What might the concept of queer joy offer to early childhood educators in New Brunswick, Canada? As a part of a study about the supports and barriers to comprehensive sexuality education in New Brunswick, Canada, we sought to speak with early childhood educators about the ways in which sexuality education happens in early childhood centers. We wondered: What kinds of sexuality education is already happening within early childhood centers and under what conditions? What do educators need to feel supported in this work? In a study with 11 early childhood educators, we found that they often spoke about 2SLGBTQI+ people and families through a lens of inclusion. Yet, despite this inclusion of 2SLGBTQI+ identities into the normative ECE space, there was no understanding of queerness and transness as joyful—and no real thinking through what queerness and transness might offer the educator and the classroom space in early childhood centers. As we imagine the possibilities for sexuality education within ECE contexts, we look forward to seeing what might happen when children and educators summon queer joy.

In Canada, multiple, intersecting, and incommensurable narratives promote investment in a public ECEC system. These dominant narratives are typically justified through an entanglement of discourses, including gender equity, colonialism, developmentalism, investment in children as future workers, and childcare as social infrastructure. With COVID-19, renewed economic arguments propose ECEC as an essential service, jump-starting an economy ravaged by the pandemic. Taking up a conversational approach, we question the potency of dominant narratives proliferated in media and policy initiatives as a way to effect large-scale change, and we seek to better understand alternative narratives of ECEC. We are drawn to those spaces where a range of new texts and narratives are generating possibilities for transformative changes. We co-create a bricolage of minor stories (Taylor, 2020) of change, keeping in mind Eve Tuck’s (2018a) theory of change and Elise Couture-Grondin’s (2018) premise of stories as theory. Keywords: early childhood education, policy, change, COVID-19, colonialism, throwntogetherness

This article shares conversational research (Thomson et al., 2012) that we undertook with parents in one of children’s primary education settings: the home. We investigated the question: what are the comfort levels of families, with young children, as they encounter picturebooks featuring diverse gender and sexual identities? Over the past 10 years in Canada, including New Brunswick, these picturebooks have increased in production (Bouchey, 2021; Miller Oke, 2019) complexity (Sullivan & Urraro, 2017) and circulation. Yet some educators in the early years of school remain uncomfortable reading these texts with young children, their concerns, in part, related to imagined backlash from heteronormative families (Goldstein 2021) and deeply entrenched constructs of childhood innocence (Kintner-Duffy et al., 2012; Martino & Cumming-Potvin, 2011, 2016; Robinson, 2013). Scholarship and our research confirm that most children know and can communicate their sex and gender identities by two years of age (Pastel et al, 2019; Stevenson, 2019) and are able to engage critically with picturebooks featuring diverse gender and sexual identities as they get older. Through our conversations with mothers, we learned that all families were comfortable with each picturebook category presented: gender expression, gender identity, gender harassment, and family composition. Interpreting our conversations through Queer Theory (Butler, 1990, 1993), we also learned how particular picturebooks serve as entry points to family discussions about diverse gender and sexual identities and how important access to diverse picturebooks is to provide these opportunities. Specifically, each of the nine mothers shared picturebooks that supported their child/children/families with being and knowing related to gender variance, who you can love, and/ or what games, hobbies and clothes are acceptable.

Kindergarten teacher Vivian Paley’s 40-year-old experiment with storytelling and story acting offers rays of hope to those seeking to build and nurture early years classrooms where creativity, agency, and democracy thrive. Our hope is that this volume, drawing on new research, serves to support those who seek to understand and promote such practices (Mardell & Swann, 2017 in Cremin et al., 2017: 198)

The children’s storybook, the Flat Rabbit, by Bárdur Oskarsson, explores complex ethical dilemmas experienced by the dog and rat after they discover the rabbit flattened on the road. Similarly, in our collective experiences with children and educators in three nature programs across Canada, we take up complex ethical dilemmas experienced by our unanticipated encounters with various deaths in the outdoors, including those of baby squirrels, a raccoon, and an owl. Common world (Latour. The politics of nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) theoretical framing helps in positioning the child as an “indivisible part of the natural and more-than-natural world.” This natural and more-than-natural world provides the impetus for children’s development of understanding and working theories related to sensitive concepts such as death (Mankiw & Strasser. Young Children, 68(1), 84–89, 2013). We identify and examine ideologies and practices around death that continue to occupy early childhood spaces (Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, UK/London, England: Duke University Press, 2016). In reimagining child-nature-animal entanglements, we posit that “staying with the trouble” (Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, UK/London, England: Duke University Press, 2016) disturbs sedimented embodied ideologies so that we might listen and foster a “practice of becoming witness” (Rose & Chrulew. Extinction studies-stories of time, death, and generations. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). We are working toward a more performative, storied, and experimental way of being and learning together with children and animals, “learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth” (Haraway. Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, UK/London, England: Duke University Press, p. 2, 2016).

