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Ruptures in the Margins: Storytelling Outside of Euro-Western Practices Pt 3

I am an uninvited settler of mixed ancestry living on the lands of the Lheidli T’enneh in northern British Columbia. I work, at the time of this writing, with multiple communities situated on the unceded ancestral lands of the Lheidli, 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, and I recognize that even with the best intentions, harm is still possible. In this blog post, I share a story of visiting a place in British Columbia that holds violent histories of segregation and racism towards Indigenous people. I recognize that the description of Miller Bay Tuberculosis Hospital may evoke distressing memories for some readers and reopen generational trauma. Please use discretion when engaging with this article. For immediate support, the Hope for Wellness Helpline is available 24/7 at 1-855-242-3310 or through online chat at www.hopeforwellness.ca.

Introduction

This is the final post of a three-part series on storytelling. In the first blog post, I unpacked common understandings of stories in early childhood education and what I mean when I talk about storytelling. Storytelling, as I discussed in the earlier posts, is a broad and complex topic. I consider stories and storytelling to be a lifelong endeavour. I will never master or be finished experimenting with the practice of storying. Every time I read a new story or listen to a storyteller share their words, I layer more ideas and curiosity into my understanding of stories. Each of these layers is in conversation with the others—nothing stays the same or can be fully defined. Every new idea brings more questions and possibilities.

I also challenge the view of stories as a solely human-centred practice, inviting readers to consider alternative storytelling practices. In the second blog post, I offered other ways of understanding stories in ECE by examining stories through a non-Western lens, engaging with the writings of Indigenous storyteller Thomas King and his provocation that “the truth about stories is that’s all that we are.”[1] If we are stories, then stories become more than words we tell others. Rather, stories are the events, realities and relations we are composed of while we are alive in in the world. When seen this way, the kinds of stories that we choose to engage with become how we shape the world. In these blog posts, I offer alternative ways to consider stories. I wonder what might happen if early childhood education were a place for stories outside of developmental psychology, which is the main way stories show up in early childhood spaces. I experiment with telling other kinds of stories through examining moments in classrooms and my broader community encounters that might not be typically discussed within the framework of early childhood. I offer the possibility of moving beyond the familiar stories encountered in early childhood education to consider stories that challenge developmental psychology’s approach to understanding and engaging with complexity. In the first post, I also shared a small moment from a pedagogical narration, “Monsters Transform a Place.” In the second, I told a story of human-bear encounters alongside a selection of Thomas King’s work. In this final post, I continue to unpack storytelling as a site of agitating colonial beliefs and practices.

In this final post of the series, I build on the stories I shared in the previous posts. Bringing feminist scholars alongside King, I discuss how certain stories become embedded in the practices of education, creating seemingly immovable, or calcified stories seen as truth. These “calcified” stories appear to be static and unchanging, becoming cemented into the everyday practices of education. Engaging with the work of Natalie Loveless, Fikile Nxumalo, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I share a moment of confronting one of the calcified stories in early childhood education through an encounter with land on the northwest coast of British Columbia. Through this encounter, I illustrate how pedagogical commitments, which are the ethical concerns, hopes and convictions I work to nourish in my pedagogist practice, are activated through the everyday choices of which stories I choose to perpetuate.[2] I share an example of how activating pedagogical commitments with children and educators is possible in the everyday doings of the classroom.

Moving beyond developmental psychology’s assessment-based practices to define children and childhood, I consider what else defines childhood. Development is only one story of childhood. Childhood is part of the story arc of human experience, full of moments that provoke curiosity, wonder, joy and so much more. If we think about the storied pathways of our lives, we can see that human experience is complex and goes beyond developmental markers or ages and stages. Engaging with complexity requires that I bring multiple voices into the discussion, layering ideas to create a diffractive reading practice. Before diving into the stories offered, I briefly unpack what diffractive reading practices are and how I activate these throughout the discussion.

The stories I bring attention to in this blog post are a small selection of the many stories that live in early childhood spaces and, more broadly, in Western society. They are not an exhaustive list of the ways storytelling is taken up in the classroom. I acknowledge that alongside calcified stories, vibrant and lively transformative worlds are also in motion. The intention of this post is to walk readers through the process of noticing, deepening and activating storytelling orientations in practice.

