Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemReconceptualising disability and inclusion: Enacting relational ways of knowing, being and doing with Bush Kinder( 2022)In the past decade over 170 ‘nature kindergarten’ programs have emerged in Victoria, Australia in which children and their early childhood teachers and educators routinely engage with local places – beaches, creeks, bush, parklands - for extended periods each week. While legally and ethically mandated to include all learners and pedagogically and philosophically premised on inclusive theories, quality standards and curriculum frameworks, little is known about how these new practice approaches conceptualise and support inclusivity for children with a range of diverse abilities. Dominant positivist and developmental discourses in research concerned with ‘disability’ in early childhood education tend to emphasize what children cannot do, pathologising difference, locating the problem within and trying to fix individual children while ignoring the relational, political, ethical and performative nature of dis/ability and inclusivity. This study seeks to resist and disrupt these dominant traditions. Situated within a post qualitative methodological orientation, this research puts post foundational, common worlds and feminist new materialist theoretical perspectives to work, employing pedagogical narration (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015) and writing as method (Richardson, 2000) to think with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2017) in everyday encounters with one ‘Bush Kinder’ on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri-Woiwurrung people of the Kulin Nation the traditional custodians of Narrm (the Australian city also known as Melbourne). Re-presenting encounters with Place, children, teachers, parents and more-than-human others, I make visible and trouble essentialised and romanticised conceptions of children, ability and nature, which are antithetical to the ethical and political entanglements of real and imagined global childhoods in contemporary Australia (Malone, Tesar & Arndt, 2020a). As others have argued before me, disability and ability are co-constituted and need to be complexified as dis/ability (Goodley, 2018). Inclusivity therefore involves broader entanglements of relatedness and mutual belonging (Taylor & Giugni, 2012). Activating these conceptions in theory and practice requires that we write with disability otherwise in early childhood education - against the dominant traditions of developmentalism and interventionist approaches. Here I enact this reconceptualisation through pedagogical narration - attuning to what children can do instead of what they can’t and emphasizing the broader relational, political and ethical entanglements of humans, more-than-humans, materials and place which are always already present in early childhood education and mutually implicated in processes of dis/ablement. I employ writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson, 2000; Richardson & St. Pierre, 2017; St. Pierre, 2021b) to generate small, situated knowledges which open new possibilities for thinking and doing in education. Holding developmental, scientific and neurological knowledges about children, ‘disability’ and ‘nature’ alongside to enact relational ways of knowing, being and doing-with in early childhood education, making visible possibilities for reconceptualising dominant, deficit focused conceptions of ‘disability’ and ‘inclusion’. Drawing on Haraway (2016) and Lenz Taguchi (2009) I offer possibilities for more response-able, inclusive and intra-active early childhood pedagogies and activist-practitioner-researcher subjectivities which attune to and amplify the lived experiences of dis/abled children themselves as well as the human and more-than-human others they are always already entangled with in the common worlds of Bush Kinder. This post qualitative work materializes new potentialities for knowing, being and doing with, disrupting traditional knowledges and practices which seek to know children through instrumental, developmental and ableist frames of reference which render difference as deficit.