This session was a panel discussion moderated by Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw (BCECPN). It considered what conditions are necessary to create a livable, inclusive and just early years system that reflects the complex pedagogical work undertaken by early childhood educators. Joining Veronica to discuss diverse perspectives on thinking early childhood beyond a service were Nicole Inesse-Nash (Assistant Professor, Toronto Metropolitan University), Fikile Nxumalo (Assistant Professor, University of Toronto) and Peter Moss (Professor Emeritus, University College London)

Nicole Ineese-Nashis an Anishinaabe (Oji-Cree) scholar, educator and Assistant Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, whose work focuses on Indigenous experiences of social systems, understandings of land-knowledge, and community-based research. Her work centers Indigenous youth, families, and communities and seeks to support self-determination and Indigenous resurgence. She is particularly interested in supporting Indigenous youth to connect with their ancestry, land, and cultures. She is the director and founder of Finding Our Power Together, an Indigenous-led non-profit organization supporting youth in realizing their own goals.

Fikile Nxumalo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching & Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, where she directs the Childhood Place Pedagogy Lab. Her scholarship focuses on reconceptualizing place-based and environmental education within current times of ecological precarity. This scholarship is rooted in perspectives from Indigenous knowledges, Black feminist geographies, and critical post humanist theories.

Peter Moss is Emeritus Professor of Early Childhood Provision at UCL Institute of Education, University College London. He has researched and written on many subjects, including early childhood education and care; the relationship between employment, care and gender; and democracy in education. Much of his work has been cross-national, and he has led a European network on child care and an international network on parental leave.

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, ECPN Co-Director, is a Professor of Early Childhood Education in the Faculty of Education and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Research in Curriculum at Western University in Ontario, Canada. Her current research traces the common world relations of children with places, materials, and other species. She is interested in the real life-worlds that 21st-century children inherit, inhabit, and share with others – human and more-than-human; and how these life-worlds are shaped by the legacies of anthropogenic environmental damage, imperial expansion, colonial dispossession, global inequalities, and displacements