The stories I invite you to consider in this post are challenging and may provoke discomfort. However, discomfort and challenge are critical companions to creating conditions for transformation. Walking with Cristina Delgado Vintimilla’s discussion of “neoliberal fun and happiness,”[3] I wonder what might become possible when ideas that move the principal goal of education beyond positivistic, innocent, and “fun” are invited into consideration. In this endeavour, I see stories as partners gesturing towards alternative and transformative approaches. Thinking education differently may be challenging, but stories that think otherwise also offer possibilities for joy, wonderment and inspiration.

None of this is perfect or formulaic. As noted in previous posts in this series, I do not offer these stories and concepts as a roadmap to best practices or a way to master the art of storytelling. They are provocations to think otherwise and invite dialogue with unfamiliarity. The kinds of stories offered in this blog series may be unfamiliar in early childhood education. This is intentional. My hope is that the conversations about stories in these blog posts support readers to stretch their understanding of what stories make possible in education.

Expanding Horizons: Diffractive Reading Practices

In this blog and in my practice, I invite diffraction as a boundary-bending practice to wear down and rupture (at times ever so slightly) the margins of some of the stories present in early childhood education. Picking up the work with Thomas King in the previous post, I introduce more voices to story alongside King, inviting Natalie Loveless, Fikile Nxumalo and Chimimanda Ngozi Adiche to add perspectives that enrich propositions for doing education differently. Throughout the post, I put their ideas into play with one another, activating a diffractive practice in the discussion.

The concept of diffraction, which is borrowed from the scientific discipline of physics, is taken up by new materialist feminist scholars to describe how weaving through many ideas across multiple disciplines creates possibilities for engaging differently in the world.[4] This way of working with ideas is a relational practice and may seem unfamiliar when contrasted with the Euro-Western methods that most of us are introduced to through the course of formalized education. If we think back to our school experiences, we might remember knowledge being partitioned into discrete blocks of time each day—math in one block, language arts in another, science in yet another and so on. Diffraction, by contrast, plays with how these ideas connect or bump up against one another, blending the boundaries between them and being open to something entirely new or surprising.

Calcified Stories: Unpacking Challenging Narratives

Stories of the magnitude at stake here are never innocent. They always do certain things and not others; rely on certain things and not others. (Natalie Loveless, How To Make Art at the End of the World)[5]

Thinking more deeply about why stories are important in shaping educational conversations, I return to the work of scholars who work with stories in their research. I am interested in how we might work with unfamiliar trajectories in early childhood education. To do this, I engage with the work of feminist scholar and researcher Natalie Loveless, who activates knowledge through research creation. Research creation is an interdisciplinary, genre-bending practice of art and theoretical research, where pedagogy and the arts come together to actively engage in creating transformative practices.[6] Loveless notes that the more she engaged with the arts in her practice, the more disciplines she drew from. To understand art, she had to deepen her theoretical understandings, and vice versa.[7] As part of this interdisciplinary work, Loveless, in How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, embraces the importance of storytelling through close readings of Thomas King and feminist scholar Donna Haraway. Loveless puts these two scholars into conversation, practicing diffraction. In this post, I bring attention specifically to her thinking with King.

Loveless agrees with King, who says, “stories are wondrous things. And they are also dangerous.”[8] In a close examination of King’s The Truth about Stories, Loveless elaborates on this idea, noting that “stories are wondrous in their capacity to reorganize our approaches to our social-material worlds; they are dangerous for their capacity to produce themselves as compelling objects of belief, naturalized, as all too many of us see year in and year out in the classroom, into calcified truths.”[9] Below I delve further into the practice of diffraction as we think about the calcification of stories and how we might invite small ruptures.

In visualizing what Loveless is offering in the examination of stories that become “naturalized,” I am drawn to her term calcified truths. When I think of calcification, I envision layers of minerals slowly accumulating on top of one another as water drips down over a surface, a slow sedimentation of one layer onto another. Using this metaphor, I am curious to unpack some of the accumulated sedimentary ideas that have created calcified truths in early childhood practice.

One example of calcified stories in early childhood education is “the good educator.” Being a good educator is a story that becomes cemented with layers of routines and tasks that define set practices in the classroom. A good educator has excellent classroom management skills, adheres to the schedule and routines, is well versed in developmental milestones and documents how children are meeting these standards. These are just some of the deeply ingrained ideas that make up the story of the good educator. Having worked as an early childhood educator before I became a pedagogist, I remember well how the layers of stories accumulated, and how constricted I began to feel by the story of the good educator. I was bound to these stories as a skilled technician in a market-based system[10] where my efforts were focused on shaping children, within a discourse of “fun and happiness”[11], to adhere to developmental standards.

