From “Barbaric” to “Knowing”: Disrupting teaching to resignify “Toddler”

Abstract

Mainstream images of “toddler” tend to serve a humorous purpose in mass media, most often presenting children of this age (18 months–3 years) as out-of-control. This assumed “barbaric” toddler promotes early childhood as a time for intervention, expecting adults to be the shapers of behavior and knowledge within discourses of social regulation which delineate possible childhoods. Within the Capitalocene, possible childhoods are inextricably linked to future adulthoods where this intervention is desired early to prepare children for future schooling and thus, future work to further industrial progress and consumption. This article revisits narrative, self-reflexive data from a larger study to identify and deconstruct mundane, acceptable teaching practices that promote the positioning of very young children as “lesser beings” through the constant control of children’s bodies, ideas, and subjectivities. Through this deconstruction of practice and in turn adult-child power relations, ruptures in habitual ways of knowing and teaching lead to a reimagining of toddlers’ actions in an effort to build counternarratives. Practices of disruption and resignification aim to challenge the positions of classroom subjects as they are continuously reproduced through discourses of development and the neoliberal agenda.

Keywords

deconstruction feminist post-structuralism narrative teaching toddler

Introduction

Infantilizing political leaders in cartoons and protest propaganda is meant to throw insult at the subject, yet, it speaks volumes about societal views of young children, particularly infants and toddlers. For example, representations of Trump as a bloated, diaper wearing baby, are meant to critique his ineptitude, incapacity, and immaturity. These images of the child that are then overlaid on men in power are steeped in “discourses of [the] child as deficient, not fully human, and uncivilized” (Templeton and Moffett, 2019: 15). Responding to the call for this special issue, I start with the spectacle of infantilizing imagery of male leaders to examine the widespread discourses that equate abhorrent behavior with young children. Templeton and Moffett (2019) call attention to representations in political cartoons that portray selfishness, destruction, whining, and tantrums, arguing that representations of such behavior equated as “childish” not only establish critique of the subject but also sustain demeaning discourses through repeated renderings. Reading these representations with/in the Capitalocene, the editors of this special issue invite an interpretation of this imagery as also an embodiment of capitalism, in all of its bloated and destructive glory. Drawing this connection makes it ever more imperative to examine the ways in which young children, specifically toddlers, are used to exemplify these facets of capitalism. Seeing the Capitalocene as becoming-in-relation (Haraway, 2016), discourses that sustain views of toddlers as barbaric and not-yet-human in the scope of human development continue to provide fodder for these critiques of the effects of capitalism and its “commitment to the lure of Progress (and its polar opposite)” (p. 50).

The work I present here draws from a larger interrogation of daily teaching practices and understandings of “toddler” using methods of narrative teacher research informed by feminist poststructural methodologies. It is important to forefront here that in using the term “toddler” I am referring to children from 18 months to 3 years old, a typical use of the term in Western developmental science and practical literature. Also, I acknowledge that the notion of “toddler” that I will further deconstruct is representative of a particularly anglicized perspective, relatively widespread in societal discourses across the US and other English-oriented societies of the minority world. I am in no way making assumptions of universality here as other cultures and knowledges have different ways of seeing and constructing this period of life coming after the first year, as well as differing notions of care and education (Ebrahim, 2019; Sims et al., 2018). Also, in my calling attention to pervasive discourses, I am not neglecting the crucial work that has been done in the field of early childhood care and education that presents infants and toddlers as capable, participatory subjects (e.g. Cheeseman, 2017; Cooper and Quiñones, 2022; Recchia and Fincham, 2019). What I do aim to do here is illustrate the prevalence of notions of the toddler as “barbaric” and the ways these ingrained images and understandings influence practice, in order to continue to challenge these dominating perspectives in our work as teachers, scholars, and teacher educators—even as we are constantly working to take up more critical perspectives on care and education.

