Canadian Children news

54SPRING / PRINTEMPS 2013 Vol. 38 No. 1

Iris Berger

PUBLICATIONS
CHAIRPERSON

Early Childhood Education in Canada: 
Are We in Motion or Are We Stepping 
Forward?

When children walk, very often they 
don’t walk with the purpose of getting 
ahead. So many things can happen on 
the way; something interesting found on 
the sidewalk—a snail or a branch, or 
there is a discovery of walking being done 
backwards or in circles, or jumping on 
one leg. 
~ Olsson (2009, p. 5)

A History of Movements

Last summer I taught a course about the 
history of early childhood education. Even 
though I have been teaching this course 
online for a number of years, the course 
this past summer stood out as a unique 
experience because it was offered in a 
face-to-face format. The daily encounters 
between the students and myself, the 
critical engagement with an array of 
historical figures, events, and phenomena, 
and the birthing and clashing of ideas, 
memories, questions, and discussions 
created a rich platform for putting the past 

in dynamic conversation with the present 
and rethinking some aspects of our field’s 
history. 

One word, in particular, seems to come 
back and haunt me after the experience 
of the history course. That word is 
movement. Those of you who are 
acquainted with the historical accounts 
of the field of early childhood education 
(ECE) will be familiar with the abundance 
of the movement terminology. For 
example, we frame periods of the field’s 
history as the kindergarten movement 
(indicating the spread of the Froebelian 
kindergarten model across Europe and 
North America in the late 1800s), the 
child study movement (linked with the 
inauguration of the scientific investigation 
of child development in the early 1900s), 
and the progressive education movement 
(associated with John Dewey’s child-
centred pedagogy of the 1920s). The 
more I reflected on the word movement, 
its meaning in the historical context of 
ECE, its connection with change, and its 
relation to current discussions within the 
field of ECE, the more I panicked. The 
term, which strongly conveys political 
flavour and fervour, seemed far removed 
from our present ECE experiences. For 
a while I could not think of what in our 
present day might be characterized as 
political movements in ECE—the kinds 
of movements that will be remembered 
and documented in the ECE history books 
about our era. 

Contemporary Movements in ECE

Curious about what might be identified 
with movement in our contemporary 
ECE landscape, I entered the subject 
heading “movement in early childhood 
in Canada” into a Google search box. To 
my surprise, when I hit the return key, the 
first link that came up was an edited book 
by Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Alan 
Pence, two ECE scholars located in B.C. 
at the University of Victoria (Veronica 
Pacini-Ketchabaw is, of course, a co-
editor of Canadian Children). Their book, 
Early Childhood Education in Motion: 
The Reconceptualist Movement in 

Canada (2005), is a collection of articles 
portraying Canadian interpretations, 
by way of research and practice, of 
the reconceptualizing early childhood 
education (RECE) movement that 
emerged in the early 1990s in the U.S. 
Scholars leading the RECE movement 
often ascribe to critical, feminist, and 
postmodern theories, and have always 
confessed to upholding a political agenda. 
They challenge long-held assumptions 
upon which ECE has been established 
(including the credibility and legitimacy 
of the historical movements that were 
mentioned in the previous paragraph), 
and they centre their scholarly efforts on 
advancing equity and social justice for 
children, educators, and families. Some 
of the topics addressed by RECE scholars 
are described by two of the movement’s 
leaders, Beth Blue Swadener and Gaile 
Cannella (2007), as follows:

The early work from reconceptualists 
in our field questioned the promotion 
of universal prescriptions for “best 
practice” and other “grand narratives.” 
Many of the reconceptualists based 
in the U.S. were doing anti-bias, 
full-inclusion or culture- and gender-
focused research that sought to 
appreciate and support diversity in 
people, ideas and ways of being. We 
shared a concern about privileging 
particular sets of beliefs or forms of 
knowledge that can create power for 
certain groups of people and oppress 
others. (p. 25)

Along with the challenges posed to a 
universal view of childhood that is based 
on developmental theory and a critique 
of the idea of quality in ECE as a value-
free concept, the reconceptualists also 
questioned the conventional idea of change 
as an upward, predictable evolution, based 
on the “natural” process of progress. For 
example, in the introductory chapter to the 
aforementioned book, Pacini-Ketchabaw 
and Pence (2005) comment that

the prevailing metaphor  in Canadian 
ECEC history is an evolutionary spiral. 
Early childhood educators are seen as 



