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Pandemic-Provoked “Throwntogetherness”: Narrating Change in ECEC in Canada
Esther Maeers, University of Regina
Jane Hewes, Thompson Rivers University
Monica Lysack, Sheridan College
Pam Whitty, University of New Brunswick
Authors’ Note
Pam Whitty https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0820-2099
This research was funded through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
(SSHRC) Connections grant.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Esther.Maeers@uregina.ca
Abstract
In Canada, multiple, intersecting, and incommensurable narratives promote investment in a public
ECEC system. These dominant narratives are typically justified through an entanglement of
discourses, including gender equity, colonialism, developmentalism, investment in children as
future workers, and childcare as social infrastructure. With COVID-19, renewed economic
arguments propose ECEC as an essential service, jump-starting an economy ravaged by the
pandemic. Taking up a conversational approach, we question the potency of dominant narratives
proliferated in media and policy initiatives as a way to effect large-scale change, and we seek to
better understand alternative narratives of ECEC. We are drawn to those spaces where a range of
new texts and narratives are generating possibilities for transformative changes. We co-create a
bricolage of minor stories (Taylor, 2020) of change, keeping in mind Eve Tuck’s (2018a) theory
of change and Elise Couture-Grondin’s (2018) premise of stories as theory.
Keywords: early childhood education, policy, change, COVID-19, colonialism,
throwntogetherness
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Pandemic-Provoked “Throwntogetherness”: Narrating Change in ECEC in Canada
“A Time to Organize, Not to Agonize” (Braidotti, 2020, p. 467)
We are meeting over Zoom—a now very familiar space and practice that was born of the urgency
and intensity of the COVID-19 lockdown. The particular 2-year ECE Narratives Project
highlighted in this article began in April 2020, just at the moment when the response to COVID-
19 provoked dramatic changes to the way most of us work and live in the world. Given the
pervasiveness of the lockdowns, we moved our planning and research meetings online and our in-
person events from physical meeting places to virtual meeting spaces. In these virtual spaces, we
have had hundreds of conversations trying to make sense of the uncertainties and inequities in
early childhood education and care (ECEC)1 made particularly visible throughout the lockdown.
We have shown up weekly—10 framed faces across four time zones—we have virtually entered
each other’s homes—grateful for the project and each other. Within the context of our lives and
this work, we are advocates, activists, educators, and researchers engaged in various roles with
responsibilities that are often entangled and mutually informative. We, too, were experiencing the
crisis. Our conversations over Zoom became a life line. And given the sudden and unexpected
focus upon childcare within the pandemic, we were determined to better understand—in this
moment of incredible disruption—how change in ECEC has happened and how we might quickly
contribute to this national and very public conversation.
This article emerges, with hope, from within the context of a Canada-wide Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Connections grant. We four, Esther, Jane, Monica,
and Pam, part of the group of 10 framed faces, are working within the ECE Narratives Project
(https://ecenarratives.opened.ca/). Our primary research focus is on change in ECEC in Canada.
In the context of this focus, we ask: What are the narratives that create, describe, and perpetuate
change; how do they work; and what do, or might, particular narratives offer to the present and
future possibilities for ECEC within Canada? As we began the project, our collective sense was
that there were and have been many narratives aiming to influence change in ECEC in Canada,
and that change has happened and continues to happen. Each of us has participated in change in
different ways, changes that have made differences in the present while offering possibilities for
future practice and policy. Collectively we have also experienced change in ECEC in Canada as a
never-ending story (Mahon, 2000; Pasolli, 2019), a what now/where to now story, one that Kate
Bezanson (2018) characterized as the government of Canada’s stop-start relationship to the field
of early learning (p. 191). In this article we narrate personal stories of change in ECEC as we
experienced them within the ECE Narratives Project.
In our desire to think about and with narratives of change within ECEC, our ECE
Narratives research group was able to create conditions and invitations for national and
international conversations. Our approach to this research has been to take up conversations as
bricolage with conversations acting as point of entry texts (POET) (Berry, 2004, p. 108).
Collectively and individually, we narrate change as we experienced it in conversations with people
in ECEC: policy advocates, educators, and scholars within Canada and internationally. To
facilitate these conversations, and over the course of our two-year project, the ECE Narratives
Project organized two webinars, the first in June 2020, a full year before the federal commitment
of $30 billion dollars for early learning and child care (Tasker, 2021). At that time, we held
conversations with ECEC policy influencers—some well-known and some who had been working
unseen for decades. In our second webinar, in November 2020, we held conversations with ECEC
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educators who were thoughtfully, persistently, and creatively staying focused on their relations
with children and their families as childcare centres strove to stay open or as they re-opened. In
conjunction with the webinar conversations, ECEC educators from across the country shared
visual representations of their experiences animating the actions they were taking to stay connected
with families, children, and community in spite of spatial and temporal shifts created by COVID-
19 to the provision of care (https://ecenarratives.opened.ca/webinar-collages/). Our third event
occurred across 2021–2022, when we had conversations with international and Indigenous policy
makers and educators. From these conversations, we created videos and research briefs bringing
together insights and possibilities for changes to ECEC in Canada.
