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Pedagogy, as a field of study, proposes provocative questions to education (Calaprice, 2017; Ferrante, 2014; Mariani et al., 2017), among other things. In the work I have been doing as a pedagogista in early childhood education in Canada (see Vintimilla, 2018, 2020). I offer provocative questions to unsettle the normative, colonial-capitalist–founded and –driven educational worlds we inhabit and, largely unconsciously, promulgate. A pedagogista is an Italian professional figure that has influenced the field of early childhood education in North America through the interest in the Reggio Emilia pedagogical approach. Briefly, a pedagogista[1] thinks education and proposes pedagogical trajectories that are responsive to a specific educational context and experience. In my work alongside educators and children, I try to offer questions to propel education, particularly early childhood education, to recognize the limits of the realities it creates. Such limits are what particular forms of being and knowing create, sustain, and enforce. Pedagogy engages with such limits and incites education to imagine and realize different educational futures by thinking with and synthesizing the interdisciplinary intersections and languages that are part of its praxis (Vintimilla & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020) In this praxis, or ways of proceeding, pedagogy draws on a variety of concepts, genres, and modes of thinking and engagement that are future oriented in that they are not so much of what is, but of what might be. In this paper I engage in this praxis by focusing on my work as a pedagogista in relation to the concepts of critique, estrangement, and what I call speculative envisioning. I argue that these concepts are themselves modes of engagement, practice, and thinking that are pedagogical and that they can help educators engage with the necessary, beautiful, and painful processual, nondeterministic work of creating (and assuming) conditions for what Tiffany Lethabo King et al. (2020) refer to as “otherwise worlds” (p. 8). Critique could be seen as a worn out concept, often misunderstood and dismissed, while speculative envisioning is, in my experience, generally a foreign concept in pedagogical practices in early childhood education – although it could perhaps be related to speculative thinking. The latter is a concept with some traction and citational force just now, yet it is sometimes accepted uncritically and taken as a “positive practice” that fills us with possibility (see Truman, 2019). Estrangement is a concept that can link critique and speculative envisioning and be the medium of their co-articulation.

To build my argument, I first present the concept of critique and the reasons I am interested in it – even if it has “lost steam,” as Bruno Latour (2004) insists. To reassert critique’s promise, I engage with it in the ways Michel Foucault (1988, 1997) and Judith Butler (2002) ask us to engage with it and consider what it might specifically offer to early childhood education. In doing so, I take up Foucault’s double movement of critique as both partner and adversary to the arts of governing, and I accept Butler’s invitation to question certainties in education that spotlight the limits of knowledge. I then introduce estrangement as a pedagogical disposition towards otherwise educational worlds and as a means by which to consider speculative envisioning. I propose speculative envisioning as a mode of pedagogical thought that works as a necessary supplement to critique and constitutes a pedagogical and ethical move toward otherwise educational worlds.

Critique, its Double Movement, and the Limits of Knowledge

Critique, being a main mode of philosophical work, interrelates with other forms of thought that are regarded as philosophical methods, forms such as analysis, questioning, interpretation, and translation. In the academic networks in which I work, critique is often seen as a relic of Western thought. These views echo, for example, Latour’s (2004) challenges to critique, or what he refers to as critique’s “barbarism” due to its relentless force to debunk arguments and tear apart other people’s ideas rather than assemble new ones. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2020) brings our attention to how the critical attitude is often linked to objective detachment, “a rationality in which sentimentality is put aside in quest for the cold, hard, higher truth (all sitting well with the subjective/objective divide)” (p. 28). Puig de la Bellacasa calls for a different form of criticality, one less patriarchal, one that reveals our concern, proximity, and care for what we research – a criticality in which the vulnerability of our work can be made public, and we can recognize citational contamination and show generosity rather than claiming our work as a constant ahistorical breakthrough.

