Toward a Process-Centered Account of Literate Activity in the Classroom

This paper presents an approach to conceptualizing classroom activities that views teachers, students, and classroom objects as participating in continuous, cyclical processes of “reengaging” and “disengaging.” As an illustration, six episodes in a U.S. preschool classroom of a teacher, nine 4- to 5-year-olds, and a box (which held objects related to a featured letter of the week) were analyzed through a relational-process lens. The box, classroom members, and objects that children brought from home moved through cycles of coming together and moving apart physically and attentionally. Furthermore, these processes metaphorically pulled in other activities across time and space.

Temporalizing Childhood: A Conversation with Erica Burman, Stephanie Olsen, Spyros Spyrou, and Hanne Warming

This paper is a summary of the keynote panel conversation that took place as part of the “Childhood in Time”conference, May 10–12, 2021. The speakers respond to the question of how they place childhood in time relations,giving examples from their own research and outlining an agenda for considering time in childhood studies.

Common Worlding Pedagogies: Opening Up to Learning with Worlds

Common worlding is a collective pedagogical approach. It is also a deliberate move to open up education to worlds beyond narrow human preoccupations and concerns and beyond its standard framing as an exclusively social practice. In this article, we identify some of the guiding principles that underpin this approach and explain how they work out in practice. We do so by offering a selection of illustrative vignettes drawn from the Walking with Wildlife in Wild Weather Times early childhood research project in Canberra, Australia, and from the Witnessing the Ruins of Progress early childhood research collaboratory in Ontario, Canada.

Differences in Child Care Participation Between Immigrant and Nonimmigrant Families

This study used data from the Survey on Early Learning and Child Care Arrangements (SELCCA) and the Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB) to examine patterns of child care use among Canadian immigrant and nonimmigrant families. Overall, children from immigrant backgrounds were less likely to be in child care. When considering only those in child care, children from immigrant families were more likely to be in licensed care than those from nonimmigrant families. Parents of children with immigrant backgrounds indicated various reasons for not enrolling their child in child care. Ensuring access to child care may have a positive impact on immigrant families.

The Aura of the Trace in One Child’s Projects in the World: Collecting as Rescue, Repetition, Rupture and Refrain

Using one child’s archival collection, found in the Prospect Archive of Children’s Work at the University of Vermont, we consider the methodological complications involved in attempting to analyze material traces of childhood, created by the child. The experimental school where these artworks were originally completed practiced methods of deep observation and descriptive review of materials collected, rather than sending children’s work home. We ponder these pedagogic methods alongside concepts delivered by the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin in order to suggest how the purpose of collecting and presenting traces of childhood can be an act of rescue.

Compensating for Stigma: Representations of Hard to Adopt Children in the "Today’s Child"

We examine 4,300 advertisements of children who were featured in Today’s Child, a daily newspaper column written by Helen Allen in the Toronto Telegram and Toronto Star (1964–1982) and syndicated across North America. We highlight how stigma and values were attributed to adoptive children featured in these advertisements. Our findings reveal how the advertisements perpetuated and attached stigma to these children and how this stigma had to be compensated for the children to appeal to prospective parents. Compensatory strategies were ultimately required to manage stigma and increase the value of the featured children.

Thinking with Doors and Perspectives: Reimagining Early Childhood Spaces

This paper explores, through a posthumanist lens, child care as a communal responsibility, taking into account varied partial perspectives produced through human and more-than-human intra-actions. Multiple narratives illustrate embodied and experienced complexities within child care spaces allowing us to reflect on uncomfortable truths to enact affirmative ethics as a way to transform the ways we care for children, their families, each other, and the spaces of child care. Specifically, we think with actual and virtual doors as producers and enablers to create spaces where early childhood educators might collaboratively interrogate how materiality and socially constructed hierarchies are embedded in the inequities that separate us, inequities further exposed and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Troubled Pedagogies and COVID-19: Fermenting New Relationships and Practices in Early Childhood Care and Education

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed vulnerabilities, tensions, and possibilities in the Canadian early childhood education and care system. This paper experiments with the metaphor of fermentation to critically reflect on the ways we, as ECEC postsecondary instructors, were challenged in upholding our pedagogical commitments. Through retrospective analysis of emails, meeting notes, and other personal communications, we examine and describe how our work and pedagogical thinking with students has been contaminated by COVID-19. We highlight the need to refigure relationships to the troubling events and reconceptualize contamination as a potent opportunity to pedagogically ferment practices in the postsecondary classroom through which living and learning well can flourish.