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Contamination

This blog post is the final installment in a series of posts that share some of the insights derived from the presentation “Storying With” offered by ECPN community pedagogists Tracy Barkman, Mary Kim, Rachel Phillips and Karen Rodden at the 2023 Early Childhood Educators of BC (ECEBC) conference Power of Story. At the conference, pedagogists shared moments and documentation from their work with educators and children to highlight how pedagogical work takes up the concept of story in multiple and diverse ways.

We and several of our thinking companions have discussed the role of the pedagogist in various publications (see Land & Montpetit, 2018, 2023; Land et al., 2022; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2020; Vintimilla & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020; Vintimilla et al., 2023). This blog post and the ones shared before are examples from the ECPN about how pedagogists work, alongside ECPN directors and coordinators, to enact the role of the pedagogist within their specific contexts. Pedagogists design and nurture pedagogical projects, within local contexts, that are deeply responsive to the conditions of our times. These projects are situated in the social, political, cultural, linguistic and material lifeworlds of communities and are designed through a deep engagement with pedagogical narrations. Through this dialogical curriculum-making process, pedagogists work to create spaces for educators to consider how to live well with young children (Vintimilla & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017). Embedded within this role is a commitment to transforming structures and habits in early childhood education that are rooted in developmentalism and other Euro-Western dominant discourses. Pedagogists strive to generate pedagogies that promote livable futures.

This blog post and the ones that came before respond to specific conditions of 21^st-century lives of children. Each of these four posts focuses on a concept that emerged from the “Storying With” presentation. These concepts—intentionality, situatedness, provoking and contamination—have been taken up in various ways in various places by the scholars named above. This piece will focus on the concept of contamination that anthropologist Anna Tsing has written about and scholars such as Cristina Delgado Vintimilla, Alex Berry, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Nicole Land and Emily Ashton, among others have extended to early childhood education. Like interruption, discussed in the previous post, contamination often carries negative connotations. However, at the ECPN, we and our colleagues from the Pedagogist Network of Ontario view contamination as a generative force for collective thinking. This perspective recognizes that thinking and ideas do not occur in isolation but are always shaped by the thoughts of others and societal discourses.

ECPN pedagogists work as part of a network that extends across British Columbia. Each educator, centre and geographical location with/in which a pedagogist works has unique histories, philosophies and stories that intersect with daily happenings in different ways. Despite the specificity of locations, each pedagogist’s ideas ripple throughout the province. Pedagogists meet regularly to discuss and support their work with collective readings. These multiple perspectives do not exist independently; instead, they interact and influence one another in a continuous process of mutual exchange. Tsing (2015) describes this meeting of ideas and how we all bring specific histories, experiences and influences as contamination.

Contamination goes beyond merely hearing others’ ideas. Rather, individual perspectives and contexts intermingle, allowing an idea to morph and complexify as it encounters different places, histories and other ideas. One of the most generative aspects of working with an ECPN pedagogist is how this work is interwoven among the multiple early years programs a pedagogist works with, resulting in a network of programs that each have their own context but are connected as a community. As different centres come together to discuss curriculum with their pedagogist, what happens in one context influences another. When a pedagogist moves between locations and shares stories with educators, they bring with them the thinking that occurs in other programs and community spaces. This sharing of stories and the resulting contamination lead to new ways of thinking, doing and understanding.

At the Power of Story conference, pedagogists highlighted how others influence their work and how the work they do in one early childhood centre contaminates their work in other centres. This does not mean they replicate experiences or inquiries from one centre to another. Rather, they acknowledge that their regular collective thinking with educators and children influences all aspects of their work. Tracy, Mary, Rachel and Karen illustrated this by sharing specific experiences where the stories emerging in their pedagogical work and gatherings with other ECPN pedagogists shaped what they focused on and activated in their continued work with educators and children. The contamination that occurs from working within a network allows many stories to exist simultaneously, enabling pedagogists to engage with the question of how multiple, even contradictory, stories can flourish. By embracing this multiplicity, pedagogists create conditions within early years programs that disrupt the privileging of singular ways of knowing and being in the world.

During their presentations, the pedagogists demonstrated how they collaborate with educators and children to create inclusive environments where no single story or idea prevails. They work to shift the focus from conventional early childhood education concepts—such as best practices, children’s interests, age-appropriate materials, school readiness—to deconstructing dominant narratives and integrating diverse (hi)stories. This approach allows these narratives to interact and evolve within their specific contexts, resulting in stories that are made and remade continuously. A crucial aspect of the pedagogist’s role is recognizing, expressing and contemplating the multiple narratives within early years programs. Pedagogists think alongside educators about how these narratives influence and intertwine with their work, and how their actions and experiences shape these narratives.

Karen, a pedagogist working in Cowichan Valley and the Saanich Peninsula, emphasized that who she is as a pedagogist is always evolving and shaped by the stories that form her identity. She highlighted that some of these stories arise from her inheritances and privileges, such as her ancestors’ complex legacy, as well as current societal conditions like the ongoing effects of climate collapse. Her position as an uninvited settler on WSÁNEĆ lands, which she has come to love and whose layered stories influence her work, also contaminates her role as a pedagogist. Karen’s unique stories, the ones that make her, compel her to challenge normalized colonial thinking that dictates which stories are highlighted and which are silenced in a settler framing of place. Contamination results as Karen brings her histories and experiences into her pedagogical decisions and interests.

