Children playing on playgrounds is a common sight, one most people have witnessed and participated in. While playground spaces are scattered throughout the United States as places for children to explore, they often reflect adult notions of childhood and come in standardized forms, which often neglect the interests of children. Situated at the nexus of critical childhoods and spatial theories, this study argues that children’s playground spaces are valuable sites of study, as are the experiences of children utilizing them. While easy to ignore the desires of very young children, or brush them off as unimportant or uninformed, this study emphasizes the value of seeing, hearing, and prioritizing the experiences of two-year old’s as they navigate playground spaces. Utilizing researcher and child-driven methods, children’s verbal and nonverbal modes of communication were valued and reflected in the findings. Children’s movements through playground spaces were reflective of their sensory and embodied ways of being, as well as their connection with the material world. This work proposes that more attention be paid to children’s actual lived experiences in playground spaces and that this be considered when designing and constructing these spaces.

Discursive power relations that enclose the field of early childhood have functioned to construct the idea of the “normal” child, a process of silencing that limits spaces of “being” for children in classrooms. Relatedly, constructions of the “good” early childhood teacher are shaped by dominant discourses of child development that define “best” and “appropriate” practices in accordance with children’s developmental “needs.” In this study, I take up feminist poststructural theories in self-reflexive examination of my teaching practice with toddlers to allow for alternate ways of seeing the “child,” and therefore, the “teacher.” In laying bare the child and teacher as discursively constructed, complexities of classroom subjects become visible and possibilities for new ways of doing “teacher” emerge when we work to destabilize the hegemonic “truths” of the field. Using feminist poststructural theories to shape a narrative teacher research methodology, this study employs ethnographic and narrative methods in self-reflexive analysis of my own teaching practice. Working with data produced during one semester in the classroom, I interrogate my daily practices and understandings of “toddler,” teaching, learning, development, and research in order to displace dominant ways of understanding “toddler” and “toddler teacher.” The possibilities for teaching toddlers have been constrained by intersecting discourses of development, readiness, neoliberalism, and gender as development and progress are prioritized while the widespread assumption that early childhood is “women’s work” (Grumet, 1988) shapes the roles and statuses of teachers who work with our youngest children. The discoveries and new knowledges I have constructed through this work have exposed, challenged, and reimagined positionings of the teacher. From the gendered “care” work assumed to come naturally to women, to the technical practice based on a foundation of developmental knowledge, to the policing of children in classrooms, this study offers examinations of relations of power that may enable teachers and children to position themselves differently in classrooms, within and beyond existing discourses.