Childhoods: Reconceptualist Narratives in Early Childhood

This course uses poststructural including posthumanist theories and a reconceptualist perspective to reimagine alternative ways of understanding childhoods in the 21st century. Students explore the concept of subjectivity to make visible how subjects are produced and maintained in educational practices. Woven throughout this course is an analysis of how particular neoliberal subjectivities within education routinely marginalize specific groups of children and families. Students consider alternative educational practices that emerge from a perspective that all children are strong, resilient and resourceful. Attention is given to the messy, complex and often contradictory lives of that contain entangled multiple relationships with humans and more than human beings.