Professional ruptures in pre-service ECEC: Maddening early childhood education and care

Abstract

This article engages in an autoethnographic analysis to offer an argument for the importance of bringing mad studies to pre-service early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs. Through both analysing reflections on two "maddening moments" during pre-service teaching as a mad-identified pre-service ECEC educator and discussing relevant mad studies literature, I aim to forward an argument for the criticality of maddening pre-service ECEC programs and pedagogies. I argue that mad studies can provide ruptures to normativities ingrained in the developmentalist curricula and pedagogies in pre-service ECEC post-secondary programs and offer new ways of thinking of children, educators, and ECEC outside of developmental and normative tropes of early childhood educators (ECEs). As such, I examine how a maddening pedagogy in pre-service ECEC can bring affect into the classroom and disrupt how sanism functions through the knowledges and normativities prioritized within pre-service ECEC.