Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education
Changing Images of Early Childhood Series

Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education uncovers and interrogates some of the inherent colonialist tensions that are rarely acknowledged and often unwittingly rehearsed within contemporary early childhood education. Through building upon the prior postcolonial interventions of prominent early childhood scholars, Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education reveals how early childhood education is implicated in the colonialist project of predominantly immigrant (post)colonial settler societies. By politicizing the silences around these specifically settler colonialist tensions, it seeks to further unsettle the innocence presumptions of early childhood education and to offer some decolonizing strategies for early childhood practitioners and scholars. Grounding their inquiries in early childhood education, the authors variously engage with postcolonial theory, place theory, feminist philosophy, the ecological humanities and indigenous onto-epistemologies.

Series Editor Introduction

Introduction: Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education in Settler Colonial Societies

Affrica Taylor, University of Canberra

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, University of Victoria

Section 1 - Unsettling Places

Chapter 1: Forest Stories: Restorying Encounters with ‘Natural’ Places in Early Childhood Education

Fikile Nxumalo, University of Victoria

Chapter 2: Unsettling pedagogies through common world encounters: Grappling with (post)colonial legacies in Canadian forests and Australian bushlands

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, University of Victoria

Affrica Taylor, University of Canberra

Chapter 3: The fence as technology of (post)colonial childhood in contemporary Australian Kerith Power, University of Western Sydney

Margaret Somerville, University of Western Sydney

Section 2 - Unsettling Spaces

Chapter 4: Troubling Settlerness in Early Childhood Curriculum Development

Emily Ashton, University of Victoria

Chapter 5: Te Whāriki in Aotearoa New Zealand: Witnessing and Resisting Neoliberal and

Neo-colonial Discourses in Early Childhood Education

Marek Tesar, University of Auckland

Chapter 6: Mapping Settler Colonialism and Early Childhood Art

Vanessa Clark, University of Victoria

Chapter 7: Teaching in the Borderlands: Stories from Texas

Julia C. Persky, Texas A&M University

Radhika Viruru, Texas A&M University

Section 3 - Unsettling Indigenous- Non-Indigenous Relations

Chapter 8: Dis-entangling? Re-entanglement? Tackling the pervasiveness of colonialism in early childhood (teacher) education in Aotearoa

Jenny Ritchie, Victoria University of Wellington

Chapter 9: Unsettling both-ways approaches to learning in remote Australian Aboriginal early childhood workforce training

Lyn Fasoli, Bachelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education

Rebekah Farmer, Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education

Chapter 10: Unsettling Yarns: Reinscribing Indigenous architectures, contemporary Dreamings and newcomer belongings on Ngunnawal country, Australia

Adam Duncan, Wiradjuri Early Childhood Centre, University of Canberra

Fran Dawning, ACT Education and Training Directorate

Affrica Taylor, University of Canberra

Chapter 11: Thinking with land, water, ice, and snow: A proposal for Inuit Nunangat pedagogy in the Canadian Arctic

Mary Caroline Rowan, University of New Brunswick

Notes on the Contributors

Index

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw is Professor and Coordinator of the Early Years Specialization in the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria, Canada.

Affrica Taylor is Associate Professor in Childhood Geographies and Education at the University of Canberra, Australia.