At the conference, Karen storied some of her pedagogical experiences by introducing participants to “SÍLE.” She said, “In English, SÍLE means grandparent. SÍLE is a SENĆOŦEN word, the language of the WSÁNEĆ people who are from the peninsula at the southern tip of what is also known as Vancouver Island. SÍLE is a JSȺ tree, also called a Douglas fir. SÍLE is WSÁNEĆ and lives closest to W̱S͸ḴEM Nation. She lives near a small creek that leads out to the inlet. She is nearly 200 years old, which means she started as a seedling around 1825. She was a young tree when Fort Victoria was established. She witnessed the proliferation of settling humans and the spread of agriculture across the peninsula. More JSȺ trees grow by the creek, and most likely some are SÍLE’s children, as JSȺ trees prefer to keep their seedlings close. Unseen by the human eye, the roots of these trees undoubtably connect through networks of fungi that allow them to communicate and share resources. At one time, SÍLE probably had trees and shrubs all around her before the land was cleared and a lawn established.”

Karen described how SÍLE, who lives at a childcare centre she works with, is at the core of the thinking and happening of her work with the humans there. This centre and the deep, sustained thinking done alongside this tree led Karen to engage with the work of individuals who also think with trees, such as Richard Wagamese, Peter Wohlleben, Suzanne Simard, David Suzuki, Wayne Grady and Robin Wall Kimmerer. The ideas and stories of these thinkers inevitably accompanied Karen to the other centres where she works. Much like we adopt habits from those we spend time with, Karen adopted habits of wondering about trees from these and other thinkers. The questions these thinkers pose and those inspired by SÍLE spread into the classrooms, fostering collaborative processes and inviting new possibilities. These ways of noticing rippled through the community, other centres and the network of pedagogists as stories and questions were exchanged. In her presentation, Karen was not advocating for everyone to think with trees but to create conditions for greater attentiveness to more-than-human companions to develop in pedagogical work in which each educator takes up these provocations in situated ways. In this way, the proposal to embrace contamination allows room for ideas to evolve rather than attempting to replicate what happens in one centre at another. For us, this is an important distinction, as it disrupts curriculum models that are designed to be implemented, for example, where preplanned activities lead children to accumulate specific knowledge, most commonly facts. Contamination creates assemblages where ideas and happenings morph and respond to conditions in the specific places where they are enacted.

Contamination is not contained within the parameters of early years programs. Karen described how getting to know SÍLE through half a year of weekly visits to the early childhood centre deeply influenced her role as a pedagogist in other centres and how thinking alongside others—children, educators, writers—transformed her beyond her professional role. Karen shared a story about a tree she often sees on her regular drive. This big, tall JSȺ tree, like SÍLE, stands alone, with the land cleared and the forest edge pushed back around it. Since her time with SÍLE, Karen has become curious about this tree she might not have noticed before. She wonders why this tree remains when other trees have been felled around it. Perhaps it hasn’t been cut down because its circumference exceeds a government specification. After thinking with trees in various ways through her experiences with SÍLE, Karen now views this solitary tree differently. She sees its isolation and how its community and connections have been cut away. While trees may not move or communicate like humans, science has shown that JSȺ trees nurture their young, communicate with peers and collaborate with other beings. The many tree stories Karen has noticed have fundamentally changed how she perceives any tree, forest and the world around her. Being open to being affected and influenced by our work with children, beyond the specific contexts of our work, helps us recognize that early childhood education is not isolated from the world. Instead, it is a complex space for thinking about and responding to the world.

Our histories and experiences contaminate how we work in early childhood education. The people we read and think with contaminate our work. The stories we hear and engage with contaminate our work. Our networks of relationships contaminate our work. There is no possibility of entering a situation as a completely objective observer or a blank slate, nor is this desirable for a pedagogist. Challenging the dominance of developmental strongholds in early childhood spaces and recognizing the multiplicity of ways to understand and contextualize experiences help to disrupt broader societal narratives. This approach complicates the idea of singular truths and the human as a universal subject, acknowledging there is not just one correct way of being in the world. Instead, it allows us to see that we are all continuously made and remade by our complex and often contradictory stories and experiences, which shape how we act and understand the world.

This series of posts shares insights derived from the presentation “Storying With” at the 2023 Early Childhood Educators of BC (ECEBC) conference Power of Story. We are deeply grateful for the ideas from numerous scholars, including but not limited to those cited in these posts, whose theoretical perspectives shape our work as pedagogists. These posts aim to show how the interconnected concepts of intentionality, situatedness, provoking, and contamination are generative concepts in the work of ECPN pedagogists. Drawing upon diverse theoretical perspectives from both within early childhood education and beyond, these posts illustrate how pedagogists design and nurture pedagogical projects that are deeply responsive to local contexts and the complex lifeworlds of the centres in which they work. By embracing the multiplicity of narratives and fostering collective thinking, ECPN pedagogists aim to challenge dominant developmentalist discourses and strive to generate pedagogies that promote livable futures. These posts serve as examples of how we work to activate these theoretical perspectives in our ongoing efforts to create inclusive, transformative early childhood education environments.