Moving Forward With Uncertainty
To learn about change in ECEC through conversations as bricolage, and in the context of this
paper, we focus upon discourses and related narratives we heard within the first webinar. What are
these narratives and what are they telling us about change in ECEC? What might we imagine for
our collective futures? Our first webinar, held on June 10th, 2020, was entitled: Moving Forward
With Uncertainty: The Pandemic as Déclencheur* for a Competent ECEC System Across Canada/
Aller de l’avant dans l’incertitude : La pandémie comme catalyseur* de transformation d’un
système plus adapté d’éducation à la petite enfance à travers le Canada
(https://ecenarratives.opened.ca/policy-narratives/).
For this webinar, we brought together policy experts for a round table discussion on current
ECEC realities and initiatives across Canada. The focus of the webinar was to illuminate and
respond to the impact of the changing perceptions and realities in childcare as COVID-19 affected
the lives of children, families, and society overall. It was our response to events unfolding
immediately around us. Collectively, we had knowledge, resources, and networks to draw on. We
were ready to act. Specifically, Monica was deeply engaged at the political level in ongoing
advocacy work/responses to the crisis and she invited individuals with whom she was working to
share their knowledge and insights. The webinar conversation came together very quickly. In
making sense of how this happened, we experienced what Doreen Massey (2005) described as the
“throwntogetherness” of place, “an ever-shifting constellation of trajectories,” always and
crucially “the combination of order and chance” (p. 151). Through planning on a national scale,
we had a SSHRC grant, and although not by chance, but certainly unexpectedly, we were in a
pandemic. Thus, at the beginning of the pandemic, we had collectively and fortuitously created a
place where we could, as Rosi Braidotti (2020) suggested, “organize rather than agonize” (p. 3).
In the first webinar, two groups of panelists took part: the first panel was composed of well-
known childcare speakers from national childcare organizations, while the second was composed
of speakers, lesser known, whose work was largely behind the scenes, out of sight, underground—
people whose focus was to bridge the work of the advocates with that of policy makers and
politicians. We were only 3 months into the pandemic, and a palpable sense of urgency permeated
the webinar discussion. There was no doubt that ECEC in Canada was in crisis. We hoped that
governments and policy makers might share our sense of urgency in this moment, and be
compelled to act. We were energized and inspired. We found ourselves in the position of being
able to do something—to bring people together at an auspicious moment for a public conversation.
To our surprise, the event drew over 400 registrants. For us, this moment in time and space
animated Massey’s (2005) notion of the significance of the public place and the “politics of the
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event of place” (p. 149): the pandemic politics of Canada and the newly and unexpectedly public
space of the virtual.
Unangax
scholar Eve Tuck (2018b) theorized that when we are thinking about how change
happens, there is no single best answer. Tuck suggested that to gain an understanding of change
we need to move into the messiness of conversations, to take seriously the practice of conversation
within all its “mired contestations” (Tuck, 2018b, 6:08). What we learned in these mired
contestations is that when narrating change there is no single best answer, no single narrative;
rather, narrating change in ECEC in Canada reverberated with Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw’s
(2010) theorizing of “flows, rhythms, and intensities'' (p. xii); moving into the messiness of
conversation is “inventive” rather than “predictive” (p. xii). As we discussed possibilities arising
from our long-standing and ongoing conversations, we were engaged with re-conceptualist ECEC
scholarship (Ashton, 2015; Iannacci & Whitty, 2009; Moss, 2018; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Pence,
2005;). In the introduction of Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible: A Memoir of Work in
Childcare and Education by Helen Penn (2019), Michel Vandenbroeck, drawing on Foucault,
described the purpose of contesting early childhood as working “to interrogate such discourses
that are presented as evident, to shake up habits, ways of thinking, familiarities and to re-
problematize these” (p. vi). We considered hegemonic discourses and those less dominant. As
Peter Moss (2018) reminds us, a dominant discourse “never manages totally to silence other
discourses or stories. … These stories may be unheard by power and consigned to the margins, for
the time being at least, but they are out there to be heard by those who listen” (p. 7). We heard
many stories, and as we listened and re-listened to these stories, we could hear stories narrating
change.
Narrating Change
We intend this next section to be read as a bricolage of ideas from our conversations—particular
moments in time emanating from our first webinar that are echoing, reverberating, repeating,
haunting. In effect, these conversational moments act as point of entry texts generating the
bricolage (Berry, 2004, p. 108). Collectively created through our conversations, we now share our
individual narratives, narrating stories of change, recognizing their intersecting, partial, and
resonating natures. Monica animates “strategic pester power,” its persistence over time, in
numerous spaces, and with and by a variety of people. Pam considers the shifting context of
Indigenous knowledges and ways of being as they are re-materialized in pedagogical and literary
texts by Indigenous peoples. Jane takes a closer look at ECEC pedagogy as an alternative—and
potentially transformative—narrative of change, unfolding in and through Canadian ECEC
curriculum frameworks. Esther describes how an ECEC educator co-creates new texts with
children, creating renewed relationships to families, community, and land, providing hope in a
time of great uncertainty.
Monica: Strategic Pester Power
I am a Treaty Four person, second generation Canadian, living and working with First
Nations and Metis communities in Saskatchewan and Ontario. I am grateful and humbled by the
wisdom and respect for the traditional knowledge of the Metis Nation and many First Nations,
shared with me by elders, educators, and students.
