(Re)Encountering Walls, Tattoos, and Chickadees: Disrupting Discursive Tenacity

Abstract

In this article, three pedagogic encounters—“Encountering the Wall,” “Encountering Young Tattooed Parents,” and “Encountering Chickadees”—conceptualized as curricular meeting places, are theoretically reconceptualized within alternative bodies of literature. Theoretical reconceptualization revealed complexities of early childhood pedagogies and the tenacity of dominant discursive practices of developmentalism, constructed, in these instances, through age-segregated settings, parenting programs, and nature pedagogy. Theoretical reconceptualizing of these encounters worked to disrupt embodied subjugations of age-segregated children, mothers and fathers, chickadees, educators, families, and researchers.