Democratic Practices with and for Our Youngest Citizens: Early Childhood Education, Agency, and the Education Complex

Abstract

Early childhood pedagogy in Australia is founded on rights-based philosophies that promote social justice, democratic communities, participation, and agency of societies’ youngest citizens. There are, however, significant challenges in realising these philosophies and enacting democratic, agentic early childhood education (ECE) for birth to five-year-old children. This chapter presents three research projects, viewed together through a lens of agency and aligned with the education complex (Kemmis et al., 2012), that highlight the interdependent practices of leading, teaching, and researching in Australian ECE contexts. The first project investigated the emergence and development of effective leadership practices and the arrangements that enabled and constrained them. The second project explored educators’ risk-taking practices, aligning with praxis as morally and ethically informed decision-making about what is ‘best’ for children and societies (Kemmis & Smith, 2008). The third project documented infants’ social and emotional communication and highlighted how the research practices helped enable infants’ participation and agency. Though the focus of each study was different, collectively they illuminate interdependent practices of an ‘ECE complex’, and how individual and collective agencies can optimise pedagogy with and for very young children to live well and help create a world worth living in (Kemmis et al., 2014).

For an episode of the World Worth Living In Podcast connected to this chapter, please click here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/17jgXTh7DsNpwdWZ2kHSMh?si=2f9e077f406b4875

Introduction

Early childhood education (ECE) worldwide has a particular history, grounded in long-held beliefs about children and the women who have classically cared for and educated them. Over time there have been shifts in some of these views, influenced partly by post-war, philanthropic, and progressive philosophies, such as the Reggio Emilia approach from northern Italy, that include the youngest children in society as citizens with agency. A significant influence has also been the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (UNICEF, 1989), and its near universal ratification by state parties of the United Nations (UN), which promotes fundamental developmental, protection, and participation rights for children. Most countries that belong to the UN have changed aspects of their ECE policies and practices in order to uphold the UNCRC (Kilkelly, 2017). Professional ECE literature in Australia reflects the subsequent shift from care-based developmental approaches of the early twentieth century, that saw children as more passive recipients of standardised, milestone-based practices (Fleer, 2003), to aspirational post-war images of children as competent and capable agents (Malaguzzi, 1994) with their own rights. For example, educators are guided by a Code of Ethics that place them as advocates for social justice through commitments to democratic action in relation to children, colleagues, families, the profession, the community, and society (Early Childhood Australia, 2016). Such ethical guidance underpins a rights-based ECE stance that works (ideally through committed educators in quality settings) to co-create democratic communities. In doing so, ECE pedagogy aims to promote and enact education as being for the good of each person and for the good of humankind (Kaukko et al., 2020).

The sites of ECE, however, are complex. Sites are characterised by diverse human resource arrangements, educator qualifications, and experience and the sector is highly feminised. Discourses of maternalism exist alongside (and often in opposition to) discourses of professionalism. Manifold regulatory and compliance measures co-exist with innovative pedagogical practices. The duty of care for children, families, and settings can be stressful and include the inherent challenges of respectfully, ethically, and realistically balancing protection rights with participation rights, especially for our youngest citizens (Salamon & Palaiologou, 2022). Furthermore, a marketised sector has created tensions between commercial interests and democratic practices (Press & Woodrow, 2018). Altogether, these challenges ‘bump up against’ a democratic ECE stance and the associated work of committed ECE professionals to enact rights-based ECE pedagogies.

The Project of This Chapter

The purpose of this chapter is threefold. Firstly, we explore the important democratic underpinnings of ECE pedagogy in Australia by (briefly) outlining aspects of the Reggio Emilia approach. We consider the complexity of enacting these aspects and propose using the theory of practice architectures to help overcome contemporary challenges. Next, we adapt the idea of the interdependent practices of education in an ‘education complex’ (Kemmis et al., 2012) to ECE and offer a view of the enactment of democratic ECE pedagogy (and all its complexity) as an ecology of interconnected ECE practices. We then present three research projects that demonstrate the education complex in relation to rights, social justice, citizenship, and agency in ECE through their investigation of practices and conditions that enable and constrain democratic ECE pedagogy. All three projects were undertaken in Australian ECE settings. All projects were case studies that aimed towards an in-depth exploration of particular practices within purposively selected sites. Each study used multiple data collection methods, including observations, interviews, and documents. All projects used the theory of practice architectures, identifying ECE leading, teaching, and researching practices (bundles of sayings/thinkings, doings, and relatings) and the practice architectures (cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements) that enabled and constrained them. The findings illuminate practices of leading, teaching, researching, and learning that draw on emancipatory and transformational ECE philosophies, often lost in the architectures of (what are meant to be) democratic ECE practices. Implications are discussed in relation to the work to be done together to live well in a world worth living in.