Loveless discusses how calcified stories “produce worlds”; she notes that changing the stories that produce worlds isn’t “an easy practice, nor innocent, nor always possible.”[12] Another activist who talks about how stories produce worlds is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In her TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story” Adichie reminds listeners that power relations cement the stories that are told and retold, and that telling new stories requires disrupting the balance of those power relations. Loveless and Adiche are gesturing towards possibilities to do storytelling differently.[13]

“Who Can Help Us Change the Stories?” Diffractive Companionship

To move towards different storytelling possibilities, we must first examine what stories are currently being told in early childhood education. Many calcified stories exist beyond the one mentioned previously. One of the sedimented stories I encounter in my work is that education in early childhood is mainly about meeting developmental goals, as I noted above. These developmental goals position an ideal image of the child[14] and an idealized method of teaching to manage or correct traits that fall outside of the ideal. Educators are positioned as technicians of children’s development through the curriculum they design and implement. There is concern that if children’s development is not attended to, they will “fall behind” in their later education. However, this fear continues to calcify the way things occur in early childhood classrooms, with no questioning of why the structures exist in the way they do or how they might be addressed differently.

Calcified stories are not easily questioned. Contrasted with King’s words, offered in the previous post – of stories being “all that we are,” full of potential for movement and growth – the concept of calcified stories evokes static truths that must be adhered to. Going back to Nikolas Rose’s idea that I thought with in the first blog post, to “unpick the ways” of calcified stories, we need an alternative.

Alternatives to the certainty of calcified stories require a diffractive composition of ideas that unsettle the taken-for-granted stories of education. This blog post so far has woven many voices together to examine stories, and here it is necessary to add another voice. Education scholar Deborah Britzman offers the concept of a pedagogy grounded in uncertainty and doubt, where the complex and difficult questions in education are opportunities to imagine other possibilities.[15] Britzman invites educators to think beyond the psychological aspects of their training to engage with ethical problems in the world that impact all of us. She draws from many philosophers (a diffractive move), including Hannah Arendt, who grappled with the societal capacity to ignore the suffering of others after her experience of living through the Holocaust as a young Jewish woman. I mention this, not because it is an interesting fact or a “back story” to Britzman’s work, but because this post unpacks racist and colonial realities in British Columbia’s Northwest. Britzman sees education as an intimate endeavour to make meaning in the world. She challenges educators to move beyond thinking about education as management techniques to think about “pedagogical projects of thought.”[16] Pedagogically grappling with ethical questions offers ways to break free from calcified ideas. Britzman’s challenge, taken alongside Loveless, invites an active response to the stories in education, asking what stories animate us and might influence our choice to tell and do stories differently.[17]

As we notice the stories we are passionate about and that we seek to retell in our work, we are forming pedagogical commitments. Over time in my work, I have developed an attunement to stories of the land. I not only notice these stories, but I also strive to activate educational ideas of intimate connection and anti-extraction in my everyday work. More reading regarding these ideas is available in previous blog posts on the ECPN website, located here. I also share more about this process below.

Activating pedagogical commitments requires continuous movement. Noticing the stories we encounter in the world is only part of what is required in working with pedagogical commitments. As we pay attention to the stories that exist in education, we have a choice to make. We can continue to live within the systems that exist, accepting and retelling stories, or we can move to disrupt and tell stories differently. In the next section, I weave in scholar Fikile Nxumalo alongside other voices as I examine another calcified story in early childhood education. I then walk through how I move from examining a calcified story to working with my pedagogical commitments to disrupt and gesture towards a different story.

Rupturing Calcification: Acting with Pedagogical Commitments

So that is how to create a single story: show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. “The Danger of a Single Story)[18]

Colonialism in Canada has produced single stories—narratives that fix Indigenous and racialized peoples into narrow, unchanging categories. Over the past 150 years, racist[19] policies have cemented ideas about Indigenous and Black communities into Canadian cultural memory, shaping how these communities are perceived in education.[20] The stories sediment over time, positioning Indigenous and Black children as marginal, as struggling or as existing outside the dominant vision of educational success.[21]

These single stories also extend to how land is conceptualized. Just as colonial narratives have fixed Indigenous and racialized peoples into particular roles, they have also separated land from Indigenous relations, casting it as an extractable resource for human use. In mainstream Canadian discourse, land is framed as something to be owned, developed and controlled—a framing that carries into the classroom, where children are often encouraged to take, rather than relate.