In this article, I will focus on the ways certain constructions of “toddler” are produced and reproduced and how attending to practices of signification both destabilizes taken-for-granted understandings and opens spaces for resignification (Butler, 1993) of “toddler.” I begin by identifying the ways in which “toddler” has become signified as “barbaric” through societal, developmental, and educational discourse. In line with the call for this special issue, I choose to focus on the ways this aspect of toddler subjectivity has been constructed as it is taken up widely in social understandings and also as it informs discourses on teaching. Then, drawing on narrative, self-reflexive data, I identify and deconstruct mundane, daily teaching practices to reveal how my practices are both produced by and work to reproduce these limiting discourses of toddlerhood through the constant control of children’s bodies, ideas, and identities (Cannella, 1997). Resulting from these processes of deconstruction and resignification, I demonstrate shifts in perspective from progress-driven developmental discourses to seeing toddlers as agentic in intra-action with the material world (Barad, 2007). All this leads to inviting new materialist and posthuman approaches (Braidotti, 2011, 2013; Hultman and Lenz Taguchi, 2010; MacRae, 2012, 2020) as alternatives in practice and the ways we might think about very young children’s subjectivities and knowledges, which only becomes possible when repeatedly rendered images of “toddler” are disrupted and resisted.

All hail the toddler: Signification through repeated renderings

Even while still in the womb, a child is “hailed” into a gender identity when the technician announces, “it’s a girl!” invoking a performative process that “constitute[s] the materiality of bodies” through the act of naming (Butler, 1993: xii). Performativity, according to Butler (1993), is not simply the act by which a subject brings into being what is named, but, rather, the process of the reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it seeks to regulate. The hail, thus, does not name a fixed and stable self but sets off a process of becoming through identification and disidentification with what is desired (O’Loughlin, 2009). As demonstrated in classroom studies on transition and belonging in my toddler classroom, when children join, teachers immediately hail them as “toddler” and expect that they establish belonging with the “toddler room” (Fincham and Fellner, 2016; McDevitt and Recchia, 2022). Looking at this act of naming performatively, I see how we teachers speak the child into a specific developmental subjectivity through repetitive namings. Identifying children in this way, without the possibility of disidentification, subjects them fully to discursive practices (Butler, as cited in O’Loughlin, 2009). Thus, the “toddler,” once named, becomes subjected to discourses that inscribe specific abilities and characteristics, or lack thereof, as the “toddler” is conceived through repeated renderings of images of the very young child as “barbaric.”

Consider the telling scene from the Pixar animated film, Toy Story 3 (Unkrich, 2010) where the toys meet their fate in a toddler classroom after being donated to a daycare. There, they are overtaken by “barbaric” toddlers (crying, screaming, running, falling) in a film scene edited and scored to feel like a horror movie. Like in political cartoons, mainstream images of “toddler” like this tend to serve a humorous purpose in the mass media. Other pervasive examples are seen in the renderings of “toddler” on social media, videos often posted by parents for entertainment. Additionally, a simple Google search reveals through auto-fill suggestions that toddlers are overwhelmingly considered to be: aholes, drunk adults, toxic, annoying, narcissists, the worst. Young children’s emotions and actions are consumed as humor. The dehumanization and disrespect of toddlers in media renderings serves to signify this time of life as pre-human, pre-understanding, and as such, pre-deserving of respect.

Looking at popular child development texts, these larger societal views are not so surprising. Along with agreement in characteristic milestones of development during the toddler years, developmental texts share a language of toddlerhood: “challenging,” “egotistical,” “limited,” “simple,” and “difficult” (Fogel, 2014; Trawick-Smith, 2018). These perspectives seem to have been solidified out of the surge of research in the 1980s when the novelty of observing toddlers in group settings drew the empirical gaze to peer relations and behaviors of conflict (e.g. Brenner and Mueller, 1982; Hay and Ross, 1982). While more perspectives are present in the literature today (e.g. Cooper and Quiñones, 2022; Løkken, 2009), many studies continue to focus on the “challenging” aspects of toddler development (e.g. Clarke et al., 2019; Gloeckler and Cassell, 2012), limiting views on what is possible for being “toddler” and prescribing this time of development as requiring adult intervention.

