunement towards personal and professional life (Collette et al., 2018: 47), we aim to highlight the ways in which RECE is at work, even when we’re not working as we should be or as we thought we might.

Number 1: 25/09/23 RECE as Home

The zoom screen is up, mics unmuted, video on. The conversation begins as it often does between ‘academics’ – we discuss institutional burdens, workloads and students, technological struggles. Computers that won’t cooperate. I (Casey) have just returned from school drop-off and I turn the conversation towards my young child and his schooling, my struggles to find footing as a parent within systems that don’t make sense for young children. We find commonality in our own ‘shy’ children (though they are 25 years apart) and the quiet brilliance they hold and that others are sometimes incapable of honouring. As we exchange anecdotes from our children’s school experiences, there is an unspoken solidarity between us that grounds the conversation – issues of power and authority, of who speaks for children, of how educational experiences unfold within complex historical and political landscapes. Of how exhausting it is. Of how much work there is to be done. We are RECE colleagues; we met in 2013 at the RECE organisation’s annual meeting in Nairobi, Kenya.

When the conversation turns towards our upcoming article, we discuss how we might come together across our very different professional contexts, how we might structure the writing tasks, what threads of connection and disconnection might be produced through our writing together/apart and how it might honour the reconceptualists movement and, in particular, the RECE organisation that we have come to call our academic and activist ‘home’ for more than a decade. We’re not sure what we could even write about but we continue to muse on the concept of ‘home’. What does it mean to call an organisation or a movement – without a physical place to attach itself to – home? Colette talks about the inherent loneliness of adopting a critical perspective in one’s work; grounding oneself in reconceptualist tenets can be institutionally isolating. But being able to find a home in an organisation like RECE affords kinship and community, affirmation and inspiration, care and strength. Of not feeling so alone. By giving us permission ‘to be angry and to dream’ (Lubeck, 1991: 168), reconceptualising early childhood education is what we do, why we do it and also how we are able to keep at it. Both of us have had uncommon paths in academia, and RECE has afforded us a particular kind of wayfinding from the margins.

Before we sign-off, Colette says, ‘and hey, listen . . . I understand. And I’m with you’. I know by her tone that she’s gently (re)turned the conversation back to these early years of schooling for my ‘shy’ child, for her ‘shy’ (now adult) child. Again, we settle into it . . . kinship and community, affirmation and inspiration, care and strength. Not feeling so alone.

Number 2: 27/10/23 RECE as (un)Doing

When we begin our zoom meeting today, we’re both well aware that we haven’t started writing the paper we should be writing, that we’ve promised to write for this special issue. Our conversation turns to the disorienting losses of the past month. Losses near and far. Both of us have, respectively, endured the sudden death of a close friend and witnessed the ongoing, devastating campaign of genocide in Gaza. We’re both reeling from these personal and global tragedies. Despite Colette’s doctor urging her to consider a rest, she marched in solidarity with Palestine in her home city of Dublin. ‘The energy of the moment is so difficult, and I am so tired’, she says, ‘but I don’t have a choice’. For me, it’s endless calling and emailing of representatives, signing petitions, making meagre donations – each is time consuming, all are seemingly futile. I (Casey) tearfully explain the hold that the endless bad news from the region has on me; I’m undone. It’s hard to look at my own child without crying but I can’t look away. I have to try to make some difference, even when it feels excruciatingly small. This is the first time in the conversation, but not the last, that Colette says, ‘vocation’; caring deeply about the state of the world and, in particular, the injustices facing children and families is a professional imperative for those in early childhood spaces. This includes the necessary work of locating ourselves within the matrix of oppressions and privileges. We have both been guilty of dedicating ourselves to ‘the work’ without equal regard for our own wellbeing. Although I have made recent moves away from the academy and into a differently paced life, my first decade in academia was defined by overwork and hurt that I disguised as productivity and persistence.

Our conversation pauses, interrupted by Colette’s doorbell ringing. A member of the Traveller community, a woman, with which she has had a long relationship is at the door. She regularly visits Colette to talk and for material support. In the Traveller ¹ community this is called the ‘call-back’, wherein the Traveller builds a relationship with someone from the settled community and visits throughout the year. Colette comes back to her computer and asks me to wait just 5 minutes more; community activism and connection takes precedence. How can it not?

