Core Intention + Question #1
How do we get to know bodies with children in early childhood education?
If the question of getting to know how bodies matter in early childhood education makes clear that we do, already and constantly, draw upon particular knowledges to make particular understandings of bodies matter, how do we figure out how to read these existing knowledge-body relations for their investment in maintaining the status quo?
How, for example, does getting to know bodies with children through the frame of addressing children’s ‘basic needs’ create specific practices and relations for understanding bodies (such as relations of maintenance, mechanization, or obligation – and discourses of custodial care)?
If we take seriously that bodies become differently meaningful with different knowledges, what relations with bodies become palpable when we purposefully work to understand children’s mundane, everyday body engagements outside of conventional logics?
How, for example, might we think toileting with knowledges beyond only hygiene? How might hunger matter to more than just nutrition or sitting still as more than only self-regulation skill-building? We have to be diligent to ensure that thinking outside, beyond, or with more than what is taken-for-granted does not slide into relativism, arrogance, or fantasy. We carry Loveless’ (2019) contention that “to work interdisciplinarily has always carried with it certain risks, such as the revelation of incompetence possible when the skills of one discipline prove insufficient in another context” (p. 45) as a reminder of what is at stake when we traffic in unconventional body logics with children; getting to know bodies without the certainty of well-worn, familiar touchstones is humbling work. When we confront how extant body logics are insufficient to projects of getting to know bodies with children, presencing (Nxumalo & Bozalek, 2021) and nourishing other logics cannot become a practice of reclaiming competence, but must risk understanding bodied relations without the certainty, reductions, and erasures that competence demands.
If bodies ‘get in the way’ of dominant imperatives or outcomes in early childhood education (schoolfication, productivity, standardized ‘quality’) how do we study what it is they get in the way of – and how might getting in the way be a generative practice?
For example, what if we notice a child who is moving slowly amid an expectation for moving quickly for how they are getting in the way of demands for efficiency or administrative obligations to maintain a fast-paced, predetermined schedule? How might moving slowly be a refusal to participate in ableist structures (or, a moment where ableist structures create the inequities they aim to maintain) that define competence as the timely, effective execution of a skill determined by universalized developmental criteria? Following Knight’s (2019) account of how “the problem child, with its narrative of delay, highlights the ways in which the futurity of childhood depends on many children not being able to access that futurity” (p. 80), rethinking how we use constructions speed and time to understand how children’s bodies ‘get in the way’ becomes a pressing proposal.
If we expand our attention to bodies beyond only the familiar, routine events where bodies are centered in early childhood education, how do we, collectively and grounded in our pedagogical commitments, make decisions about how to get to know bodies with children?
Embedded unevenly in situated pasts, presents, and futures, how do we craft an orientation to foregrounding some body knowledges and not others amid the vast and patchy constellation of interdisciplinary, lived, ancestral, and not-yet-known possibilities for getting to know bodies? Nxumalo et al., (2018) assert that it is “pedagogically responsible” (p. 449) to work at “multiple processes of lived curriculum making that educators decide to sustain” (p. 449). This insistence on the necessity to make decisions as a pedagogical responsibility anchors our question of getting to know bodies with children as an ethical and political project. For Nxumalo et al., making decisions “necessitate ethical and political intentionality – including close responding to the stratifications embedded in the who (colonized and racialized others), what (more-than-human others) and where (anti-black and settler colonial places) of emergence within neoliberal educational contexts” (p. 449). When there are no neutral, non-consequential pathways for getting to know bodies within complex and unjust contemporary worlds, how do we decide what considerations do and do not hold weight?
When there are no neutral or utopian pathways for getting to know bodies, how do we contend with the concurrent assertion that getting to know bodies is always an imperfect ethical and political project?
If we are implicated in the bodied relations and knowledges we choose to pay attention to (and not), how do we answer to the ethical and political decisions we participate in? How do we craft practices of accountability that thread getting to know bodies with educational processes of life and world-making?