I am an uninvited settler of mixed ancestry living on the lands of the Lheidli T’enneh in northern British Columbia. I work as an ECPN pedagogist with multiple communities situated on the unceded ancestral lands of the Nakadzli, Saik’uz, and Wet’suwet’en First Nations. I acknowledge my responsibility as an uninvited settler to work in good relation with Indigenous peoples on the lands they have caretaken since time immemorial. As this blog series thinks with knowledges of Indigenous storytellers, I recognize my responsibility to work with stories in ways that attempt to avoid further harm and erasure of Indigenous peoples, while always recognizing that regardless of best intentions, harm is still possible.
In early childhood programs, stories are woven into the fabric of daily life in many ways. Whether greeting children and hearing about their weekend adventures, comforting a sick child with a favourite book, exchanging ideas with a group of children at the lunch table, or sharing exciting moments of the day with families, stories are ever-present. These examples highlight how stories thrive in exchanges; this is not an exhaustive list of how stories live within early years programs.
Stories are central to early childhood education because they shape how we understand ourselves and the world around us. In this blog post, I explore the complexity of the term “story” and consider what stories in early childhood education might look like and make possible. I discuss the significance of stories, as a part of us and the world we inhabit, through the narratives of scholars and Indigenous writers and my own writing. Additionally, I examine the ethical choices early childhood educators face when working with stories and storytelling, offering examples of how professional and personal commitments influence everyday practices.
This blog series on stories is composed of three posts. This first post unpacks what a story is and what I am referring to when I use the word story. I share ways I worked with unfamiliar stories in early childhood education alongside children and educators by examining a portion of the pedagogical narration Monsters Transform a Place. The second blog post discusses how non-Western storytelling practices can support thinking outside of Euro-Western frameworks. I do this by sharing a story of bear encounters in my community alongside a discussion of selected works by Indigenous storyteller Thomas King. The third blog engages with Natalie Loveless’s examination of embedded, “calcified” stories in the classroom through the lens of Canada’s legacy of colonization.
The series focuses on stories that might be unfamiliar in early childhood education. The stories I propose challenge some of the dominant narratives of both early childhood and society. For example, I share stories that challenge the logics of developmentalism, which are deeply grounded in Euro-Western ways of knowing and being in the world.[1] I propose that early childhood needs more than Euro-Western perspectives to create transformative curriculum practices with children. For example, many of the stories told in early childhood education uphold the logics of developmental psychology, and these stories shape the construction of what it is to be a good educator.[2] Developmental psychology does this by presenting a singular view of who the human subject should become[3], and consequently positions the role of educators as nurturing children towards becoming this universal subject. The inheritance of the single story of the universal, individual subject (which has been crafted from the image of the white heterosexual male) is the ideal that is presented in the expectations of early childhood classrooms. The story of who children and educators are allowed to be within the classroom is reinforced through the everyday routines and rhythms.
Another story that is predominant in early childhood education is that of human exceptionalism. These human-centered stories privilege the human experience over relationality with the more-than-human world. These types of stories appear in early childhood education both in the actual stories we share with children and in the development of commonly accepted practices, often referred to as best practices. For example, free play, an almost universally accepted practice in North America in which children can explore the world and follow their individual interests unencumbered by adult interference[4] is based on the developmental logic that children’s potential will unfold naturally as long as environments are constructed in ways that support their specific developmental age requirements. While this might seem like the story of a classroom with best practices provided by “good” educators, this idea places children as the ones in power and control of the world they are encountering, encouraged to engage in ways that solely benefit them as individual humans and therefore also reiterates the story of humancentrism. Beyond what I perceive as the limitations of the curriculum potentiality of these stories, they also maintain the historical and current educational violences of colonialism, in which educational practices are designed to promote sameness.[5] Developmental and human-centered stories foreclose possibilities for other ways of knowing the world by providing fixed truths to be applied and dictating how and why certain stories are or are not acceptable to bring into conversation with children.[6] Nikolas Rose highlights how deeply developmental psychology is woven into the formation of human subjectivities, suggesting that by understanding these genealogies—stories of how subjectivities are constructed—we can begin to unpack and resist them.[7] He explains that these stories not only shape our interactions with one another but our projects of life planning, our ways of managing industrial and other organizations, our systems of consumption, many of our genres of literature, and aesthetic production.[8] Rose’s insight reveals how a singular narrative governs much of human society. In this blog and my work, I take up his challenge to “unpick the ways”[9] these stories have become entrenched in early childhood education practices. I propose that children and educators can engage with stories that are more complex than those offered by Euro-Western frameworks. In this proposition, I am following early childhood scholars who have been working with these ideas for decades.[10]
The ideas I offer in these blog posts are not fixed truths; rather, they are experimentations, provocations, and possibilities that encourage deep consideration of the stories we tell and live in early childhood education. I invite readers to reflect on the ideas in this blog in relation to their own classroom experiences and to examine where the ideas in this blog connect to the everyday happenings they experience.
