Marek Tesar

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Verified

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• PhD
• Dean and Professor of Education at University of Melbourne

Strangers, Gods, and monsters are all names for the experience of alterity and otherness within and amongst us. We need monsters in our lives. In this paper we use philosophy as a method to explore language, developmental and cultural instabilities, and terrifying (and discursive) monstrosity located within children's literature and childhood conte...

In this article, we explore the “vibrancy of matter” and “things” in early childhood education. We use Bennett’s and others’ ideas on the political ecology of place in a philosophical examination of vibrant entanglements of “things,” “thing-hoods,” and childhoods. We work with Bennett’s challenge to shift from thinking solely about “think-power” to...

This article argues that the denial of development can be a productive space and a liberating time for children in the current outcomes-driven times. The author offers an alternative reading of childhood, considering children’s development differently through various philosophical theorizations of events, which emerge through utilizing philosophy a...

This collaborative article explores child-centredness as a theoretical and methodological concept by asking what it means to centre children in research. The collaborative format offers a heterogeneity of voices on the concept as the contributing authors write, critically and creatively, from a range of different interdisciplinary research perspect...

The idea of home is a predominant concept and experience in the development of contemporary early childhood care and education philosophies and approaches. That predominance is evident in curriculum strategies and approaches, materials and resources, activities and lessons and interactions, and in the architecture and design of the physical spaces...

This article presents the epistemological complexity inherent in the roll out of an international project on Disaster and Risk Reduction, and consequently about science education in the Indigenous context of Turkana County in Kenya. After an introduction that explains the current state of Disaster and Risk Reduction, the paper focuses on the ‘Paper...

This chapter is a summary of philosophy, theory, and practice arising from collective writing experiments conducted between 2016 and 2022 in the community associated with the Editors’ Collective and more than 20 scholarly journals. The main body of the chapter summarises the community’s insights into the many faces of collective writing. Appendix 1...

Despite the reservations of many, digital spaces are useful and are here to stay. Most of us have witnessed that usefulness in action over the last two years, since the outbreak of COVID-19, and many of us will witness the greater penetration of the digital space into our individual lives as vaccine passports, for instance, become a reality. It see...

This article troubles themes of equity, inclusion and belonging for early childhood teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand. The authors argue that relationships between teachers matter and, in pursuit of transformative teaching praxis, can be considered as a site for restorative justice, leading to increased solidarity and collective action. While much d...

This collective piece explores the philosophical, ontological, and epistemic potentials of analyzing the relations between childhood and time, proposing thought experiments and fieldwork analyses that release childhood from a linear temporality toward (modern) adulthood. Each experiment originating from the authors’ distinct scholarly positionings...

The special topic editors develop some preliminary ponderings on visual ethics, setting the stage for further contributions to this topic.

This book argues that developmental approaches to observation in childhood pedagogy are limiting, restrictive, and present social justice dilemmas. This book unsettles, dismantles, and reimagines observation, proposing new postdevelopmental theories and modes of inquiry for educators. Written by leading scholars based in Australia, Canada, Finland,...

This collective writing project considers the central issue of how we account for, understand, and talk about, the professional work of care in early childhood education. As an international collective, we stake out some of the messiness, the specificities and complexities of care in early childhood education. Each scholar explores the issue of for...

"This collection, titled ‘Teaching in the Age of Covid-19—The New Normal’, is a collection of short testimonies and workspace photographs submitted in the first half of 2022. In numbers, the collection consists of 67 textual testimonies and 65 workspace photographs submitted by 69 authors from 19 countries: USA (13), New Zealand (8), India (7), Swe...

This paper is a summary of philosophy, theory, and practice arising from collective writing experiments conducted between 2016 and 2022 in the community associated with the Editors’ Collective and more than 20 scholarly journals. The main body of the paper summarises the community’s insights into the many faces of collective writing. Appendix 1 pre...

【New Issue Alert from ECNU Review of Education】Our June special issue guest edited by Weipeng Yang, Marek Tesar and Hui Li is now out! To get new insights into early childhood experiences and curriculum development in diverse cultural contexts within a rapidly globalizing world, please check out this special issue here: https://journals.sagepub.com...

This paper interrogates the discourses of stunting in Indonesia and its links to early childhood education. Here, stunting is analysed via Foucault's work, with data stemming from a long‐term ethnography study and analysis of relevant policy documents in Indonesia. We argue the discourses of stunting have been regulating children, teachers and pare...

This Special Issue includes a collection of studies examining the role of culture and context in shaping childhood experience and curriculum. This Special Issue aims to explicitly acknowledge that, first, culture and the value system it provides has never stayed away from us. Second, social change and cultural collisions in the globalized world res...

This collective writing project considers the central issue of how we account for, understand, and talk about, the professional work of care in early childhood education. As an international collective, we stake out some of the messiness, the specificities and complexities of care in early childhood education. Each scholar explores the issue of for...

This book is now available through Open Access.