Canadian Children news

55SPRING / PRINTEMPS 2013 Vol. 38 No. 1

having developed, since the days of 
the infant schools in the 1820s, ever 
more sophisticated understandings of 
children and their development and 
appropriate care. The evolutionary 
spiral is consistent with the modernist 
view of “progress.” (p. 13)

Rather than thinking about change or 
movement through the metaphor of an 
evolutionary process (stepping forward or 
upward toward an assumed best practice), 
Pacini-Ketchabaw and Pence suggest 
taking a revolutionary approach to change 
that entails rethinking  our practices and 
examining the assumptions underlying 
our pedagogies. This deconstructive 
approach to change involves risk and 
uncertainty (“pulling the rug from under 
one’s feet,” as one educator put it), but it 
opens up a possibility to approach the idea 
of movement or change in such a way that 
it is, at least to some degree, free from the 
standards of the present that inevitably 
limit and constrain our thinking. 

The Swedish ECE researcher Liselott 
Olsson also introduced new concepts 
for thinking about movement in early 
childhood practices. In her book, 
Movement and Experimentation in 
Young Children’s Learning: Deleuze and 
Guattari in Early Childhood Education 
(2009), Olsson engages with complex 
ideas from the French philosophers 
Deleuze and Guattari to think about 
change as something that happens at the 
molecular or micro-political level, and 
not at the administrative or governmental 
level. According to Olsson, change is not 
something that is willed as much as it is 
something that “sneaks up behind one’s 
back” (p. 74). Change happens within 
the relational fields of our practice in 

“little moments” when, for example, the 
curriculum plan breaks down and complex, 
unforeseen connections unfold in front of 
us. While curriculum involves a macro-
political decision, when it encounters 
situations within the classroom, “an 
enormous creativity is released that 
completely and continuously transforms 
and defines the curriculum,” as something 
always “escapes” the plan in the actual 
encounter with the children (p. 75). The 
question about change, argues Olsson, 
has to change. Rather than asking how 
we can get from this predefined position 
to the next, we can ask: What are the 
conditions that most favour the continuous 
experimentation that releases creative 
forces in our classrooms? How can we 
remain open to such experimentation?

Setting Early Childhood Education into 
Motion 

I believe that now is a good time to ask 
questions about change and movement 
because something else happened last 
summer. In July 2012, the travelling 
exhibit from Reggio Emilia, The Wonder 
of Learning: The Hundred Languages of 
Children, opened in New Westminster. 
The exhibit created an opportunity for a 
lot of movement here in B.C., including 
the CAYC national conference in October 
2012. Yet, when this issue of Canadian 
Children is published, the exhibit will 
already be on display in another part of 
the world. And so perhaps it is time to 
pose the following question to ourselves: 
Do we want to take the Reggio Emilia 
approach, which has been an instigator of 
change within the Canadian ECE scene 
for almost 20 years, as a symbol for an 
incremental step forward—a destination, a 
yardstick to measure our “progress”—or, 

alternatively, can we challenge ourselves 
to see the exhibit as a provocation—an 
opening for questions for which we still do 
not know the answers, but towards which 
we can begin thinking and experimenting 
together?

In conclusion, I would like to go back 
to the quote at the beginning of this 
discussion, because I think that we can 
take our inspiration for a reconceptualized 
idea of movement from young children. 
While for us, as adults, walking becomes 
an automated, purpose-bound activity, 
supported by an illusion that we actually 
know where we are going, for a child, 
walking is not necessarily about stepping 
forward with a clear destination in mind. 
What keeps children moving is a constant 
desire for experimentation through which 
new worlds are discovered and new 
relations are generated. Clearly, we cannot 
simply set aside the need for a sense of 
direction and destination, but perhaps 
we could create the possibility (or the 
conditions) to experience moments in 
which change might sneak up behind our 
backs.

References 

Olsson, L. (2009). Movement and experimentation in young 
children’s learning: Deleuze and Guattari in early 
childhood education. New York, NY: Routledge.

 
Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. & Pence, A. (2005). Chapter 1: 

Contextualizing the reconceptualist movement in 
Canadian early childhood education. In V. Pacini-
Ketchabaw & A. Pence (Eds.), Early childhood 
education in motion: The reconceptualist movement in 
Canada (pp. 5–20). Ottawa, ON: Canadian Child Care 
Federation. Available online (chapter 1 only) at http://
www.cyc.uvic.ca/uccr/pubs/

Swadener, B. & Cannella G. (2007). Reconceptualizing 
early childhood education in North America: A brief 
introduction. Canadian Child Care Federation, Winter, 
25–26. Retrieved from http://www.cyc.uvic.ca/uccr/
documents/