This postqualitative inquiry explores the processes that occurred when a group of early childhood education (ECE) students and I engaged with and in pedagogical narrations over one academic term as we attempted to make visible and disrupt the hegemonic images of children and childhood we held. I worked with Foucault’s notion of power in this study to attend to those moments when competing material-discursive practices created tensions, anxiety, and contradictions in our thinking as the students and I explored new understandings of children and childhood. Barad’s theory of agential realism provided a framework for considering how pedagogical narrations function as an apparatus, that is, as an instrument that intraacts with organisms and matter, within a learning activity to produce disruptions and change in order for generative knowledges to be produced. Positioned within the reconceptualization of early childhood education (RECE), this research is significant in that it extends the reconceptualization focus beyond the early childhood classroom into the education of early childhood educators. Further, the project challenges education from an anthropocentric and logocentric understanding whereby the knower and the known are considered distinct entities in a pedagogical context. / Graduate / kkummen@capilanou.ca

Using postfoundational and postqualitative frameworks, this dissertation considers what materializes when four child care centres adopt a multiage grouping structure, which includes children born in four consecutive years in each centre. The research question asks how do children live their lives in multiaged child care? To explore that question, the study challenges developmentalism as the dominant principle for organizing child care groupings. Engaging with three theoretical concepts, caring relations, dwelling, and becoming, the dissertation further questions: a) what characterizes relationships in these multi-aged centres? b) how do children negotiate through the curriculum in the centres? c) how can the children’s transformations be conceptualized in postdevelopmental theory/practice? This action research project employs the process of pedagogical narrations to story three ordinary moments that occurred in the child care centres. The pedagogical narrations process extends those storied moments through the critical reflections of the caregivers who work in the centres. The analytic process, thinking with theory, plugs-in the three concepts, caring relations, dwelling, and becoming, to the stories, producing beyond-developmental understandings of children, childhood, and child care. The study demonstrates pedagogical narrations as an effective postqualitative methodology for caregivers to research their own practices. This study concludes that child care structures such as age groupings, require situated ethics of care and responsibility, as well as, an early years reconceptualized curriculum that resists universalizing and normalizing practices in favour of situated ones. Considering caring relations, in spaces for young children, provides a context for thinking beyond simply, and only, adults caring for children, to thinking of children in relations of care with place, other non-human beings and non-living things, as well as other people, including other children and adults. Thinking with the dwelling concept encourages an attention to the present in early years settings, allowing more-than-developmental interests to flourish. Thinking becoming means thinking becoming-other, and positions subjectivities, including those of children, caregivers and place as unstable, shifting, and in relation. / Graduate

Feminist theorising has been instrumental in efforts to challenge gender hierarchies and conceptualize care as an ethic of relationality and interdependence, and has influenced visions of pedagogy as a relational, ethical and political endeavour. While these pedagogies importantly challenge simplified, uncontextualized, apolitical notions of both gender and care, they do not necessarily attend to the increasing complexity of children’s heterogeneous commonworlds. Following a theoretical and methodological framework aligned with material feminism and post qualitative research, in particular thinking with feminist scholars Barad and Haraway, this research questions what an engagement with human-and non-human relationality might do to complicate conversations about gender and care. Employing pedagogical narrations through a post-qualitative lens, this inquiry explores how children, educators and things become implicated in gendered caring practices. A diffractive analysis is put to work wherein gender and care are analyzed with/in several child-doll and child-car encounters, and are diffractively read through other doll and car stories near and far from the classroom. This analysis illuminates the political and ethical embeddedness of early childhood pedagogies, and the understanding that gendering and caring emerge with/in a complex web of many relations. Material feminism loosens ties that bind simplified constructions of gender as explanations for care and vice versa, and instead puts forward that gender and care per formatively emerge through intra-action. As such pedagogical and research practices need to pay careful attention to that which is always already on the verge of becoming. / Graduate