Children and the Power of Stories (eBook)

This book explores how stretching stories through posthuman and autoethnographic perspectives can produce new stories that decolon(ial)ize traditional thinking and approaches to Early Childhood Education (ECE). It demonstrates how stories can provide a different way of knowing, and a way of knowing differently: a way of decolon(ial)izing current discourses of early childhood education within educational institutions.

The book uses research and practice in ECE to act as a canvas, a context with which to explore how autoethnography can become other when viewed through a posthumanist lens. As a consequence the chapters and stories within allow for an interplay between the posthumanist and the autoethnographic, an interplay that allows for a very specific type of meaning to emerge; a meaning that traffics in numerous and disruptive possibilities rather than settled certainties. In so doing, authors rethink and perturb the notion of child-centered approaches to knowing, be(com)ing, and doing within the Early Childhood Education context.

Carmen Blyth completed her Ph.D. in 2015 on Ethics in international schools at the University of Cape Town. She was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Decolonizing Early Childhood Discourses research project at the same university. She has worked with international schools and universities in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East for over 30 years as an EAP/ESL/EAL teacher, teacher trainer, and department founder. She currently enjoys mentoring Ph.D. and IB Diploma candidates and has a special interest in the links between linguistic diversity and biodiversity, and the rights of other language speakers in institutions where English is the medium of instruction.

Teresa K. Aslanian completed her Ph.D. in 2019 on the concept of care in Norwegian early childhood education at Olso Metropolitan University. She holds the position of Associate Professor at the Department of Early Childhood Education, University of South-Eastern Norway. Her background as an early childhood educator informs her research, which is concerned with holistic learning, play and love as a professional practice in early childhood education.