Upon her return, conversation shifts from the exhaustion of doing ‘the work’ to the exhausting work of undoing. Although both of us had come to teacher education in different and nontraditional ways, we have shared goals as reconceptualist educators: for our students (and ourselves) to be ‘mobilised and pluralized through acts of questioning and thinking radically’ (Yelland and Frantz Bentley, 2018: 3). However, within the structures of higher education, we often find ourselves mired in what Britzman (2007) calls the ‘uneven development’ of becoming-teacher. That is, ‘we have grown up in schools, have spent our childhood and adolescence observing teachers and our peers, and when we enter the field of teacher education, this avalanche of experience we have undergone, made from schooling, confirms itself’ (Britzman, 2007: 2; See also, Britzman, 2003, 2006). We find that the majority of our time has been dedicated to striving for the very basics of reconceptualist deconstruction (i.e. the grand narratives of developmentalism, the language of risk and the dangers of universality) in order to make room for a more critical praxis. Battling against everyone’s lifetime of schooling, including our own, the time and effort spent ‘undoing’ often seems like standing still.

We talk about how we sustain this energy to engage, to activate. How can we rise continually to meet the moment, in the spaces and places and ways in which we are needed as well as manage the pushback? Thinking back on Lubeck’s (1991) words about righteous anger and reverie, I wonder if where we are now is what the generation of reconceptualist scholars who came before us had imagined for us? Are the struggles we’re engaging in – within the larger field of ECEC, within our own institutions, within ourselves – the same, different and/or the way forward? Are we (un)doing it right?

Number 3: 24/11/23: RECE as Belonging and (dis)Place(ment)

In our third conversion there is an immediate recognition that the energy is heavy. Life is presenting challenges that are immense both mentally and spiritually. We continue to watch and grieve for the situation in Gaza as it deteriorates and becomes ever more grave. I (Colette) mention that in Dublin we have had an unprecedented anti-immigration riot which has escalated into more regular anti-immigrant violence at designated or potential accommodation centres. This is something we wouldn’t have imagined a year ago. We turn our discussion to borders, and who gets the right to belong and who doesn’t in a homeland or new destination. We are living in a time of global movement where new borders are being created, walls are being built, countries sealed. And in the effort to survive, so many are perishing. Western powers appear blinked, indifferent to their role in constructing these crises of movement. We both despair at the mind-bending excuses of the most powerful nations in the world for refusing to authoritatively challenge Israel and demand a ceasefire in Gaza. We ask questions that we can’t answer: Where is our humanity? ‘Are we going to once again watch a whole people being dehumanised to the point where their annihilation does not matter’? (Roy, 2023).

As we discuss Gaza, Casey remarks that she is back in her hometown to ‘celebrate America’s genocidal holiday’ (Thanksgiving), and we move to consider the ongoing oppression of the Native Americans and the minimal recognition of their bordered and misrepresented position in the USA. The resistance strategies of Palestinians and Native Americans from violent incursions into their communities and their removal from their land are inter-connected. Both communities have a desire for true sovereignty – ‘the inherent independent power of peoples’ who are ‘free from permissions and threats’ (Vaught et al., 2022: 4). People resist and these resistances manifest in micro and macro spaces of non-cooperation against state powers that maintain control. They are a pushback against a colonisation intent on the removal of and annihilation of the essence of people (Vaught et al., 2022). We discuss how often it is minimised that children live and grow in these spaces of resistance and that there are implications for how children learn to be in the world. Now, more than ever, we acknowledge that decolonising theory and practice within early childhood education has to remain at the forefront of the reconceptualist ethos (e.g. Habashi, 2023, 2017; Nxumalo, 2019; Soto, 2000). How our lives become either embedded within these resistances or free to disregard them are matters of privilege, of arbitrary borders and geography, of willingness to escape or turn and face the past and present. We wonder if, 300 years from now, people will be celebrating the destruction of Gaza with quality family time and a lavish dinner.

We begin to realise that these conversations, supposedly in the service of writing a paper about RECE, are becoming meditations on who we are and how we have been shaped and why reconceptualism drives our work. What are our resistances and desires as educators, academics and reconceptualists? How are we able to move – in which directions and at what costs? I am reminded of bell hooks’ (2009) musings on belonging, using the past as raw material to compel critical engagement with ‘home’ (p. 5). Jonathan Silin, in his paper ‘Called to Account’, presented at the Dublin RECE conference in 2015, also suggests that ‘in turning to look back we open a space for self-examination’ (Silin, 2015: 7). In these conversations, we are being led to that place, to begin to find our own expression about ourselves in the ‘home’ we came to in RECE.