Democratic Early Childhood Education Pedagogies and the Challenges of Enacting Them

There are many starting points for considering the threads of progressive and democratic contemporary ECE pedagogy. Here, we start with the Reggio Emilia approach. By choosing such an approach, we distinctly locate a rights-based philosophy within our personal and globally acknowledged ECE timelines. Loris Malaguzzi, leader of the educational project in Reggio Emilia (Italy), believed that children are equipped with ‘100 languages’ (symbolic of multiple avenues to share ways of being and understanding) and placed them (children and their languages) at the centre of pedagogical practices (Reggio Children, 2022). Upholding each child’s right to their own voice, the languages are spoken (and listened to) within respectful and reciprocal relationships and promoted in critically considered, intentionally planned environments (Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relations [DEEWR], 2009). These environments, known as the third teacher, can be seen as arrangements that shape (and are shaped by) the democratic practices of capable and competent child citizens. Intentionally planned spaces enable children’s agency to co-create educational possibilities in relation to them and with educators and teachers within them.

Another concept and fundamental value in Reggio Emilia is pedagogical documentation: making children’s learning processes and practices visible to children, families, and communities, and inviting the children’s own reflection on those as springboards to further learning provocations. Malaguzzi saw pedagogical documentation as a commitment to democracy and participation (Reggio Emilia Australia, 2021). Similarly, Moss (2007) saw documentation as a means of fostering democratic practice in ECE by exploring and contesting different perspectives without assuming objective, external truths about the child that can be recorded and accurately represented. Pedagogical documentation thus becomes a means of resisting power and dominant discourses (Moss, 2007).

Many espoused Australian ECE principles and practices reflect the democratic provocations of the Reggio Emilia approach. Australia’s guiding ECE curriculum, the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF), for example, is underpinned by principles of respectful and reciprocal relationships, authentic partnerships, ongoing collaborative learning, and critical reflective, intentional practice with children, families and communities (DEEWR, 2009). This supports efforts to enact ECE as emancipatory professional practice and, so, democratic pedagogy. As has been discussed, however, there are many challenges to enacting these ideals in reality. Further examples include discourses of maternalism, confusion around compliance, the regulatory nature of the sector, and inconsistent state-based legislation (with accompanying lack of common professional language) work to diminish professionalism and democratic ECE. Perhaps the biggest challenge to enacting democratic pedagogies in Australian ECE is its marketisation. The provision of ECE has changed significantly since the turn of the twentieth century from a predominantly not-for-profit, community based and philanthropic sector, to one where private for-profit providers are competing for the market (see Press & Woodrow, 2018, for further details). Instead of seeing our youngest children as learners, the younger they are, the more money that can be made from them. According to Moss (2007), establishing democracy as a central value in early childhood institutions is ‘incompatible with understanding these institutions as businesses and adopting a market approach to service development’ (p. 15). Altogether, the sophistication and material resourcing needed to enact democratic ECE pedagogies, to consider ECE (and teaching in ECE) as professional practice, to incorporate contemporary perspectives of leadership and leading, can be constrained by ill-aligned arrangements.

An ECE rights-based activist stance compels educators, leaders, and researchers to overcome the challenges of enacting democratic pedagogies in ECE, and act for as close to the greater good for individuals and society as we possibly can. It is possible to do this through a transformative activist stance (TAS) which posits the social world as ‘constituted by and through social transformative practices enacted and carried out by individuals acting collaboratively as social subjects’ (Stetsenko, 2013, p. 14). First, however, it is necessary to differentiate between the aspirational democratic project of ECE pedagogy, the actual practices that constitute it, and the arrangements (some of which have been outlined above) that enable and constrain them. A practice theory perspective is beneficial for identifying, deconstructing, and stirring up the sedimented arrangements that prefigure possibilities for democratic ECE practices. Some of this work has been done by the authors of this chapter. For example, Gibbs (2020) has used the theory of practice architectures to identify socially just leadership practices that uphold children’s rights and to understand the organisational arrangements that enabled and constrained them. Cooke and Francisco (2020) used the theory to identify arrangements for educators to take risks in their professional practice in ways that contributed towards high-quality ECE, and, so, democratic ECE pedagogy. Finally, Salamon (2017) used the theory to illuminate how educator conceptions about infant capabilities, our youngest citizens, are amongst the arrangements that constrain infants, before identifying powerful, embodied, agentic infant practices that shape the relational dynamics and practices of educators within them.

