Abstracts
Abstract
This paper tells of an early childhood educator’s search for meaning making while experiencing a crisis of the self—a deep questioning of personhood, worthiness, ability, and purpose. It represents a snapshot of a particular time in a particular life at the convergence of a master’s program in ECE, a worldwide pandemic, and a provincial research project, which culminated in personal crisis and a great unsettling of identity. It is written in first person, from the ‘I’—the author’s humancentric appraisal of a personal pedagogical intervention, a reckoning with the self—in the hope of finding something otherwise, and something more generative as an educator within early childhood education. The paper grapples with the question of how we can create the conditions for early childhood educators to “read hard, think hard and write hard”—to dig deep, and to go deeper (St. Pierre, 2019) without dismantling a sense of self or a personhood that embodies a deep desire to contribute positively to our unfinished world.
Keywords:
- identity,
- early childhood educator,
- meaning making,
- pandemic,
- early childhood education
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Appendices
Biographical note
Veronica Maclean is first and foremost an early childhood educator with 35 years of experience. She obtained her ECE and HSER diplomas at Selkirk College, a child and youth care degree at the University of Victoria, and a master’s degree in early childhood education at UBC. She is a sessional (online) instructor at UBC and an ECCE instructor at Selkirk College. Her pedagogical commitments are to leadership and rethinking the image of the educator. She thinks primarily with postfoundational perspectives, and through these theoretical frameworks she labours to unravel and trouble dominant discourses in early childhood that stagnate and stand in the way of transformative pedagogies. Her passions include creative and academic writing. She uses writing as a way of engaging with, lingering, and thinking deeply about the complexities of living well in our worlds today. Email: veronicamaclean67@gmail.com
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