Positioned as well with/in the Capitalocene, possible childhoods are inextricably linked to future adulthoods where this intervention is desired early to prepare children for future schooling and thus, future work to further industry (Ailwood, 2004; Theil, 2020). Recently, Moss and Roberts-Holmes (2022) have attended to the effects of neoliberalism on early childhood. Drawing on Brown’s work, they detail the ideal neoliberal subject, an “economic being” who is “self-interested and competitive, independent and self-reliant” (p. 2). Toddlers may not often be considered in this sense, but the neoliberal influence on early childhood education positions them as just that, and thus, positions teachers as the ones to shape them toward this ideal “consumer.” As such, neoliberalism has successfully corroborated the developmental image of the young child as “deficient and needing to be readied to become. . . human capital” (p. 2).

Methods in practice: Self-reflexive narrative teacher research

This work draws on data and analytic writing from a larger study that engaged feminist poststructural methodologies (Pillow, 2003) as teacher research which questions presumed transparent and fully accessible versions of “experience” as the way to “knowing” (Scott, 1991). In my work, I reconsider the meaning of “experience” in the classroom to be an “active process of engaging with the tensions” (Britzman, 1992: 42) as the subjectivities of myself and others intersect and are constructed in a shared classroom space, continuously being constituted and reconstituted in and by dominant discourses that affect as well as construct particular “contexts” and not others. This study then involved deep interrogation of my practice and beliefs around teaching young children, confronting how dominating ways of being “teacher” limit the possibilities for practice and how young children are seen and constructed. At the time of this study, there were 11 toddlers in the classroom ranging from 18 months to almost 3 years old (represented in data with pseudonyms). Situated in a university affiliated center in a large Northeastern US city, the children reflected the diversity of the university, which is broad in linguistic and cultural differences but limited in representations of race and socioeconomic levels. Across the center, teachers engage an approach to curriculum that is emergent, play-based, and child-centered, prioritizing long periods of free play.

Situated amidst 15 years of teaching infants and toddlers, I constructed data over the course of 3 months that included narrative journals, daily written and photo documentation, and fixed-video recordings that served as self-observations of my teaching, along with ongoing layered reflexive narrative analysis. The larger study inquired into the process of locating and interrupting dominant discourses around “toddler” and “toddler teacher” in my daily practice, and further, how these efforts led to complicating my understandings and enactments of teaching practice. As data was generated from practice, I determined encounters to become data when I was spurred by ontological (MacLure et al., 2010) and epistemological shudders (Giugni, 2006), sensing moments of destabilization in my habitual ways of knowing and being. Using a multi-layered approach to the crafting and analysis of tangible (written and visual) reflexive data, I draw on Holbrook and Pourchier’s (2014) use of collage as analysis to connect data to theory and literature in order to construct “visible traces” of my thinking and feeling with the data. Along with digital collage, I utilize reflexive and autobiographical writing as modes of inquiry (Richardson and St. Pierre, 2005; Smith and Watson, 2010) to engage with an ongoing “fragmentation of knowing” (Giugni, 2006: 101) that then opens spaces for alternative ways of knowing and doing in teaching and research. Analysis thus is ongoing and intertwined with/as the data itself.

For this special issue, I return to this data to more specifically explore questions around the ways I see “toddler” being signified and resignified through repetitions of daily practice (Butler, 1990). In what ways does my teaching practice serve to reproduce notions of the toddler as “barbaric”? And further, through engaging in this deconstructive examination of my practice, what alternative practices and theoretical frames emerge that seek to challenge pervasive, deficit-based notions of toddler? The remaining sections of this article engage these questions as I theorize with and alongside my data in efforts to resignify classroom subjectivities.

