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Intentionality

This blog post is the first in a series of posts that share 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 stories 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.

Pedagogists design and nurture, within local contexts, pedagogical projects that are deeply responsive to the conditions of our times. These projects are situated in communities’ social, political, cultural, linguistic and material lifeworlds and are designed through a deep engagement with the process of pedagogical narration. Through this dialogical curriculum-making process, pedagogists work to create spaces for educators and children to consider how to live well together (Vintimilla & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017). Embedded in the role of the pedagogist 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 post and the ones that will follow respond to specific conditions of 21st-century lives of children. Each of these posts will focus on a concept that emerged from the presentations at the Power of Story conference. This first post looks at the concept of intentionality. Subsequent posts will unpack the concepts of situatedness, provoking and contamination.

Intentionality refers to carefully considering what our choices do. In the context of pedagogical work, this entails making daily curriculum decisions based on our vision for more equitable worlds. This means understanding that early childhood education is situated within the social, cultural, political and economic worlds we live in and that the decisions we make in education are embedded in these contexts. Being intentional means placing the words we use, practices we engage in and materials we offer into the broader societal context and reflecting on whether what we do aligns with our vision for education.

Pedagogists Tracy, Mary, Rachel and Karen started the conversation in “Storying With” by sharing the following questions that guide their practice and point to how they enact intentionality in their pedagogical work.

What is my pedagogical intention?

What do I hope for in creating lives and worlds with others?

What do I value in our collective life?

How might we nurture ethical practices in early childhood education that respond to the current conditions of our time to reimagine alternatives for education?

These questions are a catalyst for bringing more intentionality and ethical consideration into early childhood education practices. For pedagogists, these questions guide their pedagogical decisions in curriculum making and are deeply related to their pedagogical commitments.

Pedagogical commitments refers to what we stand for in our work as pedagogists. These commitments are foundational to how we decide to conceptualize and practice early childhood education. In making pedagogical commitments, we consider what it means to live well in the world; our commitments help us activate curricular practices to “agitate the status quo toward creating conditions that allow for meaningful, changemaking pedagogical relations to form” (Land et al., 2023, p. 2).

During her portion of the presentation, Tracy described pedagogical commitments as having both retrospective and prospective components—retrospective in that they acknowledge the histories and inheritances of 21st-century lives and education and prospective in how we craft questions and responses to these histories and inheritances. Curriculum practices that originate from pedagogical commitments understand early childhood education as a site of subject making. This means education is about more than the concrete facts we teach children; it is a system where people become and are made subjects of the world, where children come to understand themselves and how they are supposed to be in the world in specific ways. Subject making happens in many different ways. That is way intentional decision making is vital to crafting pedagogical spaces in which our vision for living well does not get lost in the day-to-day shuffle of early childhood programs.

Throughout the stories shared at the conference, each pedagogist spoke of uncertainty, experimentation and resisting implementable, universal practices as important parts of their pedagogical commitments that help with decision making in everyday happenings in early childhood programs. Each pedagogist shared stories about how their pedagogical work followed the interests and curiosities of the educators and children they work with, but how, through intentional engagement with their pedagogical commitments, they resist “anything goes” practices, which is a frequent misinterpretation of emergent and inquiry-based curriculum.

Many complex decisions might be taken for granted throughout the day in an early childhood program. Pedagogical commitments tether pedagogists’ words and actions to intentionality. Every decision or assumption we make in education projects an image of the world; therefore, there are no neutral or apolitical pedagogical decisions. Generally, taken-for-granted practices in early childhood education, such as following a very structured schedule or providing materials based only on children’s age, are rooted in developmental psychology and normative, universal understandings of children. Developmental ways of doing early childhood education put forward a particular child subject and perniciously define who the child should be and what they are capable of.

During the presentation, each pedagogist shared stories illustrating how they ask focused questions to actively maintain alignment between their pedagogical commitments and their thinking, imagining and decision-making processes while collaborating with educators and children.

Rachel, a pedagogist in Nanaimo, shared that at the core of her pedagogical commitments is a deep attunement to relationality. She clarified that prioritizing relationality entails recognizing existing relationships within a place while deliberately emphasizing the specific relationships she aims to prioritize by employing methods that encourage slowing down to engage with materials, others and the world in meaningful ways. Her commitment to relationality is not a simple open acceptance of any relationship but a careful consideration of what particular relationships she would like to amplify and think with through curriculum making, and why.

Rachel’s pedagogical work is inspired by a two-year-long inquiry hosted by Nanaimo Art Gallery (https://nanaimoartgallery.ca/). This gallery builds its programming around inquiry questions, and beginning in April 2022, the gallery curators began to consider the question “What stories do we tell?” To explore this question, Nanaimo Art Gallery hosted seven artists over two years who engage storytelling through their art.