Looking to the past

Back in her father’s house for the ‘holiday’, Casey practices recollection and revision as she follows her memory lines of childhood and belonging. Being a child of a mixed-race family was not the norm in her post-industrial Appalachian hometown. Her father experienced some discrimination growing up Asian in an all-White community but being a talented sportsman and competent student brought him privilege and acceptance. Likewise, Casey excelled socially and academically, mediating any negative associations that might go along with being a minority in rural Ohio. Although they were working class, they were in the unusual position that their mother had an advanced degree and a secure job, which was not normal amongst their peers. These relative privileges, despite being an anxious and unsure child, allowed Casey to ‘fake it’, to capitalise on her talents, and make herself different in a ‘good’ way. The positivity associated with difference in childhood grew much more complicated with age. Never having a relationship with another Asian American outside of her immediate family until she went to college, she found that she couldn’t connect once she had the opportunity to be in community with people of similar racial makeup. This brought her to question her identity, because everything she had learned was about being a multicultural person in a very particular Appalachian context. ‘I’ve had to cobble together who I am and reclaim myself, but it’s been tricky to be not only multiracial but also White passing in most settings and also a kind of Appalachian, working class outsider in the upper middle-class world of academia’. Navigating these identities, these borders, these differences leave one always just slightly on the outside looking in. She said, ‘and now there is always a bit of displacement and when I come home (to Appalachia) . . . you realise you are not like your family either, my family doesn’t understand what my life is professionally’. They think it is very odd to have gained a PhD, only to continue working with children. Casey wonders if a large part of her connection to RECE is that children and those who work alongside them are taken seriously, and not seen as ‘outsiders’.

I (Colette) grew up in the 60s in a lower middle-class area in an impoverished Ireland. The catholic church had a stranglehold on all matters including our moral compass and specifically the bodies and the rights of girls and women. Opportunities were scarce and the emigration boats to Britain and the USA were full. Money was tight and for me school was a penance under the rule of the presentation nuns. Where you came from mattered, and you knew it, reminded by slights and exclusions by individuals and in the school system. Moving between social classes was not so easy in Ireland. The messages in school also influenced your future and your identity as a woman. In the 1970/80s there was little ambition for us or support to attend college, our direction was to secretarial courses, nursing, insurance and banking. Both my sisters attended university at night, funded by their employers. My fee for college was paid for by my older sister, and I worked part-time and repaid her. My parents didn’t have opportunities available to them but believed in education and in the independence of women, not the norm at that time. When I was 21 my father died, having not seen the fruits of his labour and sacrifice, but my mother lived into her 80s proud of what her daughters had achieved. As a woman you had to fight your battles, and your confidence was held tightly by the nuns. These messages influenced my confidence, identity and place, where I came from was an anchor and a constraint, but my vision was strong. My route to academia was meandering. I worked in the private, voluntary and community sectors. Through my work with Traveller children I pursued the need for a more social justice approach to ECEC and the world. Working on the edge! I found myself drawing on the work of Freire (1972), focusing on disrupting and dismantling oppressions for Traveller children. At that time Freire’s work didn’t feature in ECEC in Ireland, neither did oppression, it was my connection with community development organisations that challenged and developed my way of thinking. Freire’s work prompted me to see the bigger picture to (re)consider how the sector conceptualised childhood and to think about it in relation to others.

Our memories are certainly incomplete, but the remembering, even as fragmented as it is, connects the personal, the professional and the political. Our conversations over Zoom can feel self-indulgent; we are working from privileged positions both personally and professionally. However, thinking, talking and writing with/in these spaces and places have given us clarity on the intricacies of our own need for community and belonging. These reflections ask us to continue diving deep and to question our ways of thinking and being, how we have arrived to where we are and where we might go. What borders define us – whether we are included or excluded – and how can we be constrained and liberated at the same time? How do these borders, divisions, differences make and remake us as scholars, as humans who claim to care about and take action on behalf of children past and present?

Number 4: (17/01/2024) RECE and (in)Security

After a lengthy personal check-in (How are the children? Are we taking care of ourselves?) our discussion shifts to professional insecurities, the vulnerabilities shaped by our past selves, and our feelings of otherness and inadequacy and how these intersect with RECE. When you attend a conference there is always an anxiety in presenting your work; what do we hope will be the outcome for ourselves and others (Silin, 2015)? For both of us, our initial engagements with the annual RECE conference set into motion particular ways of knowing and being that have continued to influence the trajectory of our work. Tracing the contours of our first encounter with this conference also highlighted the ways in which professional uncertainties and insecurities have factored into our relationship with RECE.