Resignifying “Toddler” and “Teacher” through disruptions of practice

Drawing on Butler’s (1990) conceptualization of agency amidst oppressive discursive structures, I focused data around points of rupture in the repetition of daily practices which, in turn, opened possibilities for resignification. Through this act of bringing discursive power into question “agency is produced within the possibilities of reconfiguring the ‘I’” (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012: 83) as it is constituted through language. In the following sections, I present ways of engaging with some of these moments of disruption as I challenge discourses that establish toddlers as “egocentric,” “barbaric,” and “unknowing.” Working with the data, I explored moments where I saw my practices reproducing these discourses, in the ways I engaged in play and conversation as well as the ways I saw my body in relation with toddler bodies in photos and video. Looking across written and visual data, I compiled narratives and collage to make new sense of my teaching practices as tools for signification and resignification of classroom subjectivities.

I utilize Butler’s (1990) theory of performativity in my analysis of the effects of discursive power on normative and unconscious performances of identities, as demonstrated in my actions as “teacher” and perceptions of “toddler” that frame my practice. Through these disruptions, I then consider a subject that is not determinately produced through discourse but rather distinguish the body as a surface of signification and resignification, as shaped by the possibilities allotted by dominant discourses (Butler, 1993) and, further, materiality (Barad, 2007). Thus, through disruptions and shifts in my teaching practices and pedagogical gaze, I not only work to resignify “toddler” but “teacher” as well. The subsections to follow illustrate this process that starts with disrupting practice as a way to notice the (re)production of subjectivities through discourse and bodily relations, which, in turn opens spaces for alternative theorizations and understandings of “toddler” in a classroom space.

Disrupting (re)productions of the emotional, egocentric toddler

While more and more literature is appearing that accounts for toddlers’ abilities to relate to and care for others (e.g. Cooper and Quiñones, 2022; Spinrad and Gal, 2018), a toddler classroom is likely to echo with shouts of “mine!” as conflicts over objects abound, reinforcing notions that strong emotional responses and egocentricity are main developmental traits at this age (Wynn et al., 2018), traits that coincide with the images of a “barbaric” toddler. In practice, I saw how these notions of “toddler” were reproduced as my interpretations of children’s emotions diminished what they were trying to express. For instance, in interpretive transcriptions of classroom video I noted:

Shawn doesn’t get his way. He wails, we [teachers] all ignore him.

Kylee does a solid fake cry. Me: “I almost believe you, Kylee.”

In these moments and many others, I easily brushed off the children’s emotional expression and moved on, signifying “toddler” as unnecessarily emotional and not to be taken seriously.

Seeing toddlers as performative (Butler, 1990) disrupts the idea that egocentrism is the “essence” of toddlerhood, bringing awareness to the complex process of signification and resignification that occurs through the repetition and ritual of practices that sustain this discourse. These daily practices in repetition, such as my responses to conflict, work to naturalize the idea of “toddler” as overly emotional and egocentric. When I sat with children’s expressions of possession in my data, I became more aware of my own frustrations with these behaviors. In my journal writing, I documented occurrences like everyone just kept taking everything while shouting “mine!,” and I interpreted possessive expressions to be ridiculous when I could not make sense of the child’s desire for a specific object. My interpretation of these actions read as toddlers just “being egocentric,” and when left unquestioned, such interpretations work to reproduce the inscription of this identity on children’s bodies.

Continuing to examine my practice as performative, light is shed on how teachers are subjected to these discourses about toddlers and how those discourses are continuously reproduced through our interpretations of and responses to children’s actions. In efforts to support children’s social and communicative development, I instinctively instruct children to “use your words” and supplement their physical expressions with the language of conflict: “no. . . mine. . . I’m using that.” And yet, I question when these practices are actually taken up by the children, such as in this excerpt from classroom documentation:

Sophia was pushing a baby in a stroller and stopped to take a phone call on her “iPhone” that was also in the stroller. Georgia came near with a baby and Sophia preemptively shouted, “No, my stroller! Wait turn.” Georgia offered a solution and told Sophia she would just carry the baby, but Sophia repeated that Georgia could “wait. . . turn,” this time in a calmer but still stern voice, with one hand on Georgia’s shoulder.