“What is a story?”: Noticing where stories show up
The word “story” is familiar to most, yet its meaning can range from recounting a real event to sharing something imagined. Stories come to life through various mediums, such as spoken word, songs, writing, and visual arts. Whether reading the latest news, chatting with friends on FaceTime, or watching a favourite TV show, we engage with stories by reading, retelling, or participating in their unfolding through sight and sound. However, these examples only scratch the surface of what a story is. In this first blog post, I suggest that stories go beyond the five senses of touch, taste, sight, smell, and hearing. They are not simply structured narratives with defined plots, settings, and characters but dynamic collections of moments and trajectories in constant motion.
Some stories unfold boldly and energetically, while others emerge slowly, with subtle transformations over time. Stories resist being pinned down by rigid definitions. For instance, the excitement of a group of children discussing a topic at the lunch table is a story in motion. In contrast, the gradual shift in a group of educators committing to slow down their practice over the course of a year represents a quieter, evolving story. As mentioned earlier, these emergent stories challenge the singular Euro-Western narratives, offering alternatives to the fixed goal of shaping individuals who conform to the dominant white male standard.
It’s easy to get caught up in the human experience when working with stories, but this can lead to a humancentric view that limits stories to human perspectives. For instance, children’s books often anthropomorphize animals, reducing stories to human invention and overlooking the rich histories, presents, and futures of other beings and forces in the world. This is significant in early childhood education, as the ways we engage with stories can either reinforce dominant narratives or disrupt them, sparking curiosity and pointing toward transformative possibilities.
I want to clarify that I’m not suggesting we stop reading to young children or remove books from classrooms just because they feature talking animals or promote heroic Western values. Some of the classic literature my parents read to me, like A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh or Beatrix Potter’s works, still hold a cherished place on my bookshelf. These stories carry the love and connection of my family, as they were shared with me during childhood. Similarly, reading in early childhood programs fosters connection and engagement between children and adults. Stories have the power to bring people together and create moments of joy. While acknowledging this, my suggestion is that as educators we always need to consider what stories enable and what they might limit, what lives are privileged and what lives are dismissed. In this blog, I’ll share an example of a story created with children that moves beyond human-centered heroics and creatures with human traits, as a gesture towards what becomes possible with other kinds of stories.
Working with monsters: Pedagogical narration moves
In 2022, I worked with a small rural community’s early childhood centre in crafting a pedagogical inquiry and a pedagogical narration. The inquiry Monsters Transform a Place worked with ideas unfamiliar to early childhood classrooms as children, educators, and I connected to the land surrounding the centre.
Inviting a collective (a multiplicity of voices) to engage with ideas is important in education. As early childhood educators in British Columbia, we are invited to create conditions for collaborative thinking and collective experimentation with children through “living inquiries.”[11] Stories are part of how we engage in collective processes as we work with documentation traces and craft pedagogical narrations. This might not be a common way of looking at the purpose of documentation in early childhood centres, as much of the documentation that goes on throughout the day is centered on individual children, logistical processes, and factual, step-by-step recountings of curriculum throughout the days, weeks, and months. A pedagogical narration is not a factual, step-by-step accounting of what happened in an inquiry. Rather, a pedagogical narration analyzes data collected over a long period of time which is then carefully crafted into a story that asks the reader to consider a particular question, concept or ethical consideration in education.[12] A pedagogical narration does not focus on individual children or educators as a protagonist, or on the reflections of educators and children. Instead, it is a storying of the careful processes and questions that shaped a classroom’s collaborative dispositions over time, written in an active voice to draw the reader into an encounter with the story as if it were happening now.
When I worked with the classroom in Monsters Transform a Place, educators and I took children’s ideas seriously about a proposed invisible monster that lived near the creek and forest trails close to the centre. This kind of inquiry work was new to everyone involved, including myself. Because we stayed with this storying for months, much emerged. There were layers to the inquiry and what happened. The children’s ideas complexified over time, as the conversation of monsters was nourished in the classroom. But this inquiry wasn’t only about the children’s ideas and drawings of monsters. While taking the children’s ideas seriously and extending space for them to be in conversation about the many complexities of invisible creatures was incredibly important, it wasn’t the most important piece I was holding as a pedagogist. What emerged as vital to the inquiry was the connection to place that children and educators were able to nourish, and how place became more than the literal landscape we could detect with our five senses when we went searching for signs of the monster. Graffiti, rocks, bent and slashed trees were signs that something otherworldly was moving in the place alongside us. As the inquiry continued, children began to study photographs offered to them by educators of footprints, marks and creatures from interesting perspectives that were taken around the community.
The children did not respond by saying “this is a footprint of a bear” or “this is the marks of a grouse’s wings,” even though they were familiar with those signs. In this context, because uncertainty and imagination had been nourished, they responded to these photographs with speculations of teleportation holes, ethereal caves and intricate maps of invisible movement through the mountains. The children were not interested in telling a literal story of monsters who played, slept, moved or ate like them. Nor did they ever name the monster(s). The monster remained mysterious, described by some children to be “trickers” shapeshifting and defying all logics. Working with monsters opened space for uncertainty and a problem that would never be solved. From my view, as I worked through the data analysis, this was a critical point—this inquiry wasn’t about the monsters as creatures that we had to unpack as “bad” or “good” or draw schematics that were recognizable (having two eyes, a nose, mouth, arms, and legs)—though some monsters were drawn in this way by some children. This inquiry was about committing to getting to know a place and being open to the uncertainty of what that knowing might offer back—that a place we grow up in and strive to know intimately is also a stranger to us. It offers us back the unknown and the unknowable in an ongoing conversation.
