Introduction: Resituating Canadian Early Childhood Education

This journal issue began with a conversation between Larry Prochner and myself at the Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education Conference in June 2008 held in Victoria, British Columbia. We discussed the idea of bringing together a group of Canadian early childhood education scholars who have been inspired by reconceptualist ideas to make their work more visible and simultaneously to further develop this important body of knowledge. Our hope was that this issue, in conjunction with other existing reconceptualist-informed work, could open spaces for rethinking practice in early childhood education in Canada. The response to the call for papers for this special issue reassured us that Canadian scholars have much to contribute to current discussions in early childhood education, especially when early childhood education has emerged as a key priority for various provincial jurisdictions over the past five years. In my view, an expanded early childhood education system cannot be pursued without critically engaged conversations about our common understandings of childhood and learning. The articles in this issue engage in this conversation. This preamble brings me to the purpose of this collection: the theory-practice divide in early childhood education. Reconceptualist ideas (based on postmodern, poststructural, feminist, and postcolonial, among other postfoundational theories) have revolutionized the field of early childhood education. This body of scholarly work has the potential to disrupt normalizing early childhood education discourses that create and maintain social inequities in society and to respect differences and diversities. At the same time, critiques have been presented that question the relevance of the reconceptualizing movement to everyday early childhood education practices. Given the importance of diversity in the Canadian context, it seems relevant to challenge the notion that postfoundational theories are primarily theoretical enterprises and explore how the theory-practice binary has been situated in traditional early childhood education discourses. The articles in this volume engage with this challenge. The authors do not view theory and practice as separate categories, nor do they refer to the application of theory to practice; rather, their work can be situated in the intra-active nature of theory and practice as described by Lenz Taguchi (2010). In this introduction, I do not attempt to define the reconceptualist movement in Canada or to provide a history of its genealogy. Plotting its history and creating a definition of reconceptualist ideas in early childhood is not a linear and simple task. At the same moment that definitions are demarcated, exclusions are created. Furthermore, a historical account needs to take into consideration time and place as uneven and dynamic, something that would require much more space than I have here. Rather, I elaborate on four themes that link the articles in this issue to the broader reconceptualist literature. My

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