Rather than commending Sophia for using language to solve her problems here, I was struck by her initial defensiveness over the stroller when another child entered her play. I further wonder how teaching practices that encourage the speaking of “mine” in turn position toddlers with this drive to claim and protect their property. Are we then just contributing to the sustenance of these deficit-driven discourses of toddlerhood? What if these concepts of egocentrism and uncontrolled emotions are seen as aspects of subjectivity produced and reproduced through our actions as teachers, rather than just assumed traits of toddlerhood? As toddlers continue to be perceived with these traits that can manifest as out-of-control-ness, discourses of schooling then position teachers as important players in the process of “controlling” the body (Jones, 2013).

Inscribing controlled identities

Discourses of schooling have served to define children as “those who must be covertly or overtly controlled, disciplined either by internalized regulatory powers or physical constraint” (Cannella, 1997: 142). Physical control of young children’s bodies is accepted practice in early care and education settings, as regulatory and developmental discourses reproduce taken-for-granted practices of handling and surveilling children’s bodies under the guise of classroom management and caregiving (Leavitt, 1994). Attending to visual data in photos and videos, I quickly noticed the amount of time spent with my hands on children’s bodies. Seeking to complicate these practices of physical handling, I noted more than 50 moments where my hands were on a child’s body—guiding, moving, caressing, hugging, holding back, scooping up, etc. I was disturbed at the ease at which I do this as a teacher and began to examine the tensions I felt as these acts so often go left unquestioned and are considered valid in the name of children’s presumed needs.

Whether my teacher hands were giving care or working to make a child compliant, these are teaching methods that perpetuate discourses of control (Millei, 2005). Moments of handling were also recounted in journal data as I sat with tensions of my own actions. On more than one occasion, I wrote about scenarios similar to these:

I ended up getting Max to his cubby and then wrestling him to the ground to get his coat on because he couldn’t/wouldn’t stand up or stay still long enough for me to actually get him dressed.

. . . picking him up and dragging him kicking and screaming is often the norm.

Seeing the body as a “practical surface for communicating identity” (Zembylas, 2003: 229), examining these methods of my teaching practice, I turn my awareness now to what these practices inscribe on and in relation to others’ bodies. Exploring touch and the interaction of bodies beyond the management and discipline aligned with dominant perspectives of toddlers’ as in need of being controlled, the practices that reproduce these discourses come to light as I also work to resist these images of toddler.

One way I explored this shift was in children’s acts of resistance to my controlling hands, behaviors that could easily be signified “barbaric” in relation to the adult seeking control. In one encounter on video, I noted a toddler communicating her dissent and discomfort with my touch, which attempts to restrain her movement with a firm grip on both of her hands. She grimaces and tries to pull away from my attempts at assisting in a conflict. In another filmed encounter, I tuned in to a different toddlers’ multiple attempts at dissent as I negotiated with him to use the bathroom, each of us gripping one end of a stroller he refused to give up, bringing his body to lie on the ground as he maintained his grip. Revisiting and slowing down this moment on video, I was able to notice his grip on the stroller, the purposeful turning away of his gaze, and a reluctant glance over his shoulder as I finally led him away, details of a child’s communication that I did not attend to as teacher in this moment. These after-the-fact noticings serve as disruptions, urging me to establish practices that resignify understandings of “toddler” in such interactions, not as a body that needs to be controlled, managed, and coerced but as a person with their own ideas and ways of knowing who is striving to be heard.

Toddlers as distinctly knowing

The perspective of toddlers as barbaric relies on developmental goals of adulthood, and such adultism positions them as unknowing and in need of others’ (i.e. adult) knowledge, as I have demonstrated thus far through practices of emotional and physical control. But, what if we instead view toddlers’ (and children generally) as ontologically and epistemologically distinct from adults, with their own complex ways of being and knowing (Templeton and Moffett, 2019)? The position of teacher is a challenging one from which to alter a belief in hierarchical knowledge. As illustrated in the following response to photo documentation of a book reading with a group of toddlers, I often interpret the children’s experience in line with notions of teaching as a unidirectional transfer:

I am often in the position of knowledge. The kids look at me with wide eyes, waiting for my response or waiting for me to share information with them about the book in front of us.