Grounded in her commitment to relationality, after visiting the gallery Rachel was inspired to bring the question “What stories do we tell?” back to the children in the early learning programs she works with. Before bringing this provocation to her work, she considered her pedagogical commitment to prioritize specific relations. She purposefully rephrased the question, asking, “Which narratives inhabit this space?” This question and the nuanced alteration in wording served to animate her commitments by encouraging educators, children and families to observe the events around them in a new and possibly unfamiliar manner. The shift in the wording of this question acknowledges that several stories exist simultaneously, and we choose which stories to privilege and which to disregard. By focusing on these choices about stories, children and educators were encouraged to notice the stories that are often invisible in their local place. To support them in recognizing these hidden narratives, Rachel considered the dispositions required to notice the multitude of stories within a space. Collaborating with educators and children, she implemented practices to slow down and stretch the senses, fostering a deep form of complex listening that acknowledges stories beyond our individual selves within the expansive universe (Rinaldi, 2001).

Through deliberate and attentive listening, Rachel, educators and children encountered previously neglected narratives in every corner of the early childhood program, including unexpected locations like gardens, toys, rain, sand, puddles and rocks. Employing documentation methods such as photography and recording children’s words, they meticulously observed the unfolding relationships in their surroundings, revisiting these traces to deepen their understanding over time. As these previously overlooked stories gradually became part of their daily conversations and observations, Rachel deliberately made time for the children to revisit, share and draw new ideas inspired by their noticings. The children, along with Rachel and the educators, began to document stories wherever they witnessed them unfolding, preserving the narratives as a way to keep them alive.

Rachel’s decisions throughout her work were purposeful, guided by her own pedagogical commitments emphasizing relationality and slowing down. By intentionally slowing down and adopting new noticing practices, she fostered a deeper appreciation of relationships, including those among children, educators and more-than-human others, such as materials, animals and places. As Rachel observed the diverse narratives and interests emerging in the early childhood program, she chose to highlight multispecies relations sparked by the children’s imaginative interpretation of rocks as eggs. While numerous intriguing occurrences unfolded daily in response to her question about narratives, working with intentionality required choosing something to focus on and follow. Rachel’s intentional focus on multispecies relations aligned with her commitment to exploring relationality, particularly her desire to acknowledge relationships beyond those centred solely on humans. As she continued to pay attention with multispecies relations in mind, she realized the children often talked about eggs, both inside and outside the classroom.

To honour and extend the children’s curiosity about eggs, Rachel and the educators decided to bring an incubator with eggs into the classroom so they might think more seriously about eggs and their stories. As the incubator became a protagonist within the classroom, the children theorized, through drawing practices, what was living inside the eggs and what it might be like for them to be inside an egg. The educators used a projector to cast these ideas onto the wall, and the children developed their theories by drawing stories of eggs and chicks on big pieces of paper. The educators and children spoke about how you can see through the projector paper’s transparency, which led to the children imagining what it might be like to see through an eggshell into the inside of the egg. As the eggs hatched into chicks, children continued to story the life of the eggs. Children drew the chicks, not just documenting how the chicks were developing as individuals, but drawing and storying the ways that they, the children and educators, were in caring and reciprocal relationships with eggs and chicks. Children offered stories and ideas to the chicks, as they frequently visited them with pencils and clipboards at the edge of the centre’s playground. Through these encounters with eggs and chicks, Rachel worked to create conditions for the children to foster a fluid and responsive relationality. She did this by supporting a daily routine that promoted slowing down, revisiting ideas and taking the children’s multispecies relations seriously. Storymaking, story collecting and storykeeping inspired the project throughout its duration. The focus on story created space for Rachel, the educators and the children to think, not only about what they wanted for individual humans, but also what they want for the world in a broader sense: what it might mean to live well.

It is clear from the example shared above that intentional thinking with pedagogical commitments is integral to curriculum making and helps us grapple with what it means to live well in our complicated world. It is important to note that pedagogists are grounded in pedagogical commitments but do not enter their work as experts knowing exactly what will happen. The process of carefully crafting curriculum is a collaborative effort predicated on an openness to see what might emerge. In her presentation, Tracy highlighted that part of her experience of becoming a pedagogist involved recognizing the importance of being comfortable with not knowing, being uncertain of where things might lead and often unsure of what to do next. However, she emphasized the necessity of remaining firmly rooted in pedagogical commitments and working with a deliberate purpose. Otherwise, it would be easy to get carried away trying to follow every emerging idea, and therefore it would be really difficult to foster long-term inquiry projects. This idea of working with deliberate purpose is related to the ideas of subject making discussed above. Making grounded, purposeful pedagogical decisions about what to follow in inquiry work creates possibilities to experiment with subjectivities that challenge the quick consumption and human exceptionalism prevalent in many taken-for-granted early childhood practices.

The concept of intentionality is the common thread linking the narratives the pedagogists shared in the “Storying With” presentation. It’s crucial to understand that intention doesn’t imply predictability; rather, it denotes that every pedagogical decision is a conscientious effort to contribute to creating more livable worlds. Intentionality signifies that each pedagogical decision has the possibility to either nurture specific narratives or suppress them. Without intentionality, we unwittingly perpetuate existing norms and paradigms. The conference presenters demonstrated that pedagogical commitments nurture intentional practices that allow educators to choose the stories we recognize and share in early childhood spaces, with an understanding of their implications.