Rethinking awkwardness made in collisions of physical and early childhood education

Abstract

ABSTRACT Background Beginning with a proposition that physical education (PE) and early childhood education (ECE) build affinities through shared developmental interests, this article works the gaps made possible when PE meets with ECE in unfamiliar ways. Through a shared investment in the normalizing and minoritizing functions of child development, how and why PE collides with ECE often hierarchizes particular knowledges, practices, and relations that typically foster instrumental and technical educational approaches to understanding children’s movement that align with settler colonial, Euro-Western conceptions of bodied individualism, responsibility, and regulation. These status-quo alliances of PE with ECE manifest in children’s movement guidelines and leave little room for local, responsive invention with children. This article asks what becomes within the spaces where PE and ECE collide otherwise – where we do not already know what can be made in the proximities of these two bodies of knowledge and instead attend to moments where, in everyday meetings of PE and ECE, we create unfamiliar pedagogical possibilities for moving with children. Purpose and Method I detail one concept found in the literature where PE meets ECE: awkwardness. I re-encounter awkwardness through blog posts co-written by early childhood educator co-researchers and the researcher during Moving Pedagogies, a pedagogical inquiry project where early childhood educators and preschool-aged children investigated how to walk slowly while disrupting walking as primarily a mode of exercise. Then, alongside Manning’s ([2014]. “Wondering the World Directly–or, how Movement Outruns the Subject.” Body & Society 20 (3-4): 162–188.) ‘precarious equilibrium’, awkwardness is engaged through its contradictions and troubles toward nourishing our imperfect work to move otherwise with PE and ECE. Conclusions Resisting the urge to articulate an overarching model for PE and ECE to intersect going forward, this article brings to the foreground moments where PE and ECE meet and fail and where what we thought we knew about PE and ECE crumbles. It proposes that with situated, enduring threads of PE and ECE we might co-create with children locally meaningful possibilities for moving together. The article concludes with a vital question for PE and ECE practitioners, educators, and researchers to grapple with: how do we do moving with children with local collisions of PE, ECE, bodies, knowledges, inheritances, and lively more-than-human others, where to move is to take the risk of inventively enmeshing our collective movements within the hopeful, messy, and disorienting ethical and political entanglements that compose complex contemporary worlds?