This inquiry could have been approached differently. Many choices were made along the way as we discarded some ideas and held onto others. We chose carefully what to follow and what to put down. These choices were ethical storytelling practices. One of the common questions I am asked when people engage with the documentation is whether we sought out Indigenous knowledges when the children began to theorize that the monster might be a sasquatch. The children were also referring to the monster as a tricker, which sounded similar to Trickster. The Trickster is a spiritual figure in many Indigenous cultures, portrayed as a hero, prankster, or shapeshifter.[13] In the Pacific Northwest, the Trickster is often portrayed as a Raven. We discussed and thought about how to respond carefully to the children’s ideas. We noticed that many children’s storybooks talk about Indigenous figures of Sasquatch and Trickster. These books could have been a resource used in the classroom to teach about Indigenous culture. However, we resisted this path. Picking up Indigenous knowledges to apply to our curriculum inquiry ran the risk of using Indigenous knowledges from a colonial lens to explain away who the monster was while also moving to assume understanding Indigenous knowledge as a mere children’s story and a supplemental resource within the classroom to “enrich” children’s knowledge of Indigenous cultures. As the pedagogist guiding the inquiry, I invited us to stay with the knowledge we were building as a classroom rather than taking and applying other knowledges to “make sense” of what we were encountering. In choosing to stay close to the knowledge we were creating together, we resisted the move to appropriate Indigenous knowledge for our own purposes.[14] While I think closely with Indigenous storytellers in my practice, I do not move to extend Indigenous stories into my practice without careful consideration of whom the movements will affect. This is an example of how ethical praxis is part of the everyday storytelling choices in pedagogical inquiry.
In my next blog post, I will share examples of storytelling outside the frame of Western perspectives. As a settler of mixed ancestry, I will walk readers through my process of storying beyond humancentrism, leaning on the work of Indigenous storyteller Thomas King. Working with others’ stories demands careful consideration and ethics. I will share ways I encounter this imperfect process through offering a narrative of troubling bear-human relations in my community and how this rippled into my work with centres. I invite readers to join me as we engage with the complexity of unfamiliar stories in early childhood education.
[1] Affrica Taylor, A. “Reconceptualizing the ‘Nature’ of Childhood,” Childhood 18, no. 4 (2011): 420–433. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568211404951
[2] Nikolas Rose, “How Should One Do the History of the Self?” in Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, And Personhood, edited by xx (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
[3] Ibid.
[4] Erica Burman, E. (2017). Deconstructing developmental psychology (3rd ed.). Routledge.
[5] Simone Bignall and Daryle Rigney, “Indigeneity, Posthumanism, and Nomad Thought: Transforming Colonial Ecologies,” in Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process After Deleuze, eds. Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019); Jeffrey Denis, Canada at a Crossroads: Boundaries, Bridges, and Laissez-Faire Racism in Indigenous-Settler Relations (University of Toronto Press, 2020); Thomas King, The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative (House of Anansi Press, 2003); Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future (Broadleaf Books, 2022); Tanya Talaga, Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City (House of Anansi Press, 2017).
[6] Ian Parker, Erica Burman, and Fernando Gonzalez Rey, “Subjectivity and Transformation” [Videorecording], 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IctH27bjU_k.
[7] Rose, “How Should One?”
[8] Rose, “How Should One?”, 23.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Peter Moss, “Early Childhood Pedagogy: Veronica Pacini- Ketchabaw Interviews Peter Moss,” Canadian Children 45 no. 2 (2020): 98–111, https://doi.org/10.18357/jcs452202019742; Gunilla Dahlberg, Peter Moss, and Alan Pence, Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education And Care: Languages of Evaluation, 3rd edn. (Routledge, 2013); Taylor, “Reconceptualizing.”
[11] Government of British Columbia, British Columbia Early Learning Framework, Ministry of Education, https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/education-training/early-learning/teach/early-learning-framework, 5.
[12] Cristina Delgado Vintimilla and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, “Weaving Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education: On Openings and Their Foreclosure,” European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 28, no. 5 (2020): 628–641, https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2020.1817235; Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Fikile Nxumalo, Laurie Kocher, Enid Elliot, and Alejandra Sanchez, Journeys: Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Practices through Pedagogical Narration (University of Toronto Press, 2015).
[13] Amanda Robinson, “Trickster,” in The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2018, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/trickster.
[14] (Todd, 2016; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Montpetit, 2020) Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 29 (2016): 4–22, doi: 10.1111/johs.12124; Veronica Pacini Ketchabaw and Meagan Montpetit, “More-than-Human Kinship Relations within Indigenous Children’s Picture Books,” in Disrupting and Countering Deficits In Early Childhood Education, eds. Fikile Nxumalo and Christopher P. Brown (Routledge, 2020).