Two years have passed since ECE Narratives’ first policy webinar; 2 years that changed
our worlds. Two years since childcare was deemed as an essential service in the face of the
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pandemic, and 2 years since the 50-year struggle in childcare was brought to fruition. On April 19,
2021, Canada’s first female finance minister Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland announced
a $30 billion dollar commitment to creating a Canada-wide early learning and childcare program.
It was just over 50 years ago that the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada
(Bird et al., 1970) called for national publicly funded childcare, the ramp to women’s equality. The
principal rationale was women’s equality and access to the workforce to contribute economically.
In subsequent decades, federal governments, both Liberal and Conservative, have offered various
rationales, and promises for childcare and yet failed to deliver (Friendly & Prentice, 2009). For the
most part, childcare in Canada has survived as a private service delivered within a market model
system (Beach & Ferns, 2015). While several countries belonging to the Organization of Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) have established stable, universal, and public ECEC
systems, Canada has not. As I think about my involvement with childcare, over 40 years as an
early childhood educator, director, advocate, and researcher, and the multiple rationales for public
investment in childcare, I can see that we are trapped—trying to find the one “right” narrative—
the narrative that would compel the government to invest. If only we could find it. We were
obsessed. WE needed THEM to do something. Like Penn (2019), “I thought of myself as someone
without power or influence or connections” (p. 33).
Penn (2011), who served as rapporteur for Canada’s participation in Starting Strong II
(OECD, 2006) provided a summary and analysis of multiple rationales that drive governments to
implement ECEC policy. She asserted that “sticky policies” and their rationales are rooted in
countries’ histories, changing contexts, and public opinion. To open up the discussion of rationales,
Penn (2011) suggested that “the job of academics and intellectuals—and students—is to step back
a little and analyze policies and their underpinning rationales, to be skeptical” (p. 28). Our
challenge is to take up Foucault’s suggestion to interrogate, disrupt, and re-problematize dominant
discourses (Penn, 2019). In the pandemic, Canada’s rationale for investment highlighted the
dominant discourses of economic returns and women’s equality which economist Armine
Yalnizyan (2020) described as the “she-cession.” Yalnizyan asserted that women were
disproportionately affected financially by the pandemic and proposed that a Canada-wide early
learning and childcare system would mitigate the negative impact and support women’s equality.
As part of our research, we collected ECEC media narratives, which included: ECEC as an
essential service for the economy and for women re-entering the workforce; ECEC as necessary
for child development; and articles on quality care, education, pedagogy, and practice. The
dominating media discourse of childcare as an essential service—for essential health care staff—
was a critical one which had the ironic effect of silencing or obscuring other narratives such as
those being lived and told by educators. For example, early childhood educators forced back to
work during the lockdown were expected to provide warm, loving care while maintaining social
distancing between adults and children as well as between very young children; they were required
to meet enhanced health and safety requirements without support for additional staffing or
appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE). In the first webinar, we heard from more than
one speaker that children’s experience of lockdown childcare held new stories for families about
the value of childcare for their children. These narratives were largely missing in the media.
In the first webinar, the Honourable Myriam Monsef, minister for women and gender
equality, was invited to bring greetings. In her remarks, Minister Monsef thanked participants for
mobilizing, for advocating, for “bringing us along with you … please don’t stop” (Monsef, 2020,
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7:20–8:19). This makes me think about the “us” and the “them.” Who is “them” and who is “us”?
Often, we construct women in government as other than “us.” Are we putting up false barriers?
Getting in our own way? In a recent publication, Joanne Lehrer and I (Whitty et al., 2020) reflected
on the involvement of several women politicians who were involved in childcare policy issues in
Ontario and Quebec. We noted that politicians, too, worked within and against their own parties,
sometimes traversing lines. I was beginning to realize that it wasn’t about us and them. As Braidotti
(2020) wrote, “WE are in this together, but we are not one and the same” (p. 1).
The “we” in our first webinar included several well-known spokespeople, for example,
Martha Friendly, Margo Greenwood, Don Giesbrecht, and Morna Ballantyne. There were also
panelists who have worked behind the scenes, quietly and invisibly. One panelist spoke about the
informal “mommy network” amongst journalists, who prioritized column space for pro-childcare
reporting. Panelists were asked to address questions such as the following:
● Early childhood education and care is a high-profile issue right now, can you share your
views about why ECEC is in the spotlight?
● Why has it been so difficult to advance a universal childcare system?
● How is Indigenous ECEC different?
● How has the world changed and what does that mean for childcare?
● Are there new arguments emerging now to support a Canada-wide universal public
childcare system?
In Conflictual and Cooperative Childcare Politics in Canada, Rachel Langford, Susan Prentice,
Brooke Richardson, and Patrizia Albanese (2016) analyzed and compared relationships between
advocates and both Liberal and Conservative governments when a national childcare program was
being proposed. They identified co-operative relationships, conflictual relationships—and at
times, conflictual—co-operation. Thinking with these ideas, I considered how they might help to
explain why we have stalled, time and time again; what impedes our progress? Is perfection the
enemy of good? Conversation in the webinar circled around whether it was possible for multiple
narratives to come together in a single Canada-wide childcare system that jump-starts an economy
ravaged by the pandemic, and addresses equality for women and children’s well-being in the
present, as well as their education and care. We stall on this conundrum, which Kate Bezanson,
Andrew Bevan, and I (2021) described as “complexity inertia.” We suggested,
Just because something is complex doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Rather, it compels an
approach that bypasses tried-and-failed, ideological or non-system-building models…
There are no shortcuts in system-building. (Bezanson, Bevan, & Lysack, 2021, n.p.)
