Storytelling and error: challenging pioneer ontologies in early childhood education

Abstract

ABSTRACT We compose and gather stories to bewilder ‘pioneering’ concepts in early childhood education (ECE) that operate from the unquestioned objectivity of settler futurity. These developmentalist notions speculate that childhood is separate from adulthood. They invisibilize ontologies, especially Indigenous ontologies, that view children as complete beings. Through art-based work, we consider Montessori’s pioneering concept ‘control of error’ from an intersectional framework that proposes implications for honouring error in ECE. We explore the cultural meanings and potentials of error, both intentional and unintentional, from our own positionalities and our shared perspective that children are always-already in deep and present relationship with the worlds that surround and compose them. One author, enrolled in the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, creates beadwork. His elders taught him that errors in beadwork are kept in as a reminder that people are imperfect. The other author, a white cisgender woman, and an infertile mother in a blended family with five children, considers both the joy and shame of errors from her perspectives as a feminist new materialist motherscholar and Montessori-trained educator. The intentional (mis)telling of a story is how we, a gay citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a cisgender white woman, conceptualise pioneering concepts in ECE.