Educating emerging educators within collisions of child development and postdevelopmental pedagogies

Situated amid the dominance of child development as a paradigm for understanding early childhood education in Canada, three instructors who work with undergraduate students in postsecondary institutions discuss the particular context, inheritances, struggles and possibilities encountered when we work at creating postdevelopmental pedagogies with undergraduate student emerging educators. We begin by studying how child development is framed in postsecondary early childhood education programme course descriptions in Ontario to make visible the specific ‘lives’ that developmentalism takes as it becomes figured as an incontestable foundational knowledge for students. To anchor our approach to thinking otherwise to child development with emerging educators, we then elaborate our commitments in interrupting child development. We propose three imperfect proposals towards thinking with postdevelopmental pedagogies with emerging educators, offering these practices as our ongoing struggle with navigating frustrating, continual and consequential collisions of child development and postdevelopmental pedagogies. Throughout the article, we locate our work as an uncertain struggle of figuring out how to engage in our own teaching generatively, responsively, and with more than only a critical impulse in a postsecondary context loyal to child development.