Résumés
Abstract
This article uses an autotheoretical approach to examine epistemic injustice in postsecondary early childhood education and care (ECEC). Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s framework of epistemic injustice and my personal narratives, I explore how dominant developmentalist and neoliberal discourses marginalize alternative knowledges and lived experiences in ECEC programs. Through reflective vignettes centered on affirmative experiences of being listened to by my grandmother, I analyze testimonial and hermeneutical injustices faced by educators and students whose identities and epistemologies fall outside of normative developmental frameworks. This article argues that hierarchical knowledge structures and accreditation standards perpetuate exclusion and proposes listening as an ethical and political practice to advance epistemic justice. It concludes by envisioning democratic ECEC spaces that embrace multiplicity, challenge developmentalist hegemony, and create openings for diverse ways of knowing and being.
Keywords:
- epistemic injustice,
- postsecondary early childhood education,
- autotheory,
- developmentalism
Parties annexes
Bibliography
- Abawi, Z., Berman, R., & Powell, A. (2019). Gender, race, and precarity: Theorizing the parallels between early childhood educators and sessional faculty in Ontario. Atlantis, 40(1), 45-60. https://doi.org/10.7202/1066420ar
- Adami, R. (2024). Childism, intersectionality and the rights of the child: The myth of a happy childhood. Taylor & Francis.
- Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.
- Allison, A. (2013). Pocket capitalism and virtual intimacy: Pokémon as a symptom of post-industrial youth culture. In A. Allison (Ed.), Asian popular culture (pp. 197–212). Routledge.
- Bezaire, K. P., & Johnston, L. K. (2022). Stop “under-mind-ing” early childhood educators: Honouring subjectivity in pre-service education to build intellectual and relational capacities. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 23(4), 435–451. https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491221128242
- Blaise, M., & Ryan, S. (2019). Engaging with critical theories and the early childhood curriculum. In J. J. Mueller & N. File (Eds.), Curriculum in early childhood education: Re-examined, reclaimed, renewed (2nd ed.; pp. 80–95). Routledge.
- Bruce, L. M. J. (2021). How to go mad without losing your mind: Madness and Black radical creativity. Duke University Press.
- Burman, E. (2016). Deconstructing developmental psychology (3rd ed.). Routledge.
- Burroughs, M. D., & Tollefsen, D. (2016). Learning to listen: Epistemic injustice and the child. Episteme, 13(3), 359–377. https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2015.64
- Campbell-Barr, V. (2019). Professional knowledges for early childhood education and care. Journal of Childhood Studies, 44(1), 134–146. https://doi.org/10.18357/jcs.v44i1.18786
- College of Early Childhood Educators. (2021). Program portfolio for approval of education programs. College of Early Childhood Educators. https://www.college-ece.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Approval_of_Education_Programs_Post-Secondary_Program_Application_Portfolio_EN.pdf
- Culley, C. (2023). Early childhood educator qualification requirements and the achievement of national goals for early learning in Canada [Master’s thesis, McGill University]. eScholarship@McGill. https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/9019s760h
- Davies, A. W. J. (2021a). Queering masculinity in early childhood and higher education classrooms: Gendered regulation and the “double-bind” of queer masculinities. In S. Hillcock (Ed.), Let’s teach about sexuality(ies) and higher education (pp. 148–163). University of Toronto Press.
- Davies, A. W. (2021b). Queering app-propriate behaviours: The affective politics of gay social-sexual applications in Toronto, Canada [Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto]. Tspace. https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/items/204192e4-ef12-4f51-85c5-bfb76b996054
- Davies, A. (2022). Professional ruptures in pre-service ECEC: Maddening early childhood education and care. Curriculum Inquiry, 52(5), 571–592. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2022.2149027
- Davies, A. W. (2023a). Maddening pre-service early childhood education and care through poetics: Dismantling epistemic injustice through mad autobiographical poetics. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 24(2), 124–146. https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491231155555
- Davies, A. W. (2023b). (Not) overcoming depression: Depressive ruptures and disordering professionalism in early childhood education and care. eceLINK, 8(1), 18–35.
- Davies, A. (2024). My heart is my head: Mad-femme romantic assemblages in queer men’s socio-sexual applications. Feral Feminisms, 14(1). https://feralfeminisms.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/08-FF-ISSUE14.1-Davies.pdf
- Davies, A. (2025). Can we madden post-secondary early childhood education and care. Potentia, 1(1), 48–67. https://doi.org/10.14288/pace.v1i1.200305
- Davies, A., Abawi, Z., & Richardson, B. (Eds.) (2025). Disrupting developmentalism in Canadian early years education: Centring marginalized knowledges. Canadian Scholars Press.
- Davies, A., & Clarke, K. (2025). Mad, maddened, and maddening: A Mad dueoethnographic exploration of undergraduate education. Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 14(3), 136-172. https://doi.org/10.15353/cjds.v14i3.1288
- Davies, A., & Hoskin, R. A. (2021). Using femme theory to foster a feminine-inclusive early childhood education and care practice. In Z. Abawi, A. Eizadirad, & R. Berman (Eds.), Equity as praxis in early childhood education and care (pp. 107–124). Canadian Scholars.