I appreciate these concerns and invitations, and on many occasions, I refer to them. However, I am still interested in critique, specifically in the ways Foucault and Butler understand this concept. These are ways that, in my view, are a slightly different take on what critique is and what it might be able to do. As a pedagogista and researcher, I think we have not yet deeply engaged with the onto-epistemological (and therefore pedagogical) possibilities offered in Foucault’s and Butler’s thinking of critique. In the early childhood education contexts in which I have worked and those with which I am currently working, critique is often confused with criticism and argumentation. Critique also seems to be confused with critical thinking – a much more welcome concept in these contexts. In my experience, through these confusions, and perhaps entangled with the anti-intellectualism that sometimes is present in early childhood education, it seems that critique is a foreign practice. My hope is to invite consideration of its pedagogical potential. These considerations are relevant, especially because for both Foucault and Butler, critique is thought in relation to subjectivity and transformation.

Foucault (1997) understands critique as a means or an instrument, something that exists always in relation to something else and is subordinated to it. He writes:

After all, critique only exists in relation to something other than itself; it is an instrument, a means for a future or a truth that will not know nor happen to be; it oversees a domain it would want to police and is unable to regulate.

p. 42

Hence critique is not abstract or transcendental; it is subordinate; it does not stand as a pure practice. And yet, if we ponder and reread the above quotation, Foucault is also saying that critique is a means “for a future or a truth that it will not know nor happen to be” (p. 42). I want to bring attention to this double movement of critique. On the one hand, it is subordinated to a discourse, practice, or discipline; on the other, it opens the way for a “yet to come.” I find Foucault’s critique both entirely beholden and inevitably natal, and thus, having pedagogical value. I will come back to this point.

Foucault (1997) considers critique and the critical attitude an art, the art of not being governed. It is an art we can trace historically and associate with another: the art of governing, and to be more specific, the art of governing persons. Such art, Foucault argues, developed from being linked to a limited field of action, for example, in the Catholic church’s governing and directing of conscience towards salvation, and then the proliferation of this form throughout different areas (education being one example of such arts of governing, or governmentalization). For Foucault, governmentalization cannot be dissociated from the question that drives critique, one that asks instead “how not to be governed” (p. 44). This question invites a curiosity that has consequences on educator’s ways of being and acting to which I refer in this paper. For now, I want to be cautious, as Foucault encourages us to be, when it comes to the question of how not to be governed. His caution refers to being explicit in that he is not proposing the idea of not being governed at all, in contrast or opposition to being governed, but rather

How not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them.

p. 44, emphasis in original

This critical attitude is not about a total disavowal of governmentalization but actually points again to critique’s double movement mentioned earlier. This is critique as both

Partner and adversary to the arts of governing, as an act of defiance, as a challenge, as a way of limiting these arts of governing and sizing them up, transforming them, of finding a way to escape from them, in any case, a way to displace them, with a basic distrust, but also and by the same token, as a line of development of the arts of governing.

p. 45

Here I quote Foucault at length because of the force of his words in my thinking regarding this edge, this in-between and double movement – the interplay between governmentalization and critique that characterizes the critical attitude. His words work here as a powerful antidote to that too presumptuous idea I often encounter in my life as a scholar and a pedagogista, which arrogates to the critical attitude the stance of liberator of epistemological constraint, bringing again and again the haunting effect of the liberal principle of autonomy. This is a principle that feeds the illusion of sovereignty – as if the critical attitude will grant us the ability to act on the basis of our own values and ideas. These illusions can become visible, for example, when educators understand their work as a practice of control and mastery, of predictability and management, or when, in the practice of the new role of a pedagogist in early childhood education in Canada, the role is understood as one more instantiation in professional development and in the arrogation of the “right” way to educate. Embracing this double movement can be exemplified in moments when educators carefully noticed the ways in which child development – as a dominant discourse – constrained what might have been possible in their practice: for example, assuming developmentally appropriate practices that suggest simplifying language and ideas when talking with children – to make them more concrete, less abstract. Or relating to children as not fully formed humans. Yet at the same time, this noticing opened up pedagogical processes that slowly displaced child development and the subjugation of educators’ practice to it: for instance, actively relating to children as always already fully humans participating in the makings of the relations and the worlds they inhabit. Or taking up ideas considered too abstract or difficult for the children and engaging with them in playful and speculative ways while noticing where the conversation might take us. Or deciding to organize the classroom based on the ideas, problems, or materials we were exploring rather than dividing it into developmentally appropriate areas of exploration and play.

