We worked with three proposals from Azzarito (2019a, b) and Body Curriculum:
We worked with Body Curriculum’s emphasis on how working with questions of visibility and processes of making visible (and invisible) shapes how we get to know bodies. Questions of making visible are tangible throughout our experiments in pedagogical documentation (instant polaroid pictures and how we notice bodies; measuring bodies and revisiting these ‘measured’ pieces of tape to see how we move with them).
Body Curriculum generates counter-stories, where youth “visually express their subjective experiences of the body in culturally relevant, contextualized, and meaningful ways, rewriting the body beyond media’s dominant narratives, and thus celebrating and validating a diversity of cultural experiences and representations of the body in fitness and health” (Azzarito, 2019b, p. 55). We worked with the proposal of getting to know bodies through storying. Intentionally getting to know bodies through stories was a move to re-enliven our body logics in a context where child development, healthism, individualism, regulation, and instrumentality had stripped richness from bodied life.
We leaned into Azzarito’s assertion that Body Curriculum is resolutely a curricular project of articulating the body. That is, bodies are known and re-known with curriculum-making. For us, this underscored the high-stakes of getting to know bodies with children, as we confronted how different bodying relations threaded through and were reiterated in everyday curriculum and the ideas, invitations, materials, and grammars – the things that nourish curriculum – that we chose to bring to particular events of thinking bodies with children were incredibly consequential.
Context, Concerns, and Inheritances
Body Curriculum
We draw on Azzarito’s (2019b) analysis of how contemporary body pedagogies and biopedagogies position children who “deviate from norms of size, shape, race, social class, and gender” (p. 1) as “’out of sight’ of the performative cultured of the body governed by neoliberal principles and ideals of self-compliance, self-discipline, and self-actualization” (p. 2). While Azzarito primarily works with youth, we work with what their analysis and proposals open for thinking bodied relations in childhood. For Azzarito, attending to how we negotiate collisions of bodies and education is both a critically intersectional project and a project of generative resistance. This means that we, in early childhood education, must understand how children’s encounters with dominant neoliberal conceptions of the ‘good’ or ‘valued’ body require children to navigate the politics of exclusion, recognition, conformity, and compliance alongside many axes of lived difference (ex. gender, whiteness, ability, racialization). At the same time as we study and respond to how children negotiate the othering and discriminatory consequences of normative biopedagogies, Azzarito makes clear that we must also attend to how refusals of the idealized body are productive: affirming the resistance, excess, and otherwise of ‘out of sight’ bodies is a life-making proposal.
Azzarito (2019b) describes how “young people insert themselves into dominant constructions of the normative it body, tearing apart the boundaries of race, gender, and social class that frame them, breaking away from normative images that Western society imposes upon their identities, thereby creating new identity positions” (p. 3). When we held Azzarito’s emphasis on getting to know the creative force of bodies alongside our question of ‘how do we get to know bodies with children in ECE?’, the possibility of figuring out how bodies are inventive and vibrant resonated with our desire to create more livable bodying relations with children. Because of our concerns about the violent inheritances and ongoing consequences of taken-for-granted body and biopolitics, we were tight rope walking a line between foregrounding critical analysis with children (ex. unpacking how body ideals are one story about bodies; naming bodied power dynamics when they arise) and wanting to get to know bodies beyond these existing logics with children. And, in working to think beyond existing ways of getting to know bodies, we wanted to resist how ‘critical analysis’ vs. ‘alternative approach’ oppositions are often made in early childhood education. An example of this is the ongoing debate about if emerging educators should learn normative child development prior to considering alternative theories of childhood. As a field, staying embroiled in this debate serves to maintain the status-quo through paralysis and precedent, such that nothing outside the terms of this debate over foundational knowledges can be considered and where the terms – such as why ECE requires a singular vision of childhood – are not up for reconceptualization. Azzarito’s proposal for re-creating bodied relations that dialogue with, but create alter to, dominant discourses offered a process that we could think alongside in our own work.
Azzarito (2019a, b) names this practice as ‘Body Curriculum’, where “students’ active engagement in the meaning-making of the embodied self, difference, and inequalities engenders body encounters with different ways of being and creates counter-hegemonic narratives of the body against media’s dominant representations of white ideals of feminine and masculine bodies” (2019b, p. 47). Azzarito’s Body Curriculum, as both a research practice and a curricular engagement, is a specific and detailed project, We want to be clear that in our work, we did not attempt to replicate Body Curriculum as a method, nor did we translate the practices that Azzarito created with youth into our work with children.