- Davies, A. W., & Joy, P. (2023). Queerness and queer subjectivities in home economics: Navigating and disrupting the helping professions in higher education. Equity & Excellence in Education, 56(1-2), 42–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2022.2158401
- Davies, A., Karmiris, M., & Berman, R. (2022). Contesting the hegemony of developmentalism in pre-service early childhood education and care: Critical discourses and new directions. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 23(4), 371–375. https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491221139065
- Davies, A. W., & Neustifter, R. (2023). Heteroprofessionalism in the academy: The surveillance and regulation of queer faculty in higher education. Journal of Homosexuality, 70(6), 1030–1054. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2021.2013036
- Davies, A. W. J., Richardson, B., & Abawi, Z. (2024). Re-imagining the image of the teacher in pre-service education: Calling for onto-epistemological justice. Pedagogy, Culture, and Society 32(4), 1013–1031. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2024.2355100
- Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international (P. Kamuf, Trans.). Routledge.
- Dyer, H. (2017). Queer futurity and childhood innocence: Beyond the injury of development. Global Studies of Childhood, 7(3), 290–302. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043610616671056
- Fournier, L. (2021). Autotheory as feminist practice in art, writing, and criticism. MIT Press.
- Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.
- Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press.
- Gale, K. (2020). Writing in immanence: A creative-relational doing? Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 9(2), 92–102. https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2020.9.2.92
- Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity. Duke University Press.
- Hernandez, C. C., Hu, L., McNabb, T. P., & Wolfe, G. (2022). Embracing our power: ECE students’ experiences creating spaces of resistance in post-secondary institutions. in education, 28(1b), 62–79. https://doi.org/10.37119/ojs2022.v28i1b.651
- Johnston, L., Shoemaker, L., Land, N., Di Santo, A., & Jagger, S. (2020). Early childhood education and care in Canada. In K. Hytten (Ed.), Oxford research encyclopedia of education. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1473
- Kassen, J. E. (2022). Trans and gender diverse youth and education. In K. Hytten (Ed.), Oxford research encyclopedia of education. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1745
- Kotzee, B. (2017). Education and epistemic injustice. In I. J. Kidd, J. Medina, & G. Pohlhaus, Jr. (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of epistemic injustice (pp. 324–335). Routledge.
- Land, N., & Montpetit, M. (2023). Mobilizing citational practices as feminist curriculum-making in early childhood education. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 38(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.63997/jct.v38i1.1007
- Langford, R. (2007). Who is a good early childhood educator? A critical study of differences within a universal professional identity in early childhood education preparation programs. Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 28(4), 333–352. https://doi.org/10.1080/10901020701686609
- Langford, R., & Richardson, B. (Eds.). (2022). The early childhood educator: Critical conversations in feminist theory. Bloomsbury.
- LeBlanc-Olmstead, S., & Kinsella, E. A. (2016). Toward epistemic justice: A critically reflexive examination of “sanism” and implications for knowledge generation. Studies in Social Justice, 10(1), 59–78. https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v10i1.1324
- Moss, P. (2017). Power and resistance in early childhood education: From dominant discourse to democratic experimentalism. Journal of Pedagogy, 8(1), 11–32. https://doi.org/10.1515/jped-2017-0001
- Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities. (2018). Early childhood education program standard. http://www.tcu.gov.on.ca/pepg/audiences/colleges/progstan/humserv/51211-early-childhood-education.pdf
- Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Moss, P. (2020). Early childhood pedagogy: Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw interviews Peter Moss. Journal of Childhood Studies, 98–111. https://doi.org/10.18357/jcs452202019742
- Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Pence, A. (2005). Contextualizing the reconceptualist movement in Canadian early childhood education. In V. Pacini-Ketchabaw & A. Pence (Eds.), Early childhood education in motion: The reconceptualist movement in Canada (pp. 5–20). Canadian Child Care Federation.
- Richardson, B., & Langford, R. (2022). Care-full pedagogy: Conceptualizing feminist care ethics as an overarching critical framework to interrupt the dominance of developmentalism within post-secondary early childhood education programs. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 23(4), 408–420. https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491221120037
- Ryan, S., & Grieshaber, S. (2024). Early childhood teacher education for social justice and equity: A systematic literature review. International Journal of Early Years Education, 32(3), 768–790. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669760.2024.2378054
- Spencer, L., & Carel, H. (2021). “Isn’t everyone a little OCD?” The epistemic harms of wrongful depathologization. Philosophy of Medicine, 2(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.5195/pom.2021.19
- Stronach, R. A. (2023). How does learning happen? Ontario’s pedagogy of oppression?: A critical discourse analysis of Ontario’s early years pedagogical framework. Journal of Childhood Studies, 48(2), 32–50. https://doi.org/10.18357/jcs482202320982
- Sutton, G. (2026). Becoming a Mad social worker. In A. Davies, L. Spring, M.A. Castrodale, & J. Cosantino (Eds.), Mad studies and education: Critical pedagogy and Mad praxis in the classroom (pp. 41–62). Springer Nature Switzerland.
- Tobin, J. (Ed.). (2004). Pikachu’s global adventure: The rise and fall of Pokémon. Duke University Press.
- Vintimilla, C. (2014). Neoliberal fun and happiness in early childhood education. Journal of Childhood Studies, 79–87. https://doi.org/10.18357/jcs.v39i1.15246
10.7202/1066420ar