What was it that finally compelled this government to deliver a Canada-wide early learning
and care program? The “strategic pester power” of advocates was identified by Honourable
Carolyn Bennett (personal communication, April, 19, 2021), a long-time childcare advocate who
worked tirelessly within the Liberal party and cabinet, along with other female ministers, to deliver
on the long-awaited national childcare program. In the moment, multiple narratives from multiple
sources converged. With a grand-scale financial commitment and the political will expressed so
clearly in the budget announcement, the new challenge becomes, how do we build a childcare
system? At a recent national symposium on building the national system, the Honourable Karina
Gould (2022), minister of families, children, and social development, challenged those in the room
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and advocates across the country to shift how we work, emphasizing, “It is different being an
advocate on the outside than it is being a builder on the inside … It doesn’t mean don’t call us out,
that is your job—but how can we be constructive? This is an important moment ...We cannot build
that system without each and every one of you.” The question of who is “we” continues to resonate.
Pam: “There has Never Been Such a Framework for Our Children and Our Families.”
I live and work on the east coast of Canada in Wolastoqiyik territory in what is now called
New Brunswick. Wabanaki families have lived here for thousands upon thousands of years. My
mother’s and father’s families have lived here for just over 200 years. Although Peace and
Friendship Treaties were signed by the Crown with the Wabanaki Peoples between 1725 and 1779,
many settlers, including myself, are just coming to understand our responsibilities as Treaty
People. Cree storyteller, writer, activist, trapper, and lawyer Harold Johnson (2007) in Two
Families: Treaties and Government, wrote of his family and mine:
I have become convinced that my family will not be freed from tyranny until your family
members free their minds from tyranny. Not until the dominant culture ceases to assume
that its structures are natural, necessary and superior will it cease to impose its ideology
over my family. …My family's survival as Indians depends on your families leaving us
room to be Indians to be independent and self-sufficient. (p. 121)
In June 2020, Cree researcher Margo Greenwood, spoke at our first webinar, Moving
Forward With Uncertainty: The Pandemic as Déclencheur. She spoke directly to the realities of
Canada’s colonialism, the historic and extensive harms done to Indigenous families and children
through imposed structures and ideologies. Greenwood (2020), whose research focuses upon the
well-being and health of Indigenous children and families, made very clear to the webinar
participants, that colonial practices in Canada have resulted in current-day realities where
immediate and intergenerational harms and trauma for children and families are evident in ECEC
politics, policies, and practices:
When you consider our history and our current day realities of First Nations, Inuit, and
Metis Peoples in Canada, we cannot deny the colonial reality of Canada nor the fact that
the First Nations, Inuit, and Metis Peoples have been marginalized in their own lands. We
cannot deny any longer that colonialism has always been and continues to be about power
and the insistence that some have power at the expense of others. (7:09–7:39)
Tuck (2018b), in her talk, “I Do Not Want to Haunt You, But I Will,” named colonialism as a
longstanding theory of change in what is now called Canada, a theory that meets with change
reluctantly. Tuck (2009) proposed interrupting this colonial power with Indigenous power,
working against colonialism as “a flawed theory of change” (p. 409), a theory that perpetuated(s)
damage-centered research, intended “to document peoples’ pain and brokenness to hold those in
power accountable for their oppression” (p. 409). Tuck (2009) advocated for suspending damage
and enacting desire-based change, with “wisdom and hope” (p. 416), in part through the
recognition of the local knowledge, narratives, and values carried by Indigenous People. She
respectfully acknowledged that although there was a need to expose “the uninhabitable and
inhumane” conditions which Indigenous Peoples continue to live in, a new historical moment calls
for a shift from damage-centered research (Tuck, 2009, pp. 415–416). She suggested instead a
move towards narratives of desire—to seek the layers, the complexity, the contradictions, the “not
yet and not anymore” (Tuck, 2009, p. 417).
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Referring specifically to the COVID-19 realities that once again “shone a light” upon
persistent inequities within childcare in Indigenous communities, Greenwood (2020, 8:00)
described the critical development and place of the Indigenous Early Learning and Child Care
Framework (IELCCF) (Government of Canada, 2018), pointing out that Canada is finally enacting
a distinctions-based approach in ECEC with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples (FNIM).
Specifically, Greenwood noted that the IELCCF foregrounds the safety and happiness of children
and self-determination within and across nation-to-nation relationships. It is a very different
starting point than other early learning and child care curriculum (ELCC) frameworks in Canada.
Indigenous knowledges, languages, and culture are at the heart of the FNIM frameworks. Self-
determination and children’s cultural identities are centred. A distinctions-based approach,
Greenwood (2020) stressed, is unique in the history of Canada: “There has never been such a
framework for our children and our families” (2:16–2:30). Greenwood’s haunting statement calls
up centuries of the damage that has been, while opening spaces for enacting a more desired future.
As Greenwood (2020) further noted, “So our children are at the core of our nations and they are
its survival and ensures its continuity” (6:55).