Adichie’s critique of single stories compels me to examine the narratives that shape early childhood education. One story that appears repeatedly, subtly woven into curriculum, assessment and policy, is the idea that Indigenous and Black children are inherently behind their nonracialized peers. This assumption, reinforced by government statistics[22], frames Indigenous and racialized children through a deficit lens, positioning them as lacking rather than acknowledging the rich, multilayered ways they experience education within their families, communities and lands.

Yet, as Fikile Nxumalo reminds us, challenging these stories requires telling new ones—ones that foreground the dynamic lived experiences of Black and Indigenous childhoods rather than framing them through deficits.[23] In her research, Nxumalo explores Black and Indigenous childhoods in relation to land, water and more-than-human kin, showing how ecological relationships offer ways out of the colonial cycles of deficit-based storytelling. Rather than reproducing narratives of lack, Nxumalo highlights the relationships, knowledge systems and land-based ways of being that are often invisible within Western statistical frameworks of school readiness and success.

In Western education, knowledge about land is framed through scientific classification, environmental stewardship or economic value. This framing impacts how children engage with land, reinforcing extractive relationships rather than reciprocal ones. But is this the kind of education we want to sustain? What other stories are possible here?

To disrupt single stories, pedagogists must not only question dominant narratives but actively generate new ones—ones that affirm complexity, relationality and situated knowledge. This is both an intellectual and an ethical responsibility. Returning to Britzman’s pedagogical projects of thought, we can nurture a commitment to resisting the calcification of educational practices by continually asking: What stories do we tell in education? Whose perspectives are centered? What narratives are being reinforced, and what might be possible if we refuse them?

This is not abstract work. It is an everyday practice. It requires educators to push back against the expectation that their role is merely technical—that is, to implement curriculum, meet developmental outcomes and reinforce dominant knowledge systems. Instead, it invites educators to see themselves as active storytellers in education with the power to shape pedagogical commitments that resist colonial narratives.

In the next section, I share a story of how I responded to a calcified narrative in my own practice—one that required carefully attending to pedagogical commitments in action.

Miller Bay: A Site of Rupture

In the spring of 2024, I took some time away from work to travel to the British Columbia Northwest. There, I stayed with my dear friend and fellow pedagogist Kirsten MacDougall Seiler. Over the years, Kirsten and I have collaborated on projects related to land and story in our respective work. In 2020–2021, she and I hosted gatherings, called Fireside Conversations, for early childhood educators across northern British Columbia to explore storytelling and connection to land. While Kirsten and I work in our own communities, many of our questions, curiosities and pathways have “contaminated” each other’s pedagogical processes. Being contaminated is a process of entanglement with the world, where being in relation to others, places and ideas extends our thinking.[24]

During this visit, Kirsten and I decided to go out on the land and visit communities and places near her home that contained stories we wanted to probe. One of the places we visited was Miller Bay, site of the defunct Miller Bay Indian Hospital.[25] Miller Bay today provides a vivid physical trace of a painful time in recent history. Segregated hospitals were commonplace well into the 21^st century in Canada.[26] Indigenous people who were ill with diseases like tuberculosis were sent to isolated places like Miller Bay, where they often died without the care and traditions of their kin. During the time when Miller Bay Hospital was operational, from 1946 to 1971, this was an acceptable practice in Canada. While segregated hospitals no longer operate in Canada, racist practices in the healthcare system and other aspects of Canadian life are alive and well, directly impacting Indigenous people.

