ABSTRACT
This article seeks to unsettle representational practices enacted through dominant multicultural pedagogical approaches in the early childhood classroom. Drawing from a research study in early childhood centers that investigated practitioners’ and children’s negotiations of racial difference, I explore how multicultural pedagogical approaches in early childhood spaces present a risk through the potential for static representations of difference and diversity. I argue that these approaches potentially reproduce inequalities and delimit ways of engaging with difference and diversity through prescribing identity and dampening capacities for certain bodies in certain spaces. I offer possibilities for movements away from pre-defined and prescriptive approaches toward complexified approaches that require close attunement to the emergence of material-discursive assemblages. Attention to relational becomings has the potential to open possibilities for socially just early childhood pedagogies that enact a micropolitical engagement with the material-discursive entanglements of everyday encounters.
Getting it Right…
On a small table in a preschool classroom in British Columbia sits a mirror, white paper, a package of eight markers ranging in colors from dark brown to light cream marked as “apricot,” “peach,” “tan,” “sepia,” 108 “burnt sienna,” “mahogany,” “Black,” and “White.” On the bright yellow and green package of markers there is a green and blue earth globe, inside of which are the drawn faces of four smiling children of different hues surrounded by the words “multicultural” “multiculterel.” A four-year-old girl child-body sits on a chair facing the mirror. She moves to pick up a light cream “peach “-colored marker. She presses the marker down on a white piece of paper, and then looks intently at her face in the mirror. She repeats this several times, with different markers. She moves to put down yet another marker, and then pick up a darker-colored “tan” marker She removes the lid, and presses the tip down on the paper. She looks in the mirror, and then picks up the lid, places the lid back on the marker, and looks around the table. She exclaims loudly, “I got the right color!” with a big smile at the two female-adult bodies that sit near her. She presses the marker on the paper and draws a dark brown oval face.
Matching, Mixing and Matching…
A large and thick black book holds together pages of pedagogical narrations throughout the preschool year. One narration is named “Mixing the Colors of Us.” The narration describes how the educators instruct all the children to take the paint and paintbrush and match their skin color with the paint. Images of the children are shown with paintbrush, paint, and paper, around a table. As several child-bodies gather and look at the colors, one child notices that one of the children is different. The child says, “Her skin is a lot yellower then ours.” The educators point out to the children how all the skin colors are different from each other. The children are then instructed to take their “”skin color” paint and mix all the colors together. One light cream color emerges. An image shows the children looking at the light cream color. The children are next instructed to take the light cream color and add colors to it to match it back to their own skin color.