The Education Complex and Early Childhood Education

The theory of practice architectures, described above, assists with ‘seeing’ the practices of educators, the sites where practices are enacted, and the arrangements on those sites that make practices possible (Kemmis et al., 2014). This approach shows us how pedagogical practices are shaped and connected, specifically within an interdependent ecology of practices (Kemmis et al., 2012). In examining democratic ECE pedagogies and the complex challenges of enacting them as ecologies of practices, the outcomes of one practice depend upon the outcomes of another, and disruptions in one part of the ecological system can erode the vitality of the whole system. Inside these ecologies, educators, informed by their knowledge, skills, and practice, commit themselves, or become committed to, the project of democratic ECE. Originally, the education complex referred to the related and interconnected ecologies of practices of schooling and the arrangements that make those practices possible (Kemmis et al., 2012). It is also described as ‘the interdependence of the practices of learning, teaching, professional learning, leading, and educational researching’ (Kemmis et al., 2014, pp. 51–52). The education complex, adapted here for the early childhood context¹ comprises educators’ pedagogical practices, children’s practices, initial and continuing professional learning, educational policy, administration and leadership, educational research and quality assessment, and families, communities, and societies (see Fig. 6.1).

Fig. 6.1

Ecology of interconnected practices in the (early childhood) education complex. Adapted from Kemmis et al. (2012 p. 37)

The practices and practice architectures hang together within an (early childhood) education complex and co-exist within the complexity of ECE settings.

Educators’ Pedagogical Practices

ECE pedagogy encompasses philosophy and educational learning frameworks, for example, the EYLF (DEEWR, 2009), quality assessment and regulations (Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority [ACECQA], 2020) which drive educational programmes within ECE. Democratic ECE pedagogies are enacted through ongoing investigation, collaboration, and research between adults and children as an everyday praxis (Reggio Children, 2022) that shifts social-political arrangements and makes it possible for educators to engage in teaching, learning, and leading practices. Material-economic, social-political, and cultural-discursive arrangements that enable and constrain pedagogy and practice include (but are not limited to) ECE regulations, common professional language, material resourcing of pedagogical projects, and sharing of knowledge and physical space.

Children's Practices

The material-economic arrangement of regulation along with the social-political and cultural-discursive arrangement of children's rights and equality, enable opportunities for children to shape the practices of leading, teaching, and learning as a process. To engage children actively in learning, the EYLF encourages educators to identify and document children’s strengths and interests to plan for their participation and development through emergent learning themes, choose appropriate teaching strategies, and design the learning environment accordingly. Curriculum content is led by children and influenced by both children and adults. As co-designers of curriculum and its delivery, children can become teachers for, and with, peers and educators. Educators thus understand children as competent and having agency over their learning (DEEWR, 2009).

Initial and Continuing Education and Professional Learning

Educators are employed from a range of initial teacher and educator training settings, including Universities, Technical and Further Education settings (TAFEs), and Registered Training Organisations (RTOs). Most educators in ECE are Diploma and Certificate trained (Education Services Australia, 2021), with a range of depth of understanding of key pedagogical concepts gained in preservice training. This acts as a cultural-discursive arrangement that shapes possibilities for pedagogical practices. Common professional language gained through preservice training and experience within ECE sites enables collective approaches to pursue quality standards (Gibbs, 2020). Material-economic arrangements provide resources for professional development. Mentoring and coaching, as a social-political arrangement, are essential strategies for shaping the practices of educators.

Educational Policy, Administration, and Leadership

Material-economic, social-political, and cultural-discursive arrangements cultivate educator practices within education policy and administration. As educators work together to develop philosophies, they advocate for programmes that uphold child and family rights. Values and philosophy, therefore, underpin decision-making, communication, and team culture—critical characteristics of effective ECE sites (Coleman et al., 2016; Siraj-Blatchford & Manni, 2007). Policy and procedure documents use professional language that is inclusive and engender a sense of responsibility. Role equality is present in staff meetings and professional development events. Through dispersed decision-making, everyone's contribution is enabled.