Our intention in travelling to Miller Bay was to confront and unsettle our assumptions in working with the concept of land. Land is often romanticized as pure and healing while also being the site of extraction and colonial exploration, and we wanted to challenge these ways of engaging with land in education. We each brought our pedagogical commitments and orientations, which were slightly different, given our contexts. Working with land from an anti-extractive pedagogical orientation, I was attending to Indigenous histories and perspectives in relation to the land. That year, I had spent intensive time working with educators and children on the land in a rural community, and I realized I was beginning to think about land in overly simplified terms—as a remedy for the rigid routines of the classroom. I was becoming complacent in a narrative of land as something curative, a soothing response to the daily struggles of adhering to the clock. Everything seemed so much easier when we were outside and the classroom routines melted into the background. Being on the land had many desired effects, including the idea of slowing down and moving from the role of educator as technician to educator as curious co-researcher with children. There were other effects of this practice as well. One very present story was the idea of following children and allowing them to explore as they wished. While inviting a slowing down, this idea also held consequences for the land. What happened, for example, if children wanted to strip leaves from trees, or stomp on grubs? Was this an okay practice simply because we were following the children? There was debate. Perhaps these practices were appropriate because the children were learning from the experience, and the less we intervened in their activities, the more the land would spark their minds and invite them to be curious. Alongside of this, a thread of romanticism persists in land curriculum engagements. Being “on the land” was alluring. I was succumbing to the romantic story of beauty and “untouched” wilderness, where the land is a healer of humanity and gives of itself without condition, available for extraction at humanity’s whim. This story, in which land is called terra nullius[27], is deeply rooted in the neoliberal idea that the land and its more-than-human inhabitants exist to benefit human progress.[28]

I wanted to refuse this narrative. Thinking with the work of Fikile Nxumalo[29] to situate my orientations, I had travelled to the Northwest coastal region to closely examine the histories and present of the extracted, colonized landscape alongside Kirsten. I wanted to disrupt the ideas that were becoming so alluring.

Miller Bay is an abandoned site just outside of Prince Rupert, British Columbia. To reach it, we had to abruptly exit the desolate highway onto a small gravel pullout just after a dangerous curve. From the vehicle, we walk in to the site through dense underbrush. The trail to the hospital grounds splits into two, and we choose the wrong path at first. Our ankles slosh in rivulets of rushing water as we head further and further into tangled brush. Scrambling to turn around and reorient ourselves, we struggle to keep our bearings. Once we relocate the lower path, the forest is so dense we don’t see the site until we are upon it. After plodding through the soggy, stream-filled brush, side-stepping slugs and mossy, slime-covered rocks, we step into the ruins. The smokestack of a brick incinerator towers above the dense trees.

Ducking inside the two-story concrete building that once was Miller Bay Indian Hospital, we are met with an eerie

drip

drip

drip.

Water drips from the broken roof, the cascade creating calcified bumps on the concrete that look like stalactites and stalagmites in a cave. Everything is wet. The damp air makes movement difficult as our bodies push against a current with each step.

Our footfalls echo sharply on the concrete. Kirsten and I speak quietly, then fall into silence. We feel this place holding immense pain and suffering within it, the ghosts of the place making their presence known. The forest closes in around us, squeezing, constricting our lungs. We do not linger long.

Standing in the thick tangle of green forest, the isolation is overwhelming. There is no sound outside of the incessant dripping of water. The bay below is still, its glassy surface peeking through the silhouettes of tree branches.

Before leaving, I stand for a few moments next to the towering brick smokestack, placing my hand against it. The solidity of the rough brick is sobering. There is a door in the base of the stack where coal, wood and other materials must have been placed to be incinerated. My body shivers as I take in the presence of a giant cedar tree whose roots now encompass the base of the chimney. A hole gapes between two of the tentacling roots, inky dark. I wonder what this tree has seen in its lifetime. I wonder what histories of this place it holds, and what it knows about the smokestack it now cradles. What encounters has it had with other beings and forces, including viruses and bacteria? A sudden urge of tears overwhelms my body as I offer a prayer of remembrance for the souls who lived and died in this place. As Kirsten and I walk back to the road, I recognize that this place has offered me a reminder that the land is a survivor of generations of extraction and colonization. It bears witness and is affected by human choices. It holds memories within place, and not all memories are idyllic. Even as the landscape reclaims human structures, traces remain.

I think about this experience for months afterwards, wondering how I might resist the idea of land as only an idyllic giver of childhood wonderment. How might I acknowledge the complexity of land as a partner in curriculum making, where histories are not washed clean? These questions could not be instantly responded to. There were no formulaic answers to help navigate the questions multiplying in my mind.

Small Moves: Choosing Ethical and Transformative Stories

Most of us think history is the past. It’s not. History is the stories we tell about the past. That’s all it is. Stories. Such a definition might make the enterprise of history seem neutral, benign. Which of course, it isn’t. History may well be a series of stories we tell about the past, but the stories are not just any stories. They’re not chosen by chance. (Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian)[30]

Stories, as King writes, are not part of our world through chance. Stories come to be through the choices of those who tell them. So why did I choose the story of Miller Bay to share in a blog about storytelling practices in early childhood education? Why does it matter that I went to the site of a crumbling tuberculosis hospital and then chose to write about the experience?

