PLAYING WITH DOLLS: (RE)STORYING GENDERED CARING PEDAGOGIES

Abstract

Based on material discussed more fully in Chapter 4 of the author’s Ph.D. dissertation (Hodgins, 2014), this article shares ordinary classroom stories of child-doll encounters that occurred during a collaborative research study that explored how children, educators, and things emerge as gendered caring subjects within early childhood practices. The historical and current dominance of dolls in early childhood practices and their links to gender and care make dolls such a significant material to think-with. Following Donna Haraway, this article works to unstick early childhood pedagogies from individualist and child-centred pedagogies, and rethink the apolitical and developmental logics that underpin “doll early childhood pedagogies”. Through thinking-with dolls, new trajectories for dolls in the classroom are created. These trajectories highlight children’s relations with/in the world situated within practices in, near, and far from the classroom, and the becoming of gendered caring subjects as a materialsemiotic entanglement rather than a performed or predestined linear development. Implications for caring pedagogies are considered, including the necessity for making visible the interconnectedness of gender and care, tracing how (particular) practices come to matter, and responding within the complexity of knotted webs of relationality.