Canada

‘What Matters in Early Childhood Studies Now’ is a three-day colloquium that will be held online on January 27, January 29, & February 1, 2022. Conceived as an open, collaborative and democratic space, this event welcomes panelists, students, early childhood educators, pedagogists, researchers, advocates, policy makers and community members working with and for children across disciplines, paradigms and contexts. It invites responding to -- and thinking with—this question: What matters in early childhood studies now?

Inspired by Liboiron (2020) this event intends to generate knowledge in early childhood studies differently and collaboratively. It seeks to challenge the traditional relationships and hierarchies that often exist between audience and presenters and instead open up a meaningful space of reciprocity for the ‘exchanging’ of ideas and experiences in early childhood studies. 

Registration link HERE

Program

Please join us in dialogue with Fikile Nxumalo (Canada), Dylan Yamada Rice (United Kingdom), Spyros Spyrou (Cyprus), Almina Pardhan (Pakistan), Jóhanna Einarsdottir (Iceland), Junlei Li (United States),  Cristina Delgado Vintimilla (Canada), Walter Omar Kohan (Brazil) and Liselott Mariett Olsson (Sweden). This curation of panels and pairing of panelists who approach their work from various perspectives or paradigms is intended to activate a generative engagement with tensions and ideas that explores the ways early childhood research, advocacy, practice, and knowledge are active in the world and its making. The panelists will engage in dialogue about the following topics:

• Orienting to children’s 21st-century inheritances in order to activate ‘otherwise’ futures, 
• Acknowledging a diversity of presents, situating ECEC in the ‘now’  
• Bridging as worlding - connecting past, present and future to collectively respond through interdisciplinary co-labouring

Exchanging

Prior to the colloquium with panelists, registered audience members will be invited to come together on December 8th, 2021 at 3:00 pm PST for a pre-colloquium gathering hosted on Zoom. In preparation for such gathering, participants will be invited to read and engage with methods from Liboiron's (2020) Exchanging. With that inspiration they will be invited to come together to generate ideas, questions, and curiosities to prepare for the panel conversations that will happen during the colloquium. This preparatory gathering will be an opportunity to collaborate and think deeper about:

• What forms of knowing and being does engaging with reciprocity make possible?
• What might these different ways of doing/relating activate in early childhood conferences? 
• Might we be able to exchange ideas, practices, theories or experiences differently?

The colloquium is organized by The Collective, a group of graduate students, educators, researchers and advocates with a shared interest in early childhood studies, in collaboration with the Canadian Association for Young Children (CAYC),  Early Childhood Educators of British Columbia (ECEBC),  Brock University Child and Youth Studies Department,  Ryerson University School of Early Childhood Graduate Studies Program, and the Centre for Childhood Studies at Capilano University.