In early childhood education, as in life, we cannot be outside of the stories that are happening, because they are within us, around us, and constantly in movement. We are implicated in the stories that live in early childhood classrooms, and the choices we make every day impact which stories will be activated. No stories, as King tells us, are chosen by chance.[31] They are created every day.

For Miller Bay to have existed at all required a story to become commonplace—calcified—in Canadian culture. That story, the story of solving the “Indian problem” by assimilating Indigenous people into white Euro-Western culture through colonial practices and, at the same time, excluded them from the taken-for-granted rights of the settler population, continues to impact all aspects of Canadian life. This calcified story impacts how land is understood in education. Land is seen as human property and a source of resources to be extracted for human benefit. In juxtaposition to this story, land is also seen as wild and untamed, a bountiful, beautiful and always-available cure for the ailments of consumerist society.

One of the difficulties we face in animating new stories is that it isn’t easy to do. Sometimes, it’s easier to look to the calcified stories and point out that they have created the world we don’t want. It’s also easy to point out how much more still needs to change, and to give in to hopelessness. It can feel alluring to notice all the ways new stories are also, invariably, making mistakes along the way. Nothing is perfect.

Miller Bay reminds us that the perception of land as innocent and curative is a dangerous story. The land is beautiful, and it may offer us a sense of calm and focus when we engage with it, and it is the site of extraction and colonization. As a result of these violences, the land has been demarcated by stark borders. These borders tell stories of who is allowed to be considered fully human and worthy of care, and where bodies are allowed to exist. I offer this small moment at Miller Bay as a sobering reminder of the visceral impact stories have. If we want a different story, we have a choice to make. This is where the ethics of our pedagogical practice become important to think about and work through. Returning to what Loveless offers, we need to find the stories that animate us and invite movement. We can rupture the calcified stories by creating new stories. Sometimes, the little movements we make are small cracks, tiny spaces at the margins of an embedded story. No matter how small, these cracks matter.

Since visiting Miller Bay, I haven’t found a set of new “best practices” for working on the land with children and educators. The troubling stories of human extraction and land as a generous healer are still with us. However, my pedagogical commitment to work in anti-extractive ways with intimate connection to the world continue to inform the work I do with early childhood programs.

In one classroom, where the children think about bears when we walk alongside the river, I invite the conversation to move from bears as animals who only roar or growl or scream or yell to a different story of bears.

Out loud, I wonder, “how do bears breathe?” We sit on the bank of the river, breathing in and out. Our breath is not human breath. We try to imagine a bear softly breathing. Our bodies lean into a gentle huff, our chins pushed forward like a bear’s jaw. Our chests puff and relax. The water trickles on, carrying our voices down the stream.

This conversation of breath opens other possibilities beyond the human assumption of bears as aggressive or territorial, or that bears are only angry or bad. We acknowledge where our lives overlap with bears’ lives and the seasonal rhythms that bring us into closer proximity with each other.

New considerations emerge. How might we offer a song to the bears in a language that is not human” We play with ideas for a song, using sounds that are not human words but likely are not bear language either.

We pause on the riverbank to breathe to the bears in “bear breath” and offer a song in unison for the bears to hear. A small gesture.

Children talk about borders and boundaries. They wonder if we might cross over the boundary of the river encircling the town, travelling to the forest on the other side of the water to be with the bears. This speculation is a small moment, but I note it. I don’t want it to get lost.

This move is important. It matters to take note. No sudden leaps to respond, but the moment is held.

Miller Bay is a place intended to separate and isolate bodies. Here, a few hundred kilometres away, we are speculating with place as a site of connection, shared care and entwined futures. Through the experience of continually visiting this riverside place, we are nourishing the ways we can break through the separation and isolation of understanding the world in only one way.

We breathe in as the bears breathe out. Together, we animate a different story.

Some Final Considerations

Stories and the practice of storytelling constitute an incredibly large topic. This blog series offers an entrance into some of the considerations stories and storytelling invite. I consider these to be imperfect gestures towards possibilities, where the stories I choose to tell offer alternatives to the calcified assumptions or “truths” that privilege some ways of being over others.

