Mitsy (Kwang Dae) Chung
My lived experience of difference and my fascination with pedagogical research into reconceptualizing [early childhood] education through drawing as an encounter (Ph.D., ongoing)
Mitsy is an artist, researcher, pedagogist and early childhood educator. She has been an early childhood educator for over 15 years, primarily focusing on young children’s drawings and aesthetic art.
Her proposed doctoral study would build on her ongoing research and explore the potential of artmaking to create inclusive, equitable classroom communities where children and educators, including those who embody difference, may live [well] together through diffractive and humiliating moments.
Adrianne Bacelar de Castro
Adrianne de Castro (PhD, ongoing) is a Brazilian educator with years of experience working in elementary and secondary schools in Brazil. Her MA Thesis is inspired by common worlds pedagogies and thinking with, rather than mastering concepts, materials and others of shared worlds. She believes in an approach to early childhood education that is collectivist and inclusive of more-than-humans. Her research is a humble response toward more livable worlds in the present human-modified geological epoch of the Anthropocene.
Malvika Agarwal
A soundfull inquiry in early childhood education for livable world (MPEd, ongoing)
My research, catalyzed from resisting the burgeoning visual artifacts within the field of early childhood education research, intents to propose an alternative sensorial re-imagining of early childhood assemblages within the climate action discourse. Through posthuman and new-materialist theories, I am currently engaged with ecological sound art as my methodology.
Narda Nelson
Storytelling for earthly survival in ECE (Ph.D., ongoing)
Narda is exploring podcasting as method to investigate two central research questions: What does it mean to tell stories of earthly survival in early childhood education? What might these stories do in the field? Her work is underscored by the question of whose perspectives we foreground in the project of reimaging education around the nurturance of future survivable worlds?
Tatiana Zakharova-Goodman
Tatiana is a playground designer and is currently pursuing a PhD at the Faculty of Education at Western University (Canada). Tatiana thinks at the intersection of pedagogy and design, as she works to re-imagine relationship-attuned play as worlding and play/ground(ing) as potentialities. Building on her interdisciplinary background, Tatiana theorizes play and outdoor play spaces as contentious, uneven, and always political.
Sarah Hennessy
Creating of an Uncommon Field Guide: Research-creation in precarious times (Ph.D., ongoing)
Using research-creation methodology, I work at the intersection of early childhood education and the arts to address climate change. Through the creation of a place-based uncommon field guide with children and educators, I imagine interconnected political lives with, not separate from, nature.
Cory Jobb
Cory Jobb (Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, British Columbia) is an assistant professor in early childhood education and PhD candidate in curriculum studies at UWO. His current research draws on children’s geographies and critical environmental early childhood education to rethink pedagogies of place within landscapes shaped by anthropogenic harms such as waste and climate change.
Sara Rocio Raeesi-Gujani
Land as pedagogical ethos: A sympoietic response to being and becoming-with/in the world (Ph.D., ongoing)
The sacred, yet, ecological distressed Lands endowed to children and evoked by Anthropocene calls early childhood education to (re)invent, (re)create and (re)respond to it; how might Land pedagogy opens up thresholds of possibility to children and educators to co-create pedagogical ethos ensamblages responsive to Indigenous Land’s reciprocal relations and ontologies in daily pedagogical practice?
Tatiana Zakharova
Play/grounding: Rethinking relationships with and on playgrounds (Ph.D., ongoing)
Tatiana Zakharova, MLA, is a playground designer at Earthscape, and is pursuing a PhD at the Faculty of Education at Western University under the supervision of leading early childhood scholar Dr. Pacini-Ketchabaw. Her work at Earthscape focuses on playground concept development and research. Academically, Tatiana thinks at the intersection of pedagogy and landscape architecture, as she works to re-imagine relationship-attuned play as worlding and play/grounding as potentialities. Her research (http://play.climateactionchildhood.net) theorizes play and outdoor play spaces as contentious, uneven, and always political.
Laura Coulman
Disabling Consent: a feminist Hobbesian analysis of Early Childhood Education and the production of disability (Ph.D., ongoing)
My works looks at disability in ECE discourses. Using feminist Hobbesian social contract theory, I cast doubt on dominant knowledges shaping the conventions of ECE and demonstrate that they contain unexposed and dominant ideas about who is not human enough (Russell, 1998), by nature, to be part of civil society.
Courtney Amber
Food, Meal Times and School Gardens: Territories for Curriculum Making and Resistance (MPEd, ongoing)
The aims of my research is to locate food, meal times and school gardens as territories for curriculum making and resistance to capitalist and neoliberal ideologies within early years programs and schools. I work through food, meal times and agricultural practices to argue that all players in education will be able to till through socio-political entanglements and cultivate more situated, yet expansive, ways of knowing, being and moving in and with the world.
Ashley Do Nascimento
Facing Climate Change in the 21st Century: Racialized, Female Youth entanglements with Polluted Waters (Ph.D., ongoing)
This research looks to a group of racialized female youth and their entanglements with local polluted waters to explore how they negotiate water rehabilitation practices in Hamilton, Ontario