Across the globe the work of early childhood educators, who are predominantly women, is misunderstood, underpaid and undervalued. Perspectives on early childhood educators are highly contentious: are they child development experts, oppressed workers, maternal substitutes, technicians, facilitators of early learning, or something else? This volume f...

Who is a child and what is childhood? These are not easy questions to address, yet they are questions that every adult could potentially answer. Every adult was once a child and we all have some form of understanding and conceptualization of childhood; albeit these may be rooted in different ontologies and draw on diverse epistemes. As such, these...

This chapter explores ideals around growth and development in young children and all of the dividends-related discourses perpetuated by neoliberalism. We explore the problematics and possibilities within the entanglements of neoliberalism and childhoods by drawing on posthuman relationalities to create knots, to disrupt. or cause stutters in growth...

"On 17 March 2021 we invited all authors of ‘Teaching in the Age of Covid-19’ (Jandrić et al. 2020) to reflect on their pandemic experience 1 year later.3 Mirroring the original article’s format, in ‘Teaching in the Age of Covid-19—1 Year Later’, we requested short testimonies, biographies, and workspace photographs. In numbers, the 1-year-later co...

What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the Philosophy of Education in a New Key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role ma...

Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a par- ticular way to conceive of the relationship between education and soci- ety. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in sec...

Infantilisations is the fourth article in a collective writing project that includes ‘Infantologies’, ‘Infantasies’, ‘Infanticides’, and Infantologies II-Songs of the Cradle. It is a notion and paper directed to the treatment of others as infants, essentially a hierarchical relation of power that supports a functional and routine psychological depe...

Within the rough ground that is the field of education there is a complex web of ethical obligations: to prepare our students for their future work; to be ethical as educators in our conduct and teaching; to the ethical principles embedded in the contexts in which we work; and given the Southern context of this work, the ethical obligations we have...

Infantologies II is a continuation of a series of articles that began with the quartet: Infantologies, Infanticides, Infantasies, Infantilizations. 'Infantologies II: Songs of the Cradle' is devoted to fairy stories, nursery rhymes and the poetics of early childhood. Each author engages with these themes through different questions and contexts, co...

The complex and fluid nature of knowledge is a key dimension of the early childhood curriculum and of early childhood teaching and learning. Such complexity adds to the already complex and dynamic work of an early childhood teacher. With a dynamic view of knowledge in mind, this article reports on research with a team of early childhood teachers to...

This article introduces the Collaborative Online Learning Across Borders (COLAB) teaching and research program. It outlines the development of the cross-national collaboration, and examines the learning in four teacher education programs in New Zealand and the United States of America. COLAB aims to support teacher candidates, in the US and abroad,...

Infanticides is the third article in a collective writing project that includes ‘Infantologies’ and ‘Infantasies’. It is designed to develop a phil- osophy of the infant, which is not tied to either developmental psych- ology or neuroscience but rather links itself to history and philosophy. It looks to develop a perspective on the world, beginning...

This collective paper on radicalization and violent extremism part of the ‘Philosophy of education in a new key’ initiative by Educational Philosophy and Theory brings together some of the leading contemporary scholars writing on the most pressing epistemological, ethical, political and educational issues facing post-9/11 scholarship on radicalizat...

This is a collective writing project that is part of the larger design of Infantologies, Infanticides and Infantilizations; a quartet that explores the philosophy of infants from thematic perspectives, that puts infants at the centre of our reflections, and that encourages a different aca- demic style of thinking.

This article reports on a case study that investigated the implementation of New Zealand early childhood education (ECE) beliefs in a kindergarten in China and its implications. The study used a process of document analysis and individual interviews with teachers and parents to collect data. The incorporation of "Western" education approaches is no...

The early learning action plan 2019–2029, He Taonga te Tamaiti / Every Child a Taonga, ushers in a new era of thinking about the governance of early childhood education (ECE). The policy language has changed, with a shift from “early childhood education” to the “early learning system”. This article starts from the concern that if a teacher was to s...

Exploring possibilities and potentialities arising out of the comprehensive, all-encompassing movements of life and matter in and through children’s learning environments is the focus of this chapter. It brings together the theoretical shifts outlined in Chaps. 1, 2 and 3 with the focus on people, places and things in the curriculum from Chap. 6, i...

Rethinking constructions of childhoods, and what it means to be a child, this chapter builds on the foundations developed in the first three chapters of the book. While those chapters challenged the rational, naturalising, social, universal or oppositional, binary constructs of childhood and addressed the concept of childhoods as plural, this chapt...

Re-positioning ways in which we see children’s entangled realities with and in the world, this chapter places a posthuman lens on children’s lives and their affective relationships with human and non-human entities and things. Throughout the chapter, we provoke the posthuman thinking which we have built up throughout the book by conceptualising how...

This chapter focuses on the multiplicities of theoretical thinking and the means for pursuing new ways of being and knowing about children and about childhoods. To do so we utilise theories, think with theories and with contemporary scholarship and conceptual thinking. We recognise the development of thought over the past two decades that has been...