In May 2021, 1 year after listening to Greenwood speak in the first webinar, and as we
were preparing a presentation for a national conference, we learned that the unmarked graves of
215 Indigenous children were found at the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc community in the southern
interior of what is now called British Columbia. The locating of unmarked graves across Canada
is a stark reminder of the deep harms orchestrated against particular children, families, and
communities by colonial policies and practices that created and maintained Indian Residential
Schools from the 1830’s until 1996. As of May 24, 2022, the National Centre for Truth and
Reconciliation Memorial Register has confirmed the names of 4130 children who died while
attending Indian Residential Schools (Supernant, 2022). Kisha Supernant explained that many
families were never notified of the deaths of their children; bodies of their children were never
sent home; and survivors who were children at the time remember children who went missing, and
in some cases these survivors were responsible for digging graves of children who had died. The
immediate and intergenerational effects of this traumatic policy are now highly visible within
Canadian popular media. Many settler Canadians are waking up to narratives of loss of children,
culture, language, spirituality, and community, narratives of loss and lack, that Indigenous Peoples
have been speaking to and about, living with, re-telling, and resisting for a very long time.
In her research with Indigenous life writings and epistolary texts, Elise Couture-Grondin
(2018), drawing from Braidotti’s concept of affirmative ethics, took up the practice of affirmative
readings, which “follow a non-oppositional logic in which difference is taken as incommensurable
singularity, instead of conceiving of Indigenous difference in a binary opposition to white settlers”
(p. 318). For Couture-Grondin (2018), affirmative readings, which could also be applied to the
creation and reading of Indigenous ELCC frameworks, place the “ethical reach of a text” beyond
raising awareness or being educative, to the possibility of transformation by “offering alternative
views of relationships, and by enacting different types of relationships in the literary field in which
readers can engage” (p. 323). There is a possibility to engage with incommensurability, “in ways
that counter the mechanisms of cognitive imperialism and appropriation/elimination” (Couture-
Grondin, 2018, p. 321).
Affirmative readings, a taking up of affirmative ethics can also be engaged as a reading-
response with picture books authored and illustrated by Indigenous Peoples. Nicola Campbell
(2005), in Shi-Shi-etko places two stories side by side. In her one page austere black and white
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preface, Campbell, a Nłeʔkepmx, Syilx, and Métis author, living in British Columbia outlines the
history and harms caused by policies of residential schooling, asking the questions, what would it
mean to live without families, to live without communities? The beautifully crafted, colour images
by Kim LaFave show the daily life of an Indigenous community in the four days prior to Shi-shi-
etko being taken from her family and community. These two apparently incommensurable stories
stand together in the book, the Indigenous story justly taking up more time and space—being told
and heard in its own right.
Swampy Cree author, David A. Robertson and Julie Flett (2016) of Cree Metis descent, in
When We Were Alone, tell a different kind of double story, that of a young girl learning from her
Nokum. Nokum speaks to her granddaughter about how she and a friend lived through their
residential school days remembering and taking up cultural and linguistic practices from home
“when they were alone.” Leanne Simpson (2018, as cited in Couture-Grondin, 2018) affirmed,
that with stories, Indigenous Peoples “pick up things where we were forced to leave them behind,
whether songs, dances, values or philosophies and bring them into existence with the future” (pp.
49–50)—which is what Nokum does in this story with the conversation with her granddaughter, a
conversation that can be engaged with, witnessed, and learned from by all inhabitants of Turtle
Island.
Indigenous texts, including Shi-shi-etko, When We Were Alone, and the distinctions-based
IELCCF, foreground different knowledges and stories than colonially based ELCC frameworks
and colonial picture books. These Indigenous texts stand together, and are very different from most
of the texts I have read for most of my life. At the moment, many Indigenous texts are written in
English; thus, once again I benefit from Indigenous knowledges at the cost of Indigenous
languages. My hope is that with the resurgence of Indigenous languages, with the translation and
production of more Indigenous texts in Indigenous languages, and considering the foregrounding
of Indigenous languages in the IELCCF, a different Indigenous future is materializing. Returning
to Johnson (2007), perhaps in the foreseeable future, my family will finally leave space for his
family “to be independent and self-sufficient” (p. 121).
Jane—ECEC Pedagogy—The Beginning of a New Story
The place I call home is on Treaty Six territory, where I grew up and later raised my own
family in amiskwaciy-wâskahikan, the nehiyawewin (Cree) name for Beaver Hills House, now
known as Edmonton. I have fond childhood memories of playing in the bush on the banks of the
swift flowing kisiskâciwanisîpiy, until recently known to me only as the North Saskatchewan
River. Since 2016, I have been living and working on the traditional and unceded territory of the
Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc people in the nation of Secwepemcúl’ecw, in the first place where the
presence of unmarked graves of children believed to be as young as 3 years of age who died while
attending residential schools in Canada, was confirmed in May 2021.