While there is no need to completely throw out the idea that we, as adult teachers, have knowledge to impart on children, what is worthy of dismantling here is the idea that adults inherently have a monopoly on classroom knowledge. In the next sections, I explore some of the openings for alternative theoretical framings and practices that I have been drawn to through practices of deconstruction and disruption.

Embracing nomadic thought with toddlers

Practices of intervention, that are central to the role of teacher, perpetuate the positioning of children as less able and “not yet important enough (stated as mature, competent, advanced cognitively, experienced) to be heard on their own” (Cannella, 1997: 152). Noticing my attempts at intervening for the sake of introducing knowledge, I worked to let go of my assumptions about what I should “teach” the children and instead sought to focus on what and how the toddlers already know. For example, sitting with two toddlers who were working at removing and replacing paper money in a wallet, I felt the urge to guide them toward play about shopping with money. I only stopped myself because of an assumption that they may not be “ready” for that knowledge yet, but then went on to question my perception that I was “dumbing down” my own knowledge to better engage on their level, as noted in journal data. A hierarchical perspective suggests this scene as a play-based “teachable moment,” however, children are always already engaging in multiple spaces of knowing, thus requiring a multiplicity of knowledges in our interactions as teachers. In this example then, might I maintain my established understanding of money, while also situating that knowledge alongside political and economic discourses and critiques, all while participating in the children’s knowing of how these pieces of paper can be manipulated in and out of containment as well as other knowledges I may not even be privy to?

Theorizing classroom knowledges with nomadic thought (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) allows a shift away from the fixed knowledge of an individual child and toward a view of knowledge as emergent and becoming, in a process of entanglement with bodies, materials, ideas, and environments (Clark, 2012). Operating beyond the poststructural discursively constituted subject, I consider Braidotti’s (2013) posthuman nomadic subject that is “materialist and vitalist, embodied and embedded” (p. 188) as I bring this lens to my analysis of shared knowledge moments with toddlers. Engaging with children in the classroom as nomadic subjects, I join them in thinking that is not sedentary but moves through time and space, inhabiting multiple places at once and never needing to settle. In this space of thought that invokes an “affective opening-out” (Braidotti, 2013: 166), “otherwise unlikely encounters and unsuspected sources of interaction experience and knowledge” are invited (Braidotti, 2011: 27).

In this example, while reading a board book that was a toddler-ized version of the story of Pandora, Molly stopped me to ask what Pandora’s mom’s name was. I recalled this moment in journal data:

At first I said I didn’t know and was going to leave it at that, ready to finish the book and move on to another activity. But then I reminded myself that this set of books was based on Greek mythology and that Pandora did in fact have a mom. I momentarily traveled back to my own childhood and my interest in Greek gods and mythology. Now sparked by my own curiosity as well, I took out my phone and suggested we ask Google. Molly asked “what’s Google?” I explained that Google was a search engine and we could ask it what Pandora’s mom’s name was. I looked it up and told her it was Athena. Molly was intrigued and repeated the name a few times at different pacings, seeming to want to get the feel of it in her mouth.

Both myself and Molly here as nomadic subjects are inhabiting spaces across the complex, nonlinear system of posthuman time (Braidotti, 2013) as I bring Molly into my affective return to childhood or as she lingers in the affective resonance of her audible repetitions of “Athena.” Had I not taken this momentary time shift, I likely would have brushed off her questioning, falling back on discourses that diminish young children’s capacities for understanding.

In another conversation with Molly, who like other precociously verbal toddlers asked “hard” questions, assumptions around children’s knowledge intersected with discourses of childhood “innocence.” While many adults hold assumptions that children should be “protected” from “big” ideas like death, racism, or sexuality for instance, the idea of innocence itself is socially, historically, and racially constructed (Dumas and Nelson, 2016). In many contexts, including my own classroom, ingrained notions of children’s “innocence” often function to silence adults in conversations with children, thus silencing children’s knowledges. The following conversation arose with Molly 1 day in the bathroom and I recreated it in journal data:

Molly:

What’s your dad’s name?

