Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw
Veronica is a Professor of Early Childhood Education in the Faculty of Education at Western University in Ontario, Canada, and the co-director of the Ontario Provincial Centre of Excellence in Early Years and Child Care and the British Columbia Early Childhood Pedagogies Network. Prior to joining Western University, she was a Professor at the School of Child & Youth Care at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where she now serves as Adjunct Professor. Her current research traces the common world relations of children with places, materials, and other species. In particular, she is interested in the real life-worlds that 21st-century children inherit, inhabit, and share with others – human and more-than-human; and how these life-worlds are shaped by the legacies of anthropogenic environmental damage, imperial expansion, colonial dispossession, global inequalities, and displacements. She is keenly interested in how educators can develop pedagogies that attend to children’s real world relations in the places they inhabit.
Cristina Delgado Vintimilla
Cristina is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood in the Faculty of Education at York University. She is also the Pedagogista for the Ontario Centre of Excellence in Early Years and Child Care. Prior to joining York University Cristina was immersed in developing innovative and situated early childhood pedagogies at Capilano University Children’s centre. The Center is known in the Canadian Early Childhood context as a space for radical reconceptualization of early childhood practices and for research done at the intersection between pedagogy and the arts. Her research interest addresses the ethical question of living well with others within pedagogical gatherings. She engages with this question by problematizing issues of subjectivity in relation to prescribed practices in education, and by unsettling pedagogies that are based in human supremacy and instrumental-managerial logics. She is interested in the intersection between pedagogy and the arts as an enabling space to rethink the project of the human.
Alex Berry
Alex Berry is a PhD candidate 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. This orientation to research has energized her pedagogical work in early childhood spaces and curatorial work in two research-creation exhibits, Disorientating the early childhood sensorium: Micro-interruptions for alternative climate futures and Plastic Childhoods: Noticing toxic intra-dependencies in Andean early childhood.
Alex received a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for her current research in Ecuador, and the Canadian Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Scholarship for innovative international research with children for her Master’s research in India with the University of Victoria.
Alicja Frankowski
Alicja Frankowski is a PhD student at York University’s Faculty of Education. Her research has taken her from the position of a teacher action researcher, tracing movement pedagogies in her own classroom to thinking with pedagogical conditions in the work of the pedagogist. She is particularly interested in deconstructing romanticized and neoliberal narratives of relationality between human and more than human subjects in early education classrooms and is investigating taken for granted remnants of these narratives. Currently she is thinking about the term curiosity, its necessity in pedagogical spaces, and the ways in which it is implicated in individualistic and fragmented Euro-western approaches to knowledge formation.
Adrianne 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.
Photo by Alex Berry