Reframing the Everyday in Early Childhood Pedagogy: Conceptualising the Mundane

Despite vast possible differences across geographic locations, cultural practices, community values, and curricular priorities, there are everyday events that are intimately familiar in the context of early childhood care and education centres. By attending to the daily events that are often overlooked and considerably under-theorized, this insightful text highlights the complexity of the everyday in early childhood settings. Contributions to this edited collection are organized to follow the chronology of a school day; each chapter draws upon post-foundational theories and empirical qualitative data in order to (re)examine a familiar routine within an early years centre, such as walking down the hallway, eating a snack, napping, or changing one’s clothing. The authors argue for a mundane early childhood praxis that attends to the pedagogical possibilities within the seemingly unremarkable and highlights its importance, especially during what are understood to be unprecedented times. This book will be of interest to advanced practitioners, graduate students, and scholars, and for use in courses in early childhood education, childhood studies, and educational foundations.

Table of Contents:
1. Unlocking/Lights On: Attending to the every/day 2. Welcoming: Acts of (be)coming together 3. Washing up: Handwashing as an embodied practice in preschool bathrooms 4. Snacktime: The “both/and” of an in-between praxis 5. (Un)dressing: An ethical consideration of children’s participation in dressing to be outside 6. Queueing and waiting: Reconceptualizing the still, silent line 7. Moving through the hallway: More-than-human relations in liminal spaces 8. Going outside - going inside: Negotiating cultural complexities and tensions 9. Eating lunch: Toddlers’ lunchtime entanglements 10. Toileting: Entanglements of curriculum and care in the toddler classroom 11. Sleeping and Rest: Encounters with sleep/time 12. Tidying up: Rethinking “ryddetid” as democratic practices in early childhood institutions 13. Saying good-bye: Theorising fleeting disconnections 14. Locking up/Lights Off: Envisioning a mundane early childhood praxis

About the Author :
Casey Y. Myers is Co-founder of Watershed Early Years. An award-winning scholar, her professional interests include posthumanism, new materialism, and post-qualitative inquiry in relation to children’s everyday lives in school, as well as children’s ethical participation in community-based research. Kylie Smith is Professor of Early Childhood Studies at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on pedagogies for social justice in early childhood. Kylie draws on participatory research methods and feminist theories to research and learn with children, families, teachers, and communities Rochelle L. Hostler is Co-founder of Watershed Early Years. Her professional interests include progressive social-constructivist early childhood education, critical interrogation of curriculum and pedagogy, and research involving children’s school life. Marek Tesar is Head of School and Associate Dean International at the University of Auckland. He is also the director of the Centre for Global Childhoods. His scholarship focuses on early childhood education and childhood studies in both New Zealand and cross-country contexts.

Review :
This book provokes us to think more deeply about an important but neglected aspect of early childhood centres -- every/day moments in the lives of children attending these settings. Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives, the book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of these centres and the significance of these moments. Arguing for a ‘mundane early childhood praxis’, the contributors show that such praxis is anything but mundane, being impactful and complex, and involving thoughtful pedagogy and relational ethics. Emeritus Professor Peter Moss, Thomas Coram Research Unit, UCL Institute of Education Having done immersive ethnographic work in early childhood contexts, I appreciated how this book decenters the official curriculum and foregrounds the implicit or hidden curricula of daily life in early childhood classrooms, with chapters organized around the flow of typical daily routines and rituals. Authors make a compelling case for a deeper consideration of the taken for granted and "mundane" routines that occur alongside enactments of explicit or official curriculum. Nuanced analyses and well theorised reflections in each chapter evoke a sense of "making the familiar strange" to gain insights into the extraordinary meaning making of the ordinary by young children, their teachers, families, and their physical environment. Readers come to understand ways in which often invisible routines reflect power, politics, play, and possibilities through theories -- including posthuman, spatial, Black Feminist, post-foundational, and new materialisms. Emeritus Professor Beth Blue Swadener, School of Social Transformation, Arizona State University The heartbeat can create a co-regulation and profound body-dialogue between parent and newborn. Similarly, here, I found myself in close relationship, in rhythm, inside of this writing—as a testament to daily, lived experiences. Myers, Smith, Hostler and Tesar develop an air of expectancy for the reader to pick the words up while living with/in the ordinary moments of daily life. It is a marvelous and profound experience to crack open the kernels of time by living between them in moments of deep thought and in remembrances of my own relational perceptions in schools; all while reading and turning over these lovely and thought-provoking pages in my mind! Professor Will Parnell, Early Childhood Education and Curriculum & Instruction, Portland State University