Casey:

My first RECE conference was in 2010 in Dalton, Georgia, USA. This was actually my very first conference as an Early Childhood PhD student. I had ‘jumped ship’ from a more traditional developmental science PhD programme just a year earlier after a chance elective in the ECE programme had introduced me to reconceptualist scholarship and convinced me I could pursue a different kind of professional life. I was inexperienced, nervous, and out of my depth. ‘I’m your grandmother!’ I vividly remember Mimi Bloch telling me this, grasping my hand, when we met in the hallway outside of a paper session. Now in 2023, and after over a decade of working with/in the RECE organisation and movement, I’m no longer taken aback by the care and attention that many experienced RECE scholars bestow upon graduate students and early career academics. But at the time, I was taken aback by this gesture. I hadn’t imagined I would be in the same room with every scholar who I was currently reading in my doctoral studies, much less to be taken by the hand. At this same conference, I attended a plenary session by Gail Boldt (2010) on embodied literacies and I can remember thinking that she was the kind of scholar I really wanted to be – a commanding intellectual that wrote and spoke of children’s lives with both tremendous theoretical complexity and enormous care. At the time, I wasn’t sure that I would even be able to write a dissertation, let alone become any kind of scholar. But holding the hand of my ‘grandmother’ allowed me to believe that I could give it a try. That sounds probably overly sentimental. But it’s true! When I teach or mentor or research, I aim for what I experienced in Dalton. Of course, I am falling short of this all the time.

Colette:

My first RECE experience was in Victoria, Canada in 2008. I had presented my work at national and international conferences previously, although not then working in academia. Travellers and Roma presentations were always put together, and I found that we spoke mainly to each other with little outside attendance. Preaching to the converted, so to speak. But my first RECE felt like acceptance, presenting not as an outsider but as an important thread in a collective weaving. First Nations educators and scholars were visible and engaged. Others were listening. RECE felt like a place of possibilities, sharing from the edge with recognition, curiosity, and respect. As someone late to academia, being in the space with scholars who influenced my thinking and have questioned the status quo for decades was and continues to be an honour. RECE colleagues encouraged me to do a doctorate, something I didn’t imagine I would do as someone connected to working at a grass-roots level. I’m so grateful for that.

None of this is to say that the RECE organisation and the broader reconceptualist movement are utopian. Like any collective, there are hierarchies, power structures, divisions, and personal and professional frictions. RECE isn’t free of those things, but perhaps it is special in how we chose to carry on together, as a community held together by vocation in spite of any of these limitations. Reconceptualism has been instrumental in shaping our identities and in the trajectories of our work. The solidarity of the people who have made this home with us has also made our persistence in that work possible.

Ending/moving forward

In a way, writing this paper turned out to be an exercise in ‘frank speaking which is both risky and free’ – Foucault’s concept of parrhesia (Foucault, 1983). In writing it together, we wanted to connect to what we believe are RECE’s most beautiful ideals – respect for individuals and communities, critical thought, professional growth, resistance and freedom. However, we worry that we may have taken the task of writing about RECE too personally and the risk is that this paper might be received in any number of negative ways – self-indulgent, fragmented, unpolished, lacking cohesive framing. A reasonable argument could be made for any of those qualifications. However, we argue that it is worthwhile, perhaps even freeing, to present this frank version of reconceptualism-at-work – imperfect, political, inefficient, vulnerable, uncertain, emotional and deeply personal. For us, these kinds of complex relationships and tender moments, our ability to connect to and support one another through professional milestones and personal losses has been how we move forward with/in our community and how we make a home within a movement.

As Silin (2015) notes ‘it’s a greater and greater challenge for teachers to find the time and professional support to look inward as well as outward, to interrogate their lived experiences as well as the experiences of those for whom they are responsible’ (p. 6 ). We are grateful for having the space and time to try to meet the challenge of looking inward in relation to the RECE movement. There is no firm conclusion to this paper; there are ongoing complexities and challenges that reconceptualism must attend to and that this paper does not solve. It is our hope that through this paper, others are moved to think critically about their activist and academic home(s), to (un)do what they’ve been taught, to settle into their places of belonging, to move with/in and against (in)security, so we can continue in the work, together.