The glossary outlines some of the ways in which we have used key concepts throughout this book. Its intention is to be a useful guide, and by no means a conclusive or complete representation of the meanings of any of the terms listed. The glossary gives insights into particular meanings as they relate to the topics of this book and to our collectiv...

The final chapter of the book outlines some of the potential implications of the posthuman and new materialist framings of this book on researching the child and contemporary childhoods. It explores how using philosophy as a method of inquiry supports engaging with the complications of posthuman research paradigms and offers a range of perspectives...

Considering the entanglement of materials and objects in children’s lives through a posthuman reading of curricula, this chapter follows on closely from Chap. 5 to investigate children’s relationships with materials and nonhuman objects. Its focus is on how children’s lives are shaped by regulatory documents, and as our first example, we examine Ao...

Outlining the complex relationship between childhood studies, philosophy and education, this chapter maps the story of the child and childhood, from a non-biological and non-medical perspective tracing philosophical perspectives over time. In the chapter, we interweave conceptions of the child subject with the philosophy and history of education, a...

In this chapter, we examine the new sociological ways of thinking about children and childhoods introduced in critique of the dominant developmental theories in the later part of the twentieth century. The chapter seeks to clarify some of the rethinking of childhoods beyond developmental frameworks and towards the posthuman, new materialist perspec...

This chapter explores posthuman pedagogies as relational ontologies in childhoodnature. It situates the reconceptualization of children and childhoods in the Anthropocene, as with nature rather than outside of nature, to present a range of ways to think about humans, and particularly children and their encounters, relations and response-ability wit...

A substantial proportion of Italian students are unaware of the connection between what they learn at school and their work opportunities .This proportion would most likely increase if data were collected today, given the generation of a broad range of new jobs that has arisen due to advancements in technology. This gap between students’ understand...

This article is a collective writing experiment undertaken by philosophers of education affiliated with the PESGB (Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain). When asked to reflect on questions concerning the Philosophy of Education in a New Key in May 2020, it was unsurprising that the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on society and on e...

Abstract: Because of limited activities are designed for early childhood children on geoscience natural hazards we have been exploring playful approaches to let young children to familiarize with them starting with volcanoes. In fact, learning theory suggests the we need to incorporate a wide range of skills and competencies in the learning process...

Infantologies is a collective writing project designed to express and summarise important ideas, approaches and forms of advocacy in a short and condensed method, in order to present a network of diverse themes, arguments and evidence concerning infants.

This chapter presents a collective response to the propositions and provocations raised in Michael Peters’ 2019 essay ‘Knowledge socialism: The rise of peer production—collegiality, collaboration, and collective intelligence’. For Peters, knowledge socialism pushes back against, deconstructs, or otherwise critically engages with, the individualizat...

This paper explores relationships between environment and education after the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of philosophy of education in a new key developed by Michael Peters and the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA). The paper is collectively written by 15 authors who responded to the question: Who remembers Greta Thunber...

Tesar, M. (2020). Is that a ladybird on the leaf? Public Intellectualism and Resistance with Very Young Children. In Wells, T., Carlson, D., & Koro, M. (Eds), Intra-Public intellectualism: Critical Qualitative Inquiry in the Academy (pp. 89-100), Myers Education Press

This is a verbatim transcript of the Call for Testimonies sent out on 17 March 2020 to thePostdigital Science and Educationmailing list and posted on social networking sites.

In this collective paper, we have accompanied Philosophy of Education in a New Key with the subtitle: ‘education for justice now’, echoing a manifesto tone. Psychoanalytically, this tone evokes the urgency of the fulfillment of desire that resists deferral. ‘For justice’ qualifies education as not ‘just’ education qua merely, simply, education for...

In this conversational article, we consider cultivating decoloniality in university education by drawing upon Jacques Ranci�ere’s (2010) notion of a living philosophy. Ranci�ere’s (2010) living philosophy holds the possibility of both a medium and a space for a re-thinking and a re-contemplation of what life is in relation to what it might be. Thro...

This collectively written article explores postdigital relationships between science, philosophy, and religion within the continuum of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment. Contributions are broadly classified within four sections related to academic fields of philosophy, theology, critical theory, and postdigital studies. The article re...

Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to...

Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to...

Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to...

This article asks the questions, what is “philosophy as a method?” how can it be conceptualized and what are its genealogies? and what role might it play in the liminal spaces of the intersections of philosophy, methodology, and education? It further aims to perform philosophy as a method through a rereading of the histories of the intersections of...

Perhaps it is our responsibility to protect the post-qualitative methodologies rather than trying to rush them or use them without any substantial reading or thinking; and as such exposing them and categorizing, and analyzing them. Perhaps there is a need for a radical renewal of methodological responsibility, of not wanting to discover and turn ev...

In this article we explore the ways in which ‘the story must change’, according to Donna Haraway (2016) . We utilize the in-between space between Haraway's suggestion that we are in a time of Great Dithering, of ‘ineffective and widespread anxiety’, and Julia Kristeva's (2014) notion of revolt, to argue for a shift in orientations towards cultural...