I want to insist then on Foucault’s point of recognizing the critical attitude, and with it the subject, not as transcending or being disimplicated from its structures of interpretation, but as yet defiant of them by the “art of not wanting to be governed quite as much” (Foucault, 1997, p. 45). Thus, Foucault turns our attention to how critique manifests itself, not as a use of a value judgement (good/bad, correct/incorrect) of discourses or practices, but rather as a question, such as the one that Butler (2002) asks when she writes, “What is the relation of knowledge to power such that our epistemological certainties turn out to support a way of structuring the world that forecloses alternative possibilities of ordering?” (p. 214). Given the interest of this paper, I cannot help but wonder, would this not be a worthwhile question for educators to live with for some time? And perhaps it is a worthwhile question with respect not just to epistemological certainties but also to the certainties that emerge from the daily repetitions of routine, from those certainties that emerge from fears of losing control in a classroom and those that are sedimented day after day by a sense of possession accruing to the value of being “experienced” educators? These are certainties that might not allow us to do the necessary work to engage with the ruins of our time – ruins of which we should not be afraid, Alexis Shotwell (2016) suggests; in sum, all such certainties that might work as an enclosure, erecting barriers before the possible, the otherwise – or before what Rinaldo Walcott (2021) refers to as the “new modes of human life” and Butler (2002) calls “alternative possibilities of ordering the world” (p. 214). In these quotes, I listen to the invitation to do one of the gestures that I think pedagogy invites us to do: create collectives that can envision and ideate educational processes that will cultivate conditions for other possible futures. Let me end this section with what Butler writes immediately after her question, which addresses the “certainties” in education:

Of course, we may think that we need epistemological certainty in order to state for sure that the world is and ought to be ordered in a given way. To what extent, however, is that certainty orchestrated by forms of knowledge precisely in order to foreclose the possibility of thinking otherwise?

p. 214

I have carried this question often in my work, because I am interested in collectively thinking what might be necessary to engage in practices of otherwise worlds in early childhood education; for example, practices that are not just about preparing children to acquire skills for eventual reading and writing by following predefined pathways (often detached from children’s situatedness), but rather, practices in which children’s ideas and relations are taken up seriously as the cultural makings of a present that proposes different questions and significations, and not the mere acquisition of fixed meanings. Furthermore, Butler’s questions reconnect me with Foucault because they evoke not just conceptions of knowledge but also the idea of limits, the limits of knowledge I was referring to at the beginning of this paper, and their relation to subjectivity and transformation.

For Foucault, critique is a matter of the conception – the idea – of knowledge, the epistemological order and limits. Following Foucault, I would argue that it is when knowing and when being affected by such limits that an opening for multiple alternative ontologies might emerge. At this point, I hear the echoes of excited conversations over many years regarding the problem of recognizing epistemological limits of/in early childhood education; for instance, regarding the purpose of early childhood education as more than a mere service, about reconfiguring the role of the educator as more than a caregiver, or expanding our human-centric conception of relationality to recognize how entangled we are with the material and more than human, and unsettling managerial practices that govern the way we relate to children every day in early childhood settings, just to name just a few. How can one know such limits? What is necessary for such limits to become visible, particularly if we recognize that we are enveloped within the very logics we are trying to make visible? Or, to use a term Sylvia Wynter borrowed from Asmaron Legesse (1973, as cited in Wynter, 1994), how do we make visible such limits when we act as the “grammarians” of such order? Here, grammarians are understood as the people who are well versed in ordering a field of experience in accordance with the axiological and epistemological system of the nation state. As I ask these questions, I find it helpful to stay with Butler (2002) as she writes:

One asks about the limits of ways of knowing because one has already run up against crisis within the epistemological field in which one lives … And it is from this condition, the tear in the fabric of our epistemological web, that the practice of critique emerges.

p. 215

It is from an ongoing crisis, a tear in the fabric of our epistemological (and ontological) web, that our modes of existence might be risked and undone. Yet, I think it is important to point out that the subjective processes that emerge from such a tearing of the onto-epistemological fabric are always situated and in relation to particular material and socio-historical contexts. This is important to highlight because this praxis calls for responsibility – to the systemic conditions we are part of and the alternative possibilities that might emerge from such praxis.