Educational Research and Quality Assessment

Material-economic arrangements for practitioner research enable educator practices. This form of research makes a powerful contribution to pedagogical decision-making and builds collaborative democratic practice amongst educators and with children. When educators become involved in practitioner research, they reflect on their teaching and use empirical evidence to support change. Investigations can embolden advocacy for socially just pedagogical practice (MacNaughton et al., 2010). Within high-quality ECE settings, this research is resourced and encouraged. Cultural-discursive arrangements also enable democratic educator practice through the knowledge and implementation of the quality standards. Where educators within sites are cognisant of evidence-based standards, they invite participation in and draw on contemporary ECE research, professional knowledge, and language to support high-level achievement on quality criteria (Livingstone, 2018).

Families, Communities, and Societies

Discourses of partnerships with families and communities in the EYLF (DEEWR, 2009) and their enactment in Quality Area 6 (Collaborative partnerships with families and communities) of the National Quality Standard (NQS) (ACECQA, 2018) act as both cultural-discursive and material-economic arrangements that shape pedagogical practices. That the EYLF ‘has been designed for use by early childhood educators working in partnership with families, children’s first and most influential educators’ (DEEWR, 2009, p. 5) reflects social-political arrangements of ECE that enable rights-based and respectful practices with families in education. Reciprocal practices with families firmly situate ECE sites within communities. Conversely, advocating for and promoting children’s contributions in ECE into the wider community helps transform and promote images of children as competent, capable citizens in society.

The three projects below describe some of the interdependent practices and arrangements within the ECE complex, identified in the research. They reveal how ECE sites (and the practitioners within them) shape and reshape democratic practices through a dynamic scaffolding and interchange of organisational arrangements (Kemmis et al., 2012) in leading, teaching, researching, and learning.

The Projects in This Chapter

Project One: The Emergence and Development of Leading and Leadership (Gibbs)

The first project described here explored the emergence and development of effective leading and leadership within exemplary² Australian ECE sites. Effective leadership influences the quality of early childhood practice and therefore plays a role in civil and economic society, contributing favourably to the developmental trajectories of young children (Douglass, 2019). In this context, high-quality ECE is a child's right (UNICEF, 1989). The conditions for leadership cultivation also contribute to educators’ rights of agency and citizenship. These shared child and educator rights, observed and analysed within the research study, take centre stage within this component of the chapter. First, however, it is essential to describe the underpinning conceptualisation of leadership. Rather than the traditional positioning of leadership as a centralised, character-driven, heroic concept, leadership is conceptualised as a collective practice (see Fig. 6.2).

Fig. 6.2

Leading in early childhood education (Gibbs et al., 2020)

This collective practice is characterised as dynamic, emergent encounters and enactments within ECE sites. More specifically, ‘leading’ is a socially just practice occurring as a relational activity within a collective and is not limited to formal leadership roles (Wilkinson, 2017). Such a conceptualisation creates space for the emergence and cultivation of leading practices and acts as a foundation for formal leadership roles. Therefore, as individuals engage in and organisations enable the practice of leading, a collective momentum occurs around the project of leadership, realised by each individual’s agentive contribution to collective practices that are ever shifting with each active contribution (Stetsenko, 2019).

Identifying leading practices is foundational to the emergence and cultivation of leadership. The theory of practice architectures helped to ‘see’ leading practices in this project and worked to identify the conditions that make those practices possible (Gibbs, 2020). Data generation took the form of observations, unstructured interviews, dialogic cafés, and document gathering. All approaches aimed to be emergent, generative, and dynamic. A field observation table supported initial observations of educators. The table mapped practices of effective leaders, with complexity leadership theory and the theory of practice architectures (see Gibbs et al., 2020 for further detail). Those educators who were practising leading were revealed. Educators included formal and informal leaders. The other methods mentioned above enabled further interrogation of practices. This interrogation enabled other leading practices, exemplified in the enactment of agency and citizenship, to be seen and then for the arrangements that made those practices possible, to be identified. In line with intentional teaching and critical ECE pedagogy and practice (DEEWR, 2009), examples of educator practices of leading included advocacy for inclusion, making a case for innovative curriculum practice, and arguing for remuneration that respects the status of the ECE educator role. The skills, knowledge, and values informed such practices of educators. Educators saw themselves as powerful agents of change and transformation. The enabling cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements of the ECE sites made this perspective and leading practices possible.