In the spirit of story as theory, and conversation as bricolage, I will look more closely and
critically at ECEC pedagogy as an alternative narrative of change, given momentum in Canada
through the provincial ELCC frameworks created in each of the 10 provinces, and most recently a
distinct First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Indigenous Framework named above as the IELCCF
(Government of Canada, 2018). ECEC pedagogy is a new story, with the potential to shape the
direction of change in this moment of possibility for ECEC in Canada. I was initially inspired by
a comment in the chat in the first webinar from Iris Berger, one of our research team members:
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What if we move the narrative beyond ECEC as an “essential service” for the economy,
and focus on children, early childhood educators (who are more than a workforce), the role
of ECEC in community, and the unique ECEC pedagogy? (Personal communication, June
10, 2020)
The creation of ELCC frameworks in Canada followed the release of the OECD review of
ECEC (OECD, 2001; OECD, 2006) and the follow-up analysis of pedagogical approaches by John
Bennett (2005) who led the OECD review, calling for pedagogical frameworks to be organized
around a statement of principles and values, broad overarching goals, and pedagogical guidelines
for reaching those goals. Like others on our ECE Narratives research team, I became involved in
creating a framework in my home province at the time, leading the design of the participatory
action research that created Flight: Alberta’s Early Learning and Care Framework in 2018.2
Our process in Alberta was critically and generously informed by the Early Childhood
Research and Development Team that created the New Brunswick Curriculum Framework for
Early Learning and Child Care~English (NBCF~English) in 2007, one of the first in Canada. Pam
Whitty (2009) described the participation of over 1300 early childhood educators involved in
creation of the NBCF~English as a process of “reclaiming, reconstituting, and textualizing
conversations and conversational moments of pedagogical learning and care from childcare
educators” (p. 37). We followed a similar path in Alberta, working with early childhood educators
to document stories of curriculum that was “already happening” as a starting point for pedagogical
conversations (Hewes et al., 2019). Resources made available through the research project made
it possible for educators to talk with one another during their workday about what they were doing
and experiencing with children and families, and what they wanted to do. The process of talking
about their pedagogy was challenging at first. Slowly, tentatively, and occasionally powerfully,
these conversations, the “stories the players tell themselves about themselves” (Geertz, 1972)
nurtured educators’ identity, agency, confidence, and valuing of their work. Anna Szylko (as cited
in Hewes & Lirette, 2018), one of the project pedagogical mentors, recognized, “Our staff meetings
will never be about ‘who left the lint in the dryer’ again.” Rebekah McCarron (as cited in Hewes
et al., 2019), a new early childhood educator, realized a change in her sense of herself as an
educator: “What I do does matter, and this realization has forever changed me” p. 49). These were
heady times, when it sometimes felt like practice had leapt out ahead of theory, leaving the research
team behind in our “bumptiousness” (Haraway, 2016, p. 1). We wrote and published and presented
collaboratively alongside educators about this story of change (Hewes et al., 2019; Hewes et al.,
2016; Makovichuk et al., 2017; Whitty et al., 2018). As others have noted, the ELCC frameworks
have been helpful in moving thought and practice away from and beyond developmentalism, and
towards story as the starting point for pedagogy.
Setting aside for a moment my unapologetic joy at having played a small part in such an
uplifting initiative, I am reminded that we are still at the beginning of the story of ECEC pedagogy
in Canada. Critical questions are surfacing about the representation of diversity, inclusion, and
difference in socio-pedagogic curriculum frameworks, particularly in relationship to the
positioning of Indigenous pedagogies. The notion of incommensurability, in particular an “ethics
of incommensurability” (Tuck & Yang, 2012), offers insight. In a critique of South African early
childhood policy, Norma Rudolph (2017) outlines how well-intentioned efforts to address the
poverty of Indigenous peoples by “adding on” Indigenous content to ECE curricula have failed
because they do not address “fundamental issues of commensurability and hierarchies of
knowledge that silence Indigenous perspectives and ways of being prevalent in different
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communities” (p. 95). Speaking to the incommensurability of Indigenous and non-Indigenous
world views, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) deepen our understanding, with their
description of an ethic of incommensurability “which recognizes what is distinct," maintaining
that Indigenous and colonial worldviews cannot always be “aligned or allied” (p. 28). Building on
these ideas, Couture-Grondin (2018) wrote:
Incommensurability 1) insists on spaces of knowledge that cannot be appropriated; 2)
signals the impossibility of comparing and putting differences on a single scale; and 3)
accepts misunderstanding as a problem that does not have to be resolved or reconciled. (p.
15)
Socio-pedagogic frameworks offer an alternative to theme-based planning and prescriptive
curricula. In our efforts to enact a co-constructed, locally and culturally situated, values-based
pedagogy, we forget that curricula do not exist in isolation and that all of us remain “engulfed in
neoliberal, and neocolonial thinking” (Tesar, 2015, p. 192). In Troubling Settlerness in Early
Childhood Curriculum Development, Emily Ashton (2015) contended that “a social pedagogical
approach creates an air of comfort rather than critique” (p. 93) and asked:
What differences are irreducible? When might inclusion be best refused? How might taking
up incommensurability contest the taken for granted assumptions underpinning inclusion
and diversity rhetoric in early childhood curricula? (p. 82)
These are urgent and provocative questions for our pedagogy. We have an opportunity as well as
an obligation to act (Johnson, 2021). What would it look like if we truly believed in Greenwood’s
(2020) vision that it is through children that a better world will be achieved? What if we follow
Ashton’s (2015) advice to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016) of incommensurability as a
productive space, rather than trying to resolve differences? And to document children’s struggles
to make meaning of difference (Ashton, 2015, p. 91)? What would taking up an ethic of
incommensurability look like in early childhood pedagogy?