Estrangement as a Pedagogical Disposition Towards Otherwise Educational Worlds

As I consider the idea of running against a certain onto-epistemological crisis, I wonder if one needs a certain space in-between, a certain dispossession, and estrangement, a suspension of some sort, and – why not? – a certain courage to recognize such limits. Indeed, Foucault’s concept of critique requires a double movement from within the subject, since it seems to me that a critical attitude asks for a form of possession (questioning the politics that make the normative worlds we inhabit) and then risks dispossession through unrecognizability. Perhaps this is a subject who consciously does not want to feel so much at home, a subject who lives well with not fully complying to the established coordinates, and thus with a sense of estrangement from the familiar. This subject is one who never settles for belonging and yet recognizes itself as inscribed and constituted by the politics of truth in which it lives.

I wonder if this practice of critique is possible today in early childhood education and particularly among educators. Is there space amid mastery and control, possession and sovereignty to tear the epistemological web that holds our worlds – or to recognize that there might be a web, torn or otherwise? Furthermore, in early childhood education the feeling of not wanting to be at home is rare. In my experience working with educators, I more often encounter the desire to create a community of sameness, a repetition of the same familiar present, rather than a community in which unrecognizability might be risked (Vintimilla, 2021), in which we might be able to envision a future that is not already determined. The echo of this “wanting to belong to a community” and its relatively warm and cozy feeling, its security and reassurance, is not a foreign feeling for me in my work as a pedagogista, and it has often been part of encounters with educators (see Vintimilla, 2014) in which I had to face and share with them my own hesitations and vulnerability as a way to collectively think about what matters to us, to what are we trying to respond to, and what concerns or move us ethically and politically. I think it is interesting and revealing to consider this desire from many different directions. Here, I reflect on it in light of Butler’s (2002) concept of critique as “that perspective on established and ordering ways of knowing which is not immediately assimilated into that ordering function” (p. 215). Thus, critique brings an unexpectedness that cannot be managed, an unexpectedness that surfaces within that suspension or impasse when something is not assimilated in the previous order of things and when one actually joins the present rather than just tumbles through as a subject adrift (see Nxumalo, Vintimilla & Nelson, 2018).

In the same tone, it is also provocative, when thinking about the role of educators, that for Foucault (1997) the critical attitude, as the exposure of epistemological limits, is associated with the practice of virtue, “as if virtue itself is to be found in the risking of established order” (p. 215). Is this not a provocative idea when thinking about concepts of the “good” and “virtuous” educator? Butler (2002) writes about Foucault’s understanding of virtue thus:

Virtue is not a way of complying with or conforming with pre-established norms. It is, more radically, a critical relation to those norms, one which, for Foucault, takes shape as a specific stylization of morality.

p. 215

It is here where the question “What, given the contemporary order of being, can I be?” (Butler, 2002, p. 221) takes shape and becomes ethical and necessary. Such a question, which is at the base of Foucault’s politics of desubjugation – as well as the self-making that starts when the subject gives oneself the right to question – are for him an art, which can be understood as an art of existence (Foucault, 1985), the art of living our lives as a relational oeuvre in which the self cultivates a relationship with the world and itself, always in the process of becoming and yet never totally fulfilled. As Butler (2002) points out:

Engaged in “arts of existence” this subject is both crafted and crafting, and the line between how it is formed, and how it becomes a kind of forming, is not easily, if ever drawn … The “indistinguishability” of this line is precisely the juncture where social norms intersect with ethical demands, and where both are produced in the context of a self-making which is never fully self-inaugurate.

p. 225

What then would it mean to conceptualize education, educators, and pedagogists in light of this relational art of existence? In the name of which responsibility will early childhood education risk or elide its reconfiguration as a world? If the role of the educator is also loaded with its historical responsibility for the “safety,” “care,” and “well-being” of the ones who are being educated, would there be a space to imagine this role as a “riskier practice that seeks to yield artistry from constraint” (Butler, 2002, p. 226) and thus a practice not only of virtue, as Foucault suggests, but also of world making?

