Alexandra Berry, PhD
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
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, PhD
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.
Emily Ashton
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.
Nicole Land
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.
Fikile Nxumalo
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.
Denise Hodgins
(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.
Erin Mirau
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.
Vanessa Clark
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.
Anastasia Butcher
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.
iris berger
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.
Kathleen Kummen
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.
Mary Caroline Rowan
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.
Scott Kouri
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.