Esther: Finding Our Place in the Story, and the Story is Not Finished …
I live and work on Treaty Four territory, within the Canadian prairies, the ancestral lands
of the nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota peoples, and the homeland of the
Métis/Michif Nation. My father’s side of the family arrived as settlers from England and Holland
and have been in Canada for generations. My mother arrived in this country as a young teacher
from Scotland. I am a first generation Canadian on her side. I grew up in the Northwest Territories
amongst the Dene and Inuit peoples. Western narratives were all that I learned as a young child. I
distinctly remember seeing brown faces looking out of windows on separate buses headed to St.
Patrick’s school. As an adult, I now understand where they were going each day. At this moment,
I live less than 100 km from where Treaty Four was signed in 1874. As a white settler, I am learning
my place in this story.
During the lockdown, when our project began and our first webinar was quickly and
intentionally organized, I found myself struggling with a lack of childcare. At that moment in time,
I was propelled into the role of juggling parenting, homeschooling, scholarship, and teaching. As
my children were underfoot, the narrative of childcare being an essential service rang true for me,
but there is more to this story. Feeling isolated in my own work, I saw that my children were
experiencing this as well. Their friends and educators were now faces on a screen. Their
interactions with people were from a distance, strained, and tension filled. Relationships have
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changed for all of us. Children’s connections to their ECEC friends, educators, and spaces have
been disrupted. However, disrupted relationships run deeper than the pandemic. In Canada, our
violent colonial history has created and continues to create disrupted oppressive relationships
(Little Bear, 2000).
Writing about the incommensurability of Indigenous and colonial worldviews as a non-
Indigenous person, Morgan Johnson (2021) argued that an ethic of incommensurability calls on
White settlers not to explain or try to resolve differences or to be bystanders to the conversation,
but rather to stand aside, using their position of privilege to open a space for listening to Indigenous
worldviews as distinct. Johnson (2021) went on to explain that White settlers are obligated through
an ethic of incommensurability to understand who we are in the story of settler colonization,
“locating ourselves within a narrative without undermining the ontologically distinct experience
of the other” (p. 42) because “we are all part of the story of destruction and/or theft of land, but we
have to understand who we are in that story. Some of us may be victims and some may be
beneficiaries, but we are all part of the story” (p. 46). What does this mean as we rebuild
relationships, as we work towards truth and reconciliation, and as we create a national ECEC
system across Canada? The pandemic has perhaps provided an opportunity to move forward
differently, and not return back to the way things were (Henderson & Little Bear, 2021).
It has now been over 2 years since we experienced global lockdowns; however, we
continue to struggle with the ongoing impacts from the pandemic. As we emerge from this
collective experience and with the federal announcement of $30 billion dollars for the ECEC
sector, there is an added motivation to move forward intentionally and collectively. Braidotti
(2020) pointed out that there is a need “to start by questioning who ‘we’ might be to begin with”
(p. 467). With the notion of ethics of incommensurability and who we are in the story as a starting
place, I share a profound experience in one ECEC program, in which children and adults grapple
with who we are in the story of the land and how we shall live in relationship to one another.
It was the last day of school. My son, his kindergarten teacher, and his classmates were
preparing to share their land acknowledgement during a ceremony for the grand opening of their
Food Forest a co-created garden project. A permaculture expert helped with the preparation of the
soil. A grandfather taught them how to plant tobacco in a good way. A Cree teacher helped name
their Food Forest. The educator explained that she attended professional development courses to
learn about local plants, stating that “when I saw some buffalo berries and sea buckthorn growing
by the Creek, I knew we could grow those” (personal communication, December, 5th, 2022). The
children worked with dirt and seeds, plants and water. The creation of this garden took many
months. The garden was full of edible plants that the children and their teacher had learned to care
for; plants that would thrive in this particular place, had been carefully chosen. There was
excitement in the air, as this was one of the first face-to-face events that the school had held since
the pandemic began. Smiling maskless faces were everywhere; being outdoors allowed a sense of
freedom from the safety protocols that everyone had become accustomed to. Parents and family
members were chatting and mingling, reconnecting or meeting for the first time. The children lined
up in front of their garden, a beautiful painted mural behind them, a co-created project in which
every student in the school had contributed. The ceremony began as families looked on, every
child participating, hands and bodies fully engaged with actions and words; words that traveled
through their bodies as they moved their arms in unison, speaking to each other, the earth, and
their families. The teacher, her colleagues, and the children had co-created text, illustrations, and
actions for their land acknowledgement. This was an ongoing process intended to be meaningful
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and accessible to the youngest children in the school. Each afternoon the children practiced the
words and actions. Each day the children and adults lived out these phrases as they walked in
nature, planted and cared for their garden, learned Cree words and phrases, experienced the story
of the land, and walked and learned alongside Indigenous Elders and community members. The
children were given space and time to experience and express their relationships to land, humans,
and nature.
The following land acknowledgement book is being shared with permission from the
teacher. All the words have been included as co-created by the children and adults. However, only
a few of the beautiful illustrations are being shared where appropriate.
Figure 1
Land Acknowledgement Book Cover
Figure 2
We Know the Land We Live On is Alive
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Figure 3
If We Open Our Hearts and Minds to Learn
Note. The text reads: “Mother Earth and the first land protectors have stories and teachings to
share with us, if we open our hearts and our minds to learn. We take care of this place alongside
our relatives the nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota Nations and later, the
Métis, settlers and then newcomers. Together, we are Treaty Four People.”