What does it mean to unsettle the settler? Elder Dr. Albert Marshal (2018) recently stated that a real need exists within education to find ways "to respect and balance the energies of different knowledge systems," something he referred to as "knowledge gardening." As four North American white settler early childhood scholars, we (re)story our understandings and evolving sense of land/place through listening, wondering, rejoicing, and learning to be affected by multiple land stories. Indigenous peoples and knowledge systems offer powerful counter-narratives to human–nature divides, human exceptionalism, and colonial hegemonic discourses that currently influence early childhood education for sustainability research and practices. We offer our stories (unsettlings) as inspiration to others, not as a recipe or method, but in the spirit of co-learning to fully recognize past–present perpetuation of colonization and as one way towards healing and learning to live together in a good way.

This presentation emerges from our experiences teaching an online, asynchronous children’s literature graduate course. Across its six-year history, teacher-participants have responded variously to the graphic novel Skim. Recently, when confronted with an image in the novel depicting a kiss between a female high school student and her female teacher, some course members focused solely on the kiss, seeming to dismiss the text entirely. To think through this unprecedented occurrence, and to consider its philosophic and curricular constraints/possibilities, we draw on the thinking of Julia Kristeva and those who interpret her work. Specifically, we are thinking about the role of discomfort in leading to Kristeva’s abjection—or, a casting out of the perceived other—and Sonja Arndt’s “dominant need to know” as possibly protecting against dwelling within the uncertain chaos of discomfort and the resulting redefinition of self. This presentation contributes to the ongoing conversation around pedagogies of discomfort. We also consider the distinct temporal experience of reading a graphic novel and suggest that the unique temporality of both the assigned reading and teacher-participants’ lives may encourage/discourage dwelling in discomfort. In closing, we discuss possible curricular and pedagogic shifts we might make to open spaces for dwelling with/in discomfort.

We are five early childhood researchers, from across Canada, thrown together amongst a series of alarming discourses, where developmental, economic, and neuroscientific rationales for ECEC drown out alternative theoretical perspectives, as well as personal experience, values, subjective knowledges, and the fierce passion we feel for our work. In the midst of this “throwntogethness” (Massey, 2005), how do we bring our situated knowings and desires to these discursive material relational mashups? How do we engage with the throwntogetherness that is the Canadian ECEC field as we knit together alternative ways of being, doing, and acting, figuring out what resonates in localized situations (Osgood, 2006)? To begin to answer these questions, we think with feminist theory (Bezanson; 2018; Langford et al., 2016; Prentice, 2009); the politics of the event of place, (Massey, 2005) and relational and spatial networked discursive entanglements (Massey, 2005; Nichols et al., 2012; Ingold, 1995; Haraway, 2016) as we untangle three vignettes related to advocating for a competent universal public ECEC system; writing postdevelopmental curriculum frameworks; and weaving productive relationships between university researchers and early childhood practitioners. These vignettes illuminate our struggles to “stay with the trouble,” as Haraway (2016) suggests, stubbornly hanging on to the hope of producing new terms of belonging (Burns & Lundh, 2011) as a form of resistance, allowing us to open up spaces to imagine, tell alternative stories (Moss, 2014), and create real change within our local contexts.

Working from the premise that learning to live well in our places is quickly becoming a necessity of human survival, in this article we weave together divergent experiences of our shared place, the Wabanaki Confederacy or Eastern Canada, and literatures and literacies of that place. This article is methodologically framed using the concept of “métissage” as it has been taken up in Canadian curriculum studies as a form of intertextual life writing. Through our métissage, we are ultimately concerned with theorizing the idea of reading place—making sense of the ways in which settler colonialism has historically made, and continues to make, itself felt on Land. The idea of reading place, however, also demands that we actively engage in disrupting the normativity of settler colonial presence on Land—particularly as manifest through literature and literacy. Toward speaking back to the normativity of this settler colonial presence, the authors draw on divergent pedagogical and literary practices toward ensuring indigenous futurities. Keywords: settler colonialism; literacies of the land; literacy

