Diffracting relationalities in early years pedagogies of care

Abstract

This diffractive disruption of care in early years settings and pedagogies opens up to a provocation that perhaps we don’t know care at all. Driven by Puig de la Bellacasa’s questioning of the notion of care as not solely a human-only matter and applying that in relation to the early years, it explores what it might mean when we cannot know all that cares or is cared for when we include more-than-human elements and factors, and when what is care remains to a large extent uncertain. Explicating the complexity of care in the early years assemblage, the paper uses a philosophical diffractive reading as a method of turning and re-turning to emphasise the non-linearity and fluidity between the doing, receiving and thinking about care in a human and more-than-human world. It urges a push beyond expected understandings of care and thus also pedagogies, culminating in potentialities that re-view a world in which things and beings are increasingly recognised as crucial, influential and potentially care-ing.

Diffracting early childhood teachers’ culture stories

“…Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology 2023, 14(1) 6 2019; Sauzet, 2021;Gunnarson, 2021;Braidotti, 2022;Arndt, 2020), this project focuses on the dearth of philosophically innovative research on and especially with EC teachers' cultural identities and wellbeing. With very few exceptions such as Paley's writing in the US, which includes reflections on her own experiences (e.g.…”

“…Diffraction, then, occurs over time, involves a "multiplicity of processes" (Barad, 2014, p. 168) and is different to reflection. The diffractive process disrupts and moves beyond what can be seen, made meaning of or even be humanly understood (Arndt, 2020;Jenkins, et al, 2021, Moxnes & Osgood, 2018. Conceptualising culture through teachers' culture stories thus evokes what both Barad and Kristeva suggest is an inner, constantly shifting, sense of otherness, creating space for socially and more-than-socially just encounters.…”

Communities of care: A collective writing project on philosophies, politics and pedagogies of care and education in the early years

“…As an ethical orientation, the risky business of teachers' care underpins and informs their everyday relationships, planning and interactions in their settings. Arndt (2020) and Puig De la Bellacasa (2017) have previously argued for understandings of care as orientations and acts that aim or work to maintain the world in which we live 'as well as possible' (p. 3). To risk exposing their own ethical orientations in the judgements, they exercise reveals teachers' views of the world and how it should be maintained, in what ways, to what ends and for what purpose.…”

Beyond reflective practice: Blogging-with Place as a diffractive practice for (re)imagining place-based education

“…Understanding this potential, researchers in early childhood education are engaging with diffractive practices as a way of opening up possibilities for thinking otherwise about ethics, pedagogies and practices that are commonplace in early childhood education. For example, diffractive practices have been used to interrogate normative notions of care (Arndt, 2020), for (re)thinking ways of observing and interpreting children's play (Hill, 2017;Merewether, 2019), and for thinking otherwise about literacies in early childhood (Kuby et al, 2019;Spector, 2015). Others are working with diffraction in ways that trouble the image of the all-knowing, reflective teacher (Hill, 2017;Lambert, 2021;Moxnes and Osgood, 2018;Murris, 2018).…”