Each of these blog posts has been an intentional rupture in the margins of early childhood education, offering questions, considerations and hopes for activating different stories. My hope with this blog series is to provoke dialogue on the commonplace stories present in early childhood centres and to offer pedagogical responses that might rupture the cementing of these stories as immovable truths. I further hope these partial and imperfect stories might be the catalyst for activating transformative stories in education, recomposing what might be possible.

Note: I am deeply grateful to the Indigenous people of rural northern British Columbia and the children, educators and communities with whom I have had the opportunity to think, walk, talk and break bread. Without you, these stories would not have come into being. From my heart to yours, I offer these unfinished stories as a humble gift to continue crafting together.

[1] Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2003), 2.

[2] 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): 628–41, https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2020.1817235.

[3] Cristina Delgado Vintimilla, “Neoliberal Fun and Happiness in Early Childhood Education,” Canadian Children 39, no. 1 (2014): 79–87.

[4] New Materialism, “Diffraction,” New Materialism Almanac, https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/d/diffraction.html.

[5] Natalie Loveless, How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 22.

[6] Owen Chapman, in Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation, edited by Natalie Loveless, xxiv (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1515/9781772125061.

[7] Loveless, How to Make Art, 3.

[8] King, The Truth about Stories, 9.

[9] Loveless, How to Make Art, 21.

[10] Peter Moss, Transformative Change and Real Utopias in Early Childhood Education: A Story of Democracy, Experimentation and Potentiality (New York: Routledge, 2014), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315779904.

[11] Vintimilla, “Neoliberal Fun and Happiness.”

[12] Loveless, How to Make Art, 20.

[13] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story” [Video], July 2009, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?subtitle=en.

[14] Gunilla Dahlberg, Peter Moss, and Alan R. Pence, Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Languages of Evaluation, 3^rd edn (New York: Routledge, 2013).

[15] Deborah P. Britzman, “Teacher Education in the Confusion of Our Times,” Journal of Teacher Education 51, no. 3 (2000): 200–205, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487100051003007.

[16] Britzman, “Teacher Education,” 201.

[17] Loveless, How to Make Art, 24–25.

[18] Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” 18:34.

[19] “Racism,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, Historica Canada, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/racism.

[20] Gloria Boutte and Nathaniel Bryan, “When Will Black Children Be Well? Interrupting Anti-Black Violence in Early Childhood Classrooms and Schools,” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 22, no. 3 (2021): 232–43, https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949119890598.

[21] Maria Salazar Pérez, “Dismantling Racialized Discourses in Early Childhood Education and Care: A Revolution towards Reframing the Field,” in Disrupting and Countering Deficits in Early Childhood Education, edited by Fikile Nxumalo and Christopher P. Brown (New York: Routledge, 2020).

[22] Catherine E. Gordon and Jerry P. White, “Indigenous Educational Attainment in Canada,” International Indigenous Policy Journal 5, no. 3 (2014). https://doi.org/10.18584/iipj.2014.5.3.6.

[23] Early Childhood Pedagogies Network, Centring Black Life in Canadian Early Childhood Education [Video], https://ecpn.ca/event/centring-black-life-in-canadian-early-childhood-education/ , 8:00 – 8:44.

[24] Nicole Land and Cristina Delgado Vintimilla, Vitalizing Vocabulary: Doing Pedagogy and Language in Early Childhood Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2024).

[25] Knowledge Network, “Indian Hospitals,” British Columbia: An Untold History, https://bcanuntoldhistory.knowledge.ca/1930/indian-hospitals.

[26] Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, “Indian Hospitals in Canada,” https://irshdc.ubc.ca/learn/indian-hospitals-in-canada/ .

[27] Karen Martin and Booran Mirraboopa, “Ways of Knowing, Being and Doing: A Theoretical Framework and Methods for Indigenous and Indigenist Research,” Journal of Australian Studies 27, no. 76 (2003): 203–214, https://doi.org/10.1080/14443050309387838.

[28] Michael Mascarenhas, Where the Waters Divide: Neoliberalism, White Privilege, and Environmental Racism in Canada (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books / Fortress Academic, 2012).

[29] Fikile Nxumalo, Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education (New York: Routledge, 2019).

[30] Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian : A Curious Account of Native People in North America , illustrated edn (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2017), 3.

[31] King, The Truth about Stories, 3.