Me:

I don’t have a dad.

Molly:

Why?

Me:

He died.

Molly:

You just live with your mom?

Me:

No, my mom lives far away. I live with my husband.

Molly:

What’s your husband’s name?

After I told her, she asked one last question, Is that your dad?, before going off to play. I documented this conversation because I remembered my discomfort in the moment as I decided to expose a bit more about my life to a toddler. Other times I would have likely responded with a name, either of my late father or stepdad who came into my life when I was an adult, but when I think about the idea of “dad” neither of these responses feel accurate as I was raised by my mother. When it comes to personal knowledge that we may feel the need to keep from children, entering this seemingly forbidden knowledge space feels dangerous.

Had I not chosen to reveal information about myself in this way, the conversation would probably have gone along a much more fixed, expected route and I would not have been left lingering in my curiosity about how she was making sense of the answers she was seeking. Resisting dominant perspectives on children’s knowledge and entering these spaces as nomadic subjects, we allow for unlikely encounters (Braidotti, 2013) where children are viewed with capacity to demonstrate their knowledge and direct their own inquiry, outside the confines of adult-driven perspectives.

Knowing of/through the body and material

Thinking about knowledge affectively and across time and space, resisting practices that assume to know a fixed child subject can lead to alternate understandings of the ways we (both teachers and toddlers) know. Watching a toddler traversing large holes and piles of sand, I noted in my journal how

I felt in my own body what that balancing might feel like. . . and recalled my own childhood and how pleasurable these tests of physicality were.

The provocation of this child’s performance of knowing with their body and sand informed the (re)formation of my own subject, “affected by something outside itself, understood as prior, [activating] and [informing] the subject that I am” (Butler, 2015: 1). This moment of affective memory caught me by surprise and set in motion a shift in how I was attending to children’s intra-actions with the material world (Barad, 2007). In my observations of children, I was no longer seeking to describe just their learning and developmental skills, as documentation is often understood, I was starting to think about what I can learn from the child and this material (Hultman and Lenz Taguchi, 2010; MacRae, 2020). What is happening to me, the child, and the material in intra-action? What knowledges are at play in these encounters? And, what may need to be left unknown?

Widely accepted discourses of teaching in early childhood position the teacher as a play facilitator and scaffolder of skills and development, intervening to support pretend play skills in the name of cognitive development (Russ, 2016). This focus has established norms for “pretend” play and teachers have expectations of what play should look like. In “play-based” curriculum, children’s play is thus coopted as a space for intervention (Goodley and Runswick-Cole, 2010), where the “teaching” can occur, like when a child takes up a teapot and I quickly interfere with a cup to ask for tea (excerpted from journal data). What if we instead view young children’s play as fantastical, surreal, and unimaginable, open to individual and affective engagement just as one might with a Salvador Dalí painting. Approaching children’s play as unknowable and endlessly interpretable, our sense-making attempts stretch beyond the developmental language of skills and concepts, instead engaging with our own imaginings of what children are feeling and thinking, considering what other knowledges we can connect to in the moments we observe, or dreaming of new possibilities in thought as we see something previously unknowable in our shared intra-actions and imaginary moments (Fincham, forthcoming).

I engage further with these ideas here in the context of the commonly observed caregiving play of toddlers. Drawing on MacRae’s (2012) work highlighting the agentic force of a doll in a preschool classroom, I turn my focus to the material baby doll in my observation of one toddler who

stood in front of the mirror and looked at herself while she bounced with the baby. She moved quite slowly up and down with smooth movement as she looked at the reflection of herself and the baby.