These questions are helpful for me in two ways. Once again, they are a cautious move towards understanding Foucault’s and Butler’s concepts by attempting not to trap them in a sense of being portrayed as offering us enlightenment or salvation. They are also a way to consider the connection between a certain understanding of estrangement and Foucault’s concept of critique, which then may be brought into conversation with education as the space in which we relate to the future – a future understood not as a repetition of the present and of “the codes that govern humanness” (McKittrick, 2015, p. 8).

As I discussed before, Foucault’s critique occurs in recognition of and at the limits of epistemological certainties, but it does not aim at a revolutionary flight from any particular condition brought about by those normativities or at installing a better understanding of how to act and be in the world. Although the critical attitude happens at risk of our own subject formation and hence calls upon taking the risk of unrecognizability, this lack of recognition is necessarily neither an alienated and alienating solitude nor an act of introspective withdrawal from the world that constitutes us. On the contrary, for Foucault such ontological risk – like his concept of critique – is much more attuned with what I recognize as estrangement, a generative pedagogical experience that emerges in educational processes that are in deep relation with our inheritances while also envisioning other possible futures.

This understanding of estrangement is not estrangement from the world – suggestive of distance from political and worldly affairs – but estrangement for and within the world as a way of being in a space of defamiliarization that might unsettle the stagnation of routine – the repetition of “the world as we know it” patterns – and propel us to think beyond the already established by presenting the world through different and unusual angles, and thus, I will say, through problematizing the familiar: to be in the familiar and yet within a certain estrangement. This is a conception of estrangement that is opposed to both Marxist world alienation[2] (alienation is a concept laden with the wish to be overcome) and romantic introspection. Rather, and based on my experience as a pedagogista, I am pointing to estrangement as a disposition towards the yet to come.

Might it be that in education we might recognize as a form of alienation what I have just indicated here as estrangement? Perhaps in education such a conception of estrangement threatens the root of possession and sovereignty, those presumptive colonial inheritances which may arise from fears cultivated by understandings of educating as controlling and managing. Why should we risk self-affirmation to approach the otherwise and unfamiliar? Perhaps we might ask, why bother with thinking about education and estrangement if we – at least some of us – live well with, and are recognized as competent in, the familiarity of the tried-and-true daily routine? “Why bother with the system when the system works?” as an undergraduate student once asked me.

These questions are relevant because they remind me of the difficult process of trying to imagine alternatives when the only discourse that is available is that there are no alternatives. This assumption of no alternatives is one I have been interested in unsettling. I think of it as a slow work of evading “conceptual coagulation and the prejudice of taking the given for granted, the assumption that it could not be otherwise” (Giles, 2007, p. 16). I understand thinking otherwise alternatives in education, and the generative estrangement this might bring, as necessary in the work of pedagogisti (plural of pedagogista in Italian) and in their pedagogical endeavours, which involve envisioning as a way of dehabituation, a way of making the familiar strange, of making the ordinary anomalous. I am referring here to a type of pedagogical work that asks us to be aware that with

Perpetual mobility, essential fragility or rather the complex interplay between what replicates the same process and what transform it … we have to deal with something whose stability, deep rootedness and foundation is never such that we cannot in one way or another envisage, if not its disappearance, then at least identifying by what and from what its disappearance is possible.

Foucault, 1997, p. 65

The Disruptive Excitement of Speculative Envisioning

Envisaging, to use Foucault’s term – and more specifically, speculative envisioning – is what defines my practice as a pedagogista. Speculative envisioning is a form of crafting pedagogical orientations that emerge between concreteness and utopia, possibility and necessity, and within the educational tension of who one is, who one is allowed to be, and who one could become within educational spaces (Milani, 2017). It is speculative because this form of envisioning “is a mode of thought committed to foster visions of other worlds possible” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 110) Speculative envisioning requires that we choose – that we propose and invent – on the basis of the uncertain and the unthought as a way to give form or “cut out” the singularity of a given educational project (D’Angella & Orsenigo, 1999) that, at the same time, is the result of ideation – of ideas put in action – through a series of speculative processes.

