My topic for this e-portfolio is an intentional questioning of the status quo in early childhood education (ECE) using the metaphor of diffraction “as a tool of analysis for attending to and responding to the effects of difference” (Barad, 2007, p. 72). I want to push and trouble the taken-for-granted of what has been and is still assumed about theory and practice in this field, and I invite readers to join me in this questioning as we move through the pages of this e-portfolio. Let us imagine what might be possible if we were to invite more and different ideas of children, teachers, students, families and communities and the spaces and materials that make up the expected and accepted definitions and practices of ‘early childhood education’.  This includes noticing and dwelling with difference, and then “staying with the trouble in order to nurture well-being on a damaged planet” (Haraway, 2016, p.76), though it may be awkward, uncomfortable and even discouraging. I am interested in seeking out and critiquing the ways in which systems and structures including neo-liberalism, colonialism, capitalism, developmentalism and others, work to dictate who children are in the contexts of their lives and relationships, and what they should learn, think, do and be.

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Throughout this Masters in ECE program, I have been inspired and challenged to attend to and think deeply about ethics, power and assumptions in education. Shortly after starting this degree, I started a new job as a member of the ECE faculty in a small community college on Vancouver Island. In this role I have been pushed to think about the narrow scope of research that I had come to know as truth in the field of early learning, and to question pervasive ideas that overwhelmingly dominate the ways in which we see, know and teach children and ways in which the curriculum and established parameters for pre-service teacher education are prescribed and defined. As I began to plan lessons and assignments and read through approved textbooks and expected learning outcomes, I felt increasingly uneasy about the particular stories, theories, voices and ways of knowing children I was charged with relaying to my new students. Singular, narrow definitions of children and childhoods, and human-centred, colonial and capital-driven theory and policy continue to dominate discourses in early childhood education, and glaring inequities are evident as different stories, theories, voices and ways of knowing continue to be excluded and ignored. The versions of knowledge that have been accepted as status quo in the field of ECE did not and still do not represent my husband’s, children’s and community’s Indigenous ways of knowing, nor their perceptions of what education could be. They did not and do not represent my children’s experiences as neurodiverse, gender diverse and culturally diverse learners. They did not and do not represent the lived experiences, values and situated knowings of the students in my ECE classroom who travel to Vancouver Island from different places around the world, and bring with them ideas and experiences that must become part of our discourse.