Current Students
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.
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.
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 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.
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 (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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
Former Students
Weaving Child-plastic Relations in the Ecuadorian Andes (2022)
Alex Berry graduated from her PhD studies at Western University’s Faculty of Education. Within postqualitative framings, Alex’s research puts into conversation research-creation and pedagogical inquiry toward processes that might shape the emergence of alternative child-climate relations, particularly in the Ecuadorian Andes.
Kelly-Ann MacAlpine, PhD, is currently a part-time Assistant Professor and Research Associate at the Faculty of Education, Western University. Her area of study is early childhood environmental education, with a particular interest in how common worlds pedagogies and speculative storying rethink pedagogical and curricular approaches to support children’s sensitivities to, and relations with more-than-human others in environmentally precarious times. Her writing and research contribute to the Common Worlds Research Collective and Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory.
Dissertation Title: Common Worlding Pedagogies in Early Childhood Education: Storying situated processes for living and learning in ecologically precarious times
John Drew is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, French, and Writing at King’s University College at Western University. He is an award-winning researcher who has published globally on animals and nature in literature, multispecies empathy, environmental education, indigenization, and writing and social change within the climate emergency. His teaching focuses, in particular, on writing and its capacity to promote social, multispecies, and climate awareness and action. He is a member of the Common Worlds Research Collective.
Child Figurations (Ph.D., 2020)
Emily is writing about how child-figures, figurations of childhood, and early childhood imaginaries entangle to create particular worlds. She is interested in figures that have the potential to challenge taken for granted orthodoxies, oppose settler colonialism, and gesture towards different futures.
Fatty Muscles and Muscular Fats: Relating-With and Interrogating Fat(s) in Early Childhood Education (Ph.D. - 2017)
This project engages fat(s) and muscle(s) as generative and surprising biological-material matters. This project wonders what possibilities for engaging with fat in early childhood education might emerge if we refuse to brand fat as stable, inert, or dangerous: How can we attend to how fat moves, matters, and happens otherwise in early childhood education?
What Can a Body Do? Exploring Female Adolescent Sporting Bodies (MA - 2014)
This thesis interrogates embodiment as a riddle by foregrounding ethical, epistemological, and ontological questions of what embodiment(s) might be capable of creating and performing. Incorporating images and discussion generated with female PeeWee hockey players, this project experiments with articulating tentative, enfleshed, and entangled local embodiment(s) through the hockey-bodies of female adolescent athletes.
Unsettling encounters with 'natural' places in early childhood education (Ph.D. - 2014)
Fikile's dissertation crafts and puts to work practices of witnessing and a methodology of refiguring presences as modes of creating interruptions in settler colonial place relations. Her particular interest is in the anti-colonial possibilities of (re)storying the ‘natural’ places that we co-inhabit with children and educators.
(Re)Storying Dolls and Cars: Gender and Care with Young Children (Ph.D. - 2014)
Putting pedagogical narrations to work as a post-qualitative methodology, Denise explored gender and care through child-doll and child-car encounters in, near and far from the classroom. Her project speaks to gendering and caring as anything but innocent, private, individual practices but rather as always already collective, ethico-political, materialdiscursive becomings.
Can Early Childhood Educators ‘do’ Postfoundational Praxis in a Foundational World? A Praxiographic Inquiry into the Enactment of Reconceptualist Engagements (MA - 2017)
Positioned within reconceptualizing early childhood (RECE) literature, Erin's study makes visible the complexity and multiplicity in praxis that early childhood educators experience when they engage with postfoundational theories. Through participant observation, learning circles, and pedagogical narrations, this praxiography presents an account of how socio-material practices might make visible educators' learnings.
The Arts, Imperial and Settler Colonialism, and Places and Spaces (Ph.D. 2017)
Vanessa is an artist-researcher who engages in place specific art practice. She researches place through a broad range of methods, such as mixed media collage, drawing, story, photography, and installation. In her most resent work her primary art material is waste.
Disrupting the all-too-human body through art in early childhood education and car (MA - 2013)
The purpose of Vanessa's research was to disrupt the all-too-human body through art in early childhood education and care. Her study began by constructing the problem of the all-too-human body as it is practiced in the classroom and through art. With this study, she attempted to disrupt this way of reading the body through an art encounter. This involves rethinking/rewriting how we come to practice art making. To do this, Vanessa turned to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and employed three concepts: the Body without Organs (BwO), assemblage, and becoming. With these concepts, Vanessa's thesis was inspired by an immanent relational materialist onto-epistemology.
Exploring Experiences of Early Childhood Educators Who Are New to the Field (MA - 2017)
Drawning on the values and principles of appreciative inquiry and inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) ideas of becoming and rhizomatic thinking, Anastasia will explore experiences of educators who are new to the field. she is also interested in the possibilities of looking deeper into nuances of educators' experiences by using collage as methodology.
Narration-As-Action: The Potential of Pedagogical Narration for Leadership Enactment in Early Childhood Education Context (Ph.D. - 2013)
Iris explored what new possibilities for ECE leadership arise with the introduction of the practice of pedagogical narration in B.C. Drawing on Arendt’s political theory, the study offers new options for theorizing and enacting leadership in early childhood education contexts by rethinking pedagogical narration as political action.
Making Space for Disruption in the Education of Early Childhood Educators (Ph.D. - 2014)
Kathleen's postqualitative inquiry explored the processes that occurred when a group of early childhood education (ECE) students engaged with and in pedagogical narrations to make visible and disrupt hegemonic images of children/childhood. The project challenged anthropocentric andlogocentric understandings of education whereby the knower and the known are considered distinct entities in a pedagogical context.
Thinking with Nunangat in Proposing Pedagogies with Inuit Early Childhood Education
(Ph.D. - 2017)
Carol's research begins with the premise that ongoing processes of colonization disrupt access to Inuit ways of knowing and being in pedagogical practice. Her research investigates thinking with land, water, ice and snow as strategies for engaging with Inuit ontologies, epistemologies and axiologies. This research in done in collaboration with early childhood educators in an Inuit community. By being with land, by thinking with water and by doing with ice, children, families, hunters, educators and Elders gain access to: specific and technical Inuttitut language, acquire skills related to being with bushes and foxes, snow and ice, and in the process engaged with place based Indigenous knowledges.
Exploring the possibilities of learning stories as a meaningful approach to early childhood education in Nunavik (MA - 2013)
Could pedagogical narration in the form of learning stories offer a medium through which Indigenous approaches to learning and care be made visible? In this local/regional collaborative action research project, Carol found that photo narratives accompanied by active group reflection provide a place through which Inuit knowledges can be accessed; multi-level relationships amongst educators, children, families and administrators strengthened; and the Inuktitut language positioned as a written medium of communication.
Conceptualizing Self, Identity, and Subjectivity: Engagements with Theories and Theorists in Child and Youth Care (MA - 2014)
In his thesis, Scott analyzes various conceptualizations of the self in child and youth care, as well as concepts of identity and subjectivity. The concept of the self - central to North American child and youth care - has been understood as the mediator of knowledge and skills, the foundation of authentic and therapeutic relationships, and the essence of ethical, moral, and professional practice. He focuses on concepts that (1) have traditionally played a central role in child and youth care curriculum and professionalization; (2) emerged from research conversations; and (3) specifically relate to issues of diversity, power, and decolonization.
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.