In the work I do together with educators, we attempt the difficult task of learning to inherit the onto-epistemological coordinates that define the worlds we inhabit, and in doing that, we work collectively at noticing the limits and the crisis of such onto-epistemological worlds (educational and otherwise). Yet, this is not enough. Critique might be necessary, but it is also not enough. On the basis of such crisis, on the creation of some openings, we are called to envision and ideate. To say it with Alain Badiou (2019), we are propelled to insert something into the present (and its ongoingness) – in between what is and what might be. In the encounter between the educators and my work, we try to create the conditions so that, collectively, we can activate speculative propositions that insert an otherwise into the fabric of the present. These speculative propositions can be modest gestures taken up in mundane everyday practices. For example, some years ago I invited a group of educators to collectively consider what curricular changes we might make so that we could move from routines and transitions, which managed time and children, to slowly and collectively create rituals that would nourish other relational and temporal logics. For instance, lingering longer during lunch times, collectively noticing a drawing and its ideas without rushing to the next transition, attending to what others have to say, and opening spaces for dialogue and collective thinking and encounters – logics that would invite us to value and create an aesthetics and an affective realm that resist managerial and normative modes of relating. To put it differently, we activate propositions that organize conditions to create curricular experiences, within the mundane ins and outs of the everyday, that are open to otherwise ways of being, thinking, and acting – ways that are less managerial, less capitalistic, less based on human supremacy, less extractive. Envisioning is enacted through the disruptive excitement of a proposition. Indeed, propositions carry an excitement that creates a flicker in the makings of educational and curricular everydayness, while at the same time posing “a risk that requires a leap of thought and imagination” (Sehgal, 2014, p. 198). Thus, pedagogical propositions might not be fully formulated, or based on fully knowing, and they are not the product of evidence, but they are pregnant with all the potentiality and allure of a “making different” – they manifest speculative and pedagogical visions into practice through the intense and creative labouring of curriculum making.

A beginning gesture towards creating such speculative propositions is through activating what pedagogy does (among other things): offering provocative questions to education. These questions are never neutral; they emerge out of particular concerns. In my case, I offer questions to early childhood education because I am concerned about the ways in which early childhood is committed to an array of logics, vocabularies, and normative discourses (for instance, managerial, custodial, developmental, and liberal-human-centric, to name just a few). These grammars of recognition tend to assimilate, as Katherine McKittrick (2015) writes, “all forms of human beings into a single homogenized descriptive statement that is based on the figure of the West’s liberal monohumanist Man” (p. 23) and, simultaneously, prevent early childhood education from imagining other subjects and other worlds – larger worlds – that emerge from paying attention to other logics (human and more than human). These other educational worlds I am referring to here are worlds that can engage with questions that pedagogy – as what thinks education – might ask. Questions such as: What kind of educational worlds are being sustained? What relations are being reproduced? What subjective processes are possible and what are impossible to imagine? What inheritances and histories does early childhood education engage with? And what possibilities are available, or not, to reconfigure life’s configurations? In my view, pedagogy offers questions like these because it thinks education must be more than a means to an end, more than an instrumental project to produce better capitalist futures or to socialize children “into codes that govern humanness” (McKittrick, 2015, p. 8). These questions are neither neutral nor fetishistic of change (i.e., change for the sake of change) because they emerge from the situated practice of being in relation with the world and its worlding beyond our wanting and doing. Indeed, speculative envisioning is crafted as a response to something that immanently addresses us. Yet, given the history of education, it is important to notice that this response is not done as an egocentric meaning-making act or as an effort to signify what addressed us. Rather, it is done as a speculative, propositional, and creative gesture that is collectively (with human, material, atmospheric, and more-than-human educational protagonists) stitched into the fabric of the present through interpretive curricular processes that are not interested in repeating and perpetuating the educational worlds we know. As a pedagogical practice, speculative envisioning delineates processes that have the potential to produce education as an event – as what is not yet here. In this way, speculative envisioning is not focused on meaning making. If anything, it is a praxis that is interested in immanent possibilities for world making. It is future oriented. Therefore, it is a praxis that creates educational worlds that welcome the early childhood education to come.