A developmental interpretation would suggest the child is simply reenacting learned adult behavior they have observed. But, thinking instead about knowledges that are being passed between the toddler and the baby doll in this moment (Hultman and Lenz Taguchi, 2010), my curiosity goes to embodied knowledges and “the ways a body comes to know, make sense of, and perform phenomena” (Theil, 2020: 75). What bodily knowledges and memories might this child be bringing to her play? What does this act of picking up a doll provoke in the child? Is this play even “pretend”? Blurring the lines between pretend and reality in turn elevates young children’s knowledge as the adult-gaze too often discounts a child’s pretend world. A toddler is not just learning to pretend play their reality, which is often the stage of play perceived at this age, but they are performing and generating their knowledges through embodied relations with materials.

Possibilities in welcoming unruliness with/in the Capitalocene

Capitalism supplies the network of power relations that produce knowledge, and thus the subjectivities of teachers and young children. Returning to the imagery of the “barbaric” toddler, it is easy to see how this identity marker is not compatible with neoliberalist, capitalist expectations of schooling that aim to produce docile bodies (Foucault, 1977; Jones, 2013) primed to contribute to the future of industry and the economy with their human capital (Ailwood, 2004; Moss and Roberts-Holmes, 2022). Combined images of the young child serve to regulate the role of teacher, constituting the early childhood teacher as an interventionist and a technician, driven by discourses of behavioral regulation and the idealized future student-worker-consumer. The discourses and knowledges that constrain early childhood serve to construct a teacher who is a “self-regulating professional,” subject to a dual accountability—to the self but ultimately to society (Osgood, 2010). In my toddler classroom, this was evidenced in practices that intervene, control, and aim to “teach” about the ways of the world, practices that perpetually reproduce the assumed “toddler” as challenging, egocentric, and not-yet-human. In order to disrupt these established ways of being, teaching practices that involve critical self-reflexivity bring awareness to the role teachers play in sustaining and reproducing discourses feeding hyper-capitalism in the classroom, and thus, lead to openings for imagining other ways of teaching and being “toddler.”

By disrupting and reframing teaching practices, teachers can contribute to the resignification of “toddler” within and against the phenomenon of capitalism as it “makes and remakes material bodies. . . while at the same time being made and remade through discursive formations” (Theil, 2020: 71–72). Those “barbaric” and “unknowing” acts of toddlers might then be resignified as desired and productive “unruliness” on the edges of capitalism (Tsing, 2015). For teachers, the act of noticing anew the unruly bodily acts of toddlers can jumpstart the process of disrupting our everyday practices in early childhood that draw on an embodied knowledge of the capitalist structures that have established schooling (Theil, 2020). Embracing the “barbaric” perhaps as a welcome unruliness, the questions of practice would no longer be primarily about how to control and how to understand, but rather what we might leave alone in order to privilege young children’s contributions as knowing subjects, which they are always already. The subjectivities of teacher also become resignified as possibilities arise in our efforts to not know and not tame toddlers’ minds and bodies as we also turn this gaze on the materiality of classroom spaces.

This work is not prescriptive; there is no easy step-by-step process for disruption and resignification. And, it is an enormous ask of teachers to let go, to enter spaces of uncertainty and vulnerability as one begins to question practices and beliefs that are so ingrained. Pillow (2003) describes this work as “uncomfortable reflexivity” as it destabilizes knowledge and subjectivity. It is not just teachers, but researchers and teacher educators who must embrace and expose the discomfort of making the familiar unfamiliar. As teachers, we have been socialized into a role that positions us as the more knowledgeable expert, so stepping into these spaces of unknowing feels dangerous. I return often to the idea of teaching as “the opportunity for getting lost” (Block, 1998: 328) as teachers can become that nomadic subject finding possibility and potential at the edges. This work is not about throwing out what we know and what we do as teachers, but rather, engaging an ethical practice where we question, challenge, and exist in this process of disruption as a way to resignification, where “a deeply ethical relation between bodies” in classrooms will ensue (Clark, 2012: 138).

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Emmanuelle N Fincham is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at Western Washington University. Building on over 15 years of teaching infants and toddlers, her work employs critical narrative practitioner research as a way to reconceptualize understandings of practice, play, and young children’s development and ways of knowing.

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