In this article, three pedagogic encounters" Encountering the Wall," "Encountering Young Tattooed Parents," and "Encountering Chickadees"-conceptualized as curricular meeting places, are theoretically reconceptualized within alternative bodies of literature. Theoretical reconceptualization revealed complexities of early childhood pedagogies and the tenacity of dominant discursive practices of developmentalism, constructed, in these instances, through age-segregated settings, parenting programs, and nature pedagogy. Theoretical reconceptualizing of these encounters worked to disrupt embodied subjugations of age- segregated children, mothers and fathers, chickadees, educators, families, and researchers.

Rachael, Katelyn, Pam and Matt take up Sara Ahmed's (2012) concepts of fleeting encounters and brick walls as they reflect on the feminist and decolonizing nature of their work. This paper is the product of months of conversation between the co-authors. Through the use of autoethnographical and participatory approaches, the authors seek to invite the reader into a co-constructed space where mutual support and inspiration shape the future actions of the participants as they grapple with their ethical responsibilities as learners and educators.

Often children’s opportunities to play are constrained by particular interpretations of play that instrumentalize its value in the service of adult-defined, future-oriented goals for children. As an alternative, we draw upon specific theoretical insights of play and playfulness, to closely examine the power of the present and past in childhood and adulthood, through ongoing play episodes created and re-created by co-playing, co-authoring adults and children. This particular playing collective takes up common popular cultural scripts embedded in the film Frozen , and through intertextual and multimodal adventuring, indoors and out, reveal emergent and playful uncertainties and potentialities that can occur when children and adults are committed to play as “a thing by itself” (Huizinga, 1950, p. 45).

Low levels of literacy in early childhood can have lasting effects on children’s educational and intellectual development. Many countries have implemented newborn literacy programs designed to teach parents pre-literacy promoting activities to share with their children. We conducted 2 quasi-experimental studies using 1) a pre-test/post-test design and 2) a non-equivalent control group design to examine the effect of newborn literacy programs on parents’ self-reported literacy intentions/behaviors, values toward literacy, and parent-child interactions. Parents were recruited from 3 provinces, 2 with newborn literacy programs (intervention) and 1 without (control). Parents in the intervention group completed prenatal and postnatal (after participation in program) questionnaires. Parents in the control group completed 1 questionnaire. Questionnaires were designed to capture parents’ literacy intentions (prenatal), behaviors (postnatal), values, and parent-child interactions (postnatal). A total of 98 parents were included in study one and 174 were included in study two. Parents’ self-reported prenatal intentions and values were higher than their postnatal behaviors and values. Parents in the intervention group exhibited higher literacy behaviors and values and greater enjoyment reading to their children than parents in the control group, though they also reported reading to their children less frequently. Parents in the intervention group had significantly higher Positive Interactive scores than controls. Overall, we found participation in newborn literacy programs positively impacted parenting behaviors and attitudes. Lower postnatal within-group scores (intentions and values versus behaviors and values) may have been the result of participants’ high expectations. Given our findings, we recommend that these programs continue.