Figure 4
We Are All Part of the Story of the Land
Note. The text reads: “That means that together, we are part of a living promise to protect Mother
Earth along with the water, the plants, the flyers, the swimmers, the crawlers, and each other.
We are all part of the Story of the Land …”
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Figure 5
And the Story is Not Finished
Note. The text reads: “AND THE STORY IS NOT FINISHED … We choose to heal the land
and the broken relationships here so that everyone can learn and grow in harmony with nature
and each other for as long as the sun shines, the grass grows and the river flows.”
While I watched my son recite the land acknowledgment on that hot summer day at the
end of his kindergarten year, I was filled with hope. Seeing children as active participants in the
story of the land and providing those opportunities within ECEC programs, moves beyond current
narratives of ECEC as an investment in children as future workers, as a jump start for the economy,
or as an essential service for women’s equality. This alternative narrative brings forth the
importance of relationships, for children, for adults, for land. Could these actions and this text be
a way to envision how we shall live (Tuck, 2018a) within ECEC? Perhaps this is an example of
the possibilities that the incommensurability of Indigenous and colonial worldviews can offer to
ECEC pedagogies (Ashton, 2015) and how it can look if we take this “incommensurability
seriously as a pedagogical starting point” (Ashton, 2015, p. 91).
My son’s kindergarten teacher reimagined her place in the story of the land; she troubled
her teaching practice and decentered her settler knowledge, creating space for the knowledge of
Elders, community and the land, building relationships that cross boundaries (Henderson & Little
Bear, 2021) and impact learning. She also worked alongside children in authentic and productive
ways. In our first webinar, Greenwood (2020), referring to her dream of a world in which all
children are free from oppression, powerfully stated, “Children are not just passive recipients but
that this better world will be achieved through them” (1:58–2:06). Watching the children live out
their land acknowledgement embodies what Greenwood has expressed. Children, when provided
with the opportunity, are active participants in their story of the land. Following Tuck’s (2009)
provocation to move from a damage-centred focus in research to one of desire while bringing what
we have learned about damage along with us, I see hope in this moment.
This brings me back to a recent conversation our group had when Monica asked: “What is
the thread of hope that runs through this work?” We paused in silence, thinking about the pockets
of hope exposed within the seemingly crumbling systems cascading around us. Then we spoke …
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We see hope in the amazing work some educators are doing. We see hope in the underground,
behind the scenes work of policy influencers and makers, passionate about universally available
childcare in Canada. In spite of the persistence of post-colonial practices, we see hope in the cracks
in colonialism. We see hope in young children.
In Closing … Shifting From Damage to Desire
In this article our intent has been to narrate change in ECEC in Canada specifically as we
experienced it in the context of pandemic as provocation, and within the ECE Narratives project.
In questioning the potency of dominant narratives, our minor stories (Taylor, 2020) took on new
meaning as a productive starting point for moving our thinking from damage to desire. As we
engaged in conversation about alternative narratives and new texts, we were able to co-create a
bricolage of minor stories. We became more fully aware of the deeply embedded and damaging
nature of colonialism and how paralyzing it can be, and of the possibilities of moving beyond—
from damage to desire. In Monica’s narrative of change there was a movement from “us” and
“them” to “we,” a recognition that there are no short-cuts in system building, that the search for
one right narrative is naïve, and that we cannot let complexity inertia become an excuse for
inaction. In Pam’s narrating of change, she considers our responsibilities as Treaty People and the
spaces created by particular Indigenous texts centring Indigenous knowledges, languages, and
cultures. These texts shift from damage to desire while presenting the possibility of creating new
Indigenous futures, and new ways of being for White settlers that focus on the taking up of
incommensurability as a pedagogical starting point (Ashton, 2015) for ourselves and the larger life
endeavours in which we are engaged. Jane narrates the ways in which working with curriculum
frameworks opens a space for educators to value their own work, and brings forward thinking that
positions incommensurability as a productive space in relationship to ECEC curricular goals of
diversity, inclusion, and difference. In Esther’s narrating of change, she sees hope in the way that
one educator was able to co-create opportunities through which children’s ways of knowing were
valued, local knowledge was honoured, and the agency of the land was acknowledged. Through
intentional and caring practice children and adults were able to work towards finding their place
in the story of the land.
Because of the pandemic we had extended opportunities to experience movement of
thought through conversation in an extraordinary moment of change for ECEC in Canada.
Conversation, community, co-creation, and co-authorship were made possible through the use of
various digital platforms. The crisis in ECEC, made more visible by the pandemic, reframed the
scope of our research. Our “throwntogetherness” in a pandemic moment inspired us to bring people
together for a broader public conversation in a virtual space, to story a multi-faceted bricolage,
narrating change in ECEC in Canada.
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1 We use the term ECEC throughout the paper to be consistent with the terminology of the OECD. In Canada ECEC
is also commonly referred to as early learning and child care (ELCC) in the context of the frameworks.
2 The Alberta framework was first published in 2014 as Play Participation, and Possibilities: An Early Learning
and Child Care Curriculum Framework for Alberta. In 2018, it was re-issued as Flight: Alberta’s Early Learning
and Care Framework.
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