For the past five years, the University of New Brunswick (UNB) Early Childhood Centre, working with childcare educators, has been researching, piloting, and developing curriculum materials and workshops for infants, toddlers, and other children. As we move in and out of university and daycare spaces where “people are not equally located” (Eyre, 2007, p. 99), our work is rifled with contradictions and ethical tensions. Out of this complex and contradictory landscape, we hear and ask many recursive questions. The question we problematize in this article is: Where do we find the time to do this? (Foucault, 1984; Marshall, 2007). Questions such as this incite experiments and interpretations that enliven and invigorate our pedagogical co-authorings in order to reimagine ourselves and our worlds (Olson, 2005). Our critical examination of experimentations and interpretations provoked through three communally produced texts uncovers how educators both slide into and disrupt cultural orientations toward individualism, deficit, and the tyranny of clock time.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. See Murray (2003 Murray, J. W. 2003. Face to Face in Dialogue: Emmanuel Levinas and (the) Communication (of) Ethics, Lanham, MD: University Press of America. [Google Scholar]). 2. See also Dahlberg and Moss (2005 Dahlberg, G. and Moss, P. 2005. Ethics and Politics in Early Childhood Education, London: RoutledgeFalmer. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and Todd (2003 Todd, S. 2003. Learning From the Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis, and Ethical Possibilities in Education, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. [Google Scholar]). 3. See Swadener and Cannella (2007 Swadener, B. B. and Cannella, G. 2007. Reconceptualizing early childhood education in North America: a brief introduction. Interaction, 20(4): 25–26. Available online at: http://www.cyc.uvic.ca/uccr/documents/07.Swadener_Cannella_Reconceptualizing_Interaction.pdf, accessed 30 June 2009 [Google Scholar]). 4. See Cannella (1997 Cannella, G. S. 1997. Deconstructing Early Childhood Education: Social Justice and Revolution, New York: Peter Lang. [Google Scholar]), Dahlberg et al. (2007 Dahlberg, G., Moss, P. and Pence, A. 2007. Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Languages of Evaluation, , 2nd edn., Abingdon, UK: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), and MacNaughton (2005 MacNaughton, G. 2005. Doing Foucault in Early Childhood Studies: Applying Post‐Structuralism Ideas, New York: RoutledgeFalmer. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 5. See Cannella (1997 Cannella, G. S. 1997. Deconstructing Early Childhood Education: Social Justice and Revolution, New York: Peter Lang. [Google Scholar]), Lubeck (1998 Lubeck, S. 1998. Is developmentally appropriate practice for everyone?. Childhood Education, 74(5): 283–292. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]), and MacNaughton (2005 MacNaughton, G. 2005. Doing Foucault in Early Childhood Studies: Applying Post‐Structuralism Ideas, New York: RoutledgeFalmer. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 6. See Roopnarine and Johnson (2001 Roopnarine, J. L. and Johnson, J. E. 2001. "Play and diverse cultures: implications for early childhood education". In Early Childhood Education and Care, and Reconceptualizing Play, Edited by: Stuart, R. and Brown, M. H. 295–319. Oxford: Elsevier Science. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Goldschmied and Jackson (1994 Goldschmied, E. and Jackson, S. 1994. People Under Three: Young Children in Day Care, London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]), and York (2006 York, S. 2006. Roots and Wings: Affirming Culture in Early Childhood Programs, , special edn., Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. [Google Scholar]). 7. In the field of early childhood, see e.g. Cannella.and Viruru (2004 Cannella, G. S. and Viruru, R. 2004. Childhood and Postcolonization: Power, Education, and Contemporary Practice, London: RoutledgeFalmer. [Google Scholar]), Dahlberg et al. (2007 Dahlberg, G., Moss, P. and Pence, A. 2007. Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Languages of Evaluation, , 2nd edn., Abingdon, UK: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), and Einarsdottir and Wagner (2006 Einarsdottir, J. and Wagner, J. T., eds. 2006. Nordic Childhoods and Early Education: Philosophy, Research, Policy and Practice in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, Greenwich, CT: Information Age Press. [Google Scholar]). 8. There is a shift from the use of language arts to literacy and/literacies, often multiliteracies and currently multi‐modal literacies, in part reflecting a shift from psychologically‐based research approach to reading curricula to social‐cultural sensibility on language and literacy learning. 9. See American Psychiatric Association (1995 American Psychiatric Association. 1995. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, , 4th edn., Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. [Google Scholar]). 10. See Ellis (2007 Ellis, S. 2007. Policy and research: lessons from the Clackmannanshire synthetic phonics initiative.. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 7(3): 281–297. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Hassett (2006 Hassett, D. D. 2006. Signs of the times: the governance of alphabetic print over 'appropriate' and natural reading development. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 6(1): 77–103. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), and Sleeter (2008 Sleeter, C. 2008. Equity, democracy, and neoliberal assaults on teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24(8): 1947–1957. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 11. See Ball and Pence (2006 Ball, J. and Pence, A. 2006. Supporting Indigenous Children's Development: Community‐University Partnerships, Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press. [Google Scholar]), especially pp. 33–46, 47–60 on co‐constructing curriculum. 12. See New Zealand, Ministry of Education (2006 New Zealand, Ministry of Education. 2006. Te Whāriki. He Whāriki Mātauranga mā ngā Mokopuna o Aotearoa. Early Childhood Curriculum, Wellington, , New Zealand: Learning Media Education. Available online at: http://www.dji.de/bibs/320_whariki.pdf, accessed 28 August 2009 [Google Scholar]).