Inclusive practice, for example, was enabled by using common professional language to describe inclusion and approaches to ensuring a child's access to the early childhood setting. Knowledge of funding arrangements expedited such access, and a shared commitment to equality ensured full engagement in educational programmes and practice for the child. Innovative curriculum practice was enabled by an educational leader's full and robust understanding of regulatory compliance and, in some cases, a healthy argument against overt compliance. Such a thorough understanding enabled an exciting programme of excursions that broadened children's understanding of their surroundings and their role as world citizens. The third example of educator advocacy for higher remuneration was enabled by an understanding of the importance of early childhood educators that was equally shared across the ECE site. Educators felt supported in advocating for higher pay and for early childhood education. Positional leaders encouraged strike action. An important finding in this study resides in shaping democratic practices of leading by the children within the ECE sites. This previously unconsidered and surprising finding illuminated the children's role in developing leadership. Emerging and positional leaders engaged with children as research partners and equals in learning. Curriculum content was led by the children and influenced by children and adults. For example, one ECE site explored the threatened extinction of bees. In this project, children inspired and shaped leadership through a rich intertwining of interest, activism, and pedagogical knowledge. Another example of co-created curriculum content included a project driven by the children and led in partnership with Klarissa, the early childhood teacher. The project embodied concepts of identity, colonisation, and democratic practices, reflected by Klarissa:

The Flag Project began with the question, 'Why do we have four flag poles but only three flags?" and led to a flag-raising ceremony almost nine months later. The children wanted to make a symbol of their connection to the place where they spend their days. They insisted on ensuring that not only our school was represented but also the people who came before us, the Aboriginal people.

They reflected on their relationship to the land on which we live and play and how they could develop their own symbols to represent their connection. Their respect for this place, their community and the natural world was evident throughout their work. This sense of consideration led to a long research process to understand flags, colour, symbols and meaning.

To reflect on this project, I feel immense pride in seeing the 'real life' flag arrive. We did it! This flag represents so much more than our little school on the roof. The children were genuinely considerate of our world when creating this flag.

The interdependence of practices and constant shaping and reshaping in an ecology of practices within the ECE complex, brought to life with practice examples, reveals new practices of leading and the phenomena of leadership transformation for both children and educators. The emergence and development of leadership in this way shifts traditional power dynamics and promotes agency and citizenship within collective democratic and socially just communities.

Research Project Two: Educator Professional Risk-Taking to Support Children’s Rights, Social Justice, and Democracy (Cooke)

Project two explored educators’ perspectives and practices of educator professional risk-taking in ECE. The study took place in three Australian ECE settings, chosen because they were rated as ‘exceeding’ in the Australian legislated accreditation and quality rating system (ACECQA, 2020), and because they demonstrated value for children’s risk-taking in their promotional material and centre documentation. The combination of high quality and the provision of opportunities for children’s risk-taking invited participation by educators who were likely to provide reflective and valuable insight on risk-taking in professional practice (Cooke et al., 2020). Risk-taking was framed as beneficial risk-taking, this being thoughtful and courageous acts that take a person outside of their comfort zone, are characterised by uncertainty and the possibility of negative consequences, and are enacted with the hope for positive outcomes and/or valuable learning (Cooke et al., 2019). Use of the theory of practice architectures helped to identify how participating educators addressed issues of upholding children’s rights, social justice, and democracy by taking risks in their professional practice. In taking risks, educators carefully considered what was ‘best’ for children and society, thus aligning risk-taking with praxis (Cooke et al., 2020). Praxis, as viewed in the theory of practice architectures, is the enactment of morally and ethically informed decisions that contribute to the formation of individuals and societies (Kemmis & Smith, 2008).

Upholding children’s rights involved moral and ethical decision-making, as children’s rights were sometimes in conflict with parents’ wishes. Educators took risks by enabling children’s engagement in activities of their own choosing but were disapproved of by their parents. Activities included getting dirty and face painting. Educators assessed the strength of children’s desires and the value of the activity, weighing this against potential repercussions from parents. One educator said, after allowing a child to have her face painted, ‘the guilt I feel when [the parents] are quite angry…[but] it’s [the child’s] face, their skin…they never get to have autonomy over the way they look’ (Sally, Teatree Children’s Centre). This moral and ethical decision-making was also evident when educators addressed issues of social justice in curriculum. Educators spoke about taking children into ‘risky grey spaces’ by exploring ‘big issues’. Australian history was a big issue viewed as risky because not all families agreed with sharing such complex and potentially divisive information with young children. Educators who engaged with issues such as this believed it was important for children to know the world they live in, so they can work to change it for the better. One educator said, ‘[I know] children who have done stuff, have stood up and spoken and felt very empowered by that’ (Lucy, Teatree Children’s Centre).

The praxis-based risk-taking that educators enacted to pursue democratic, socially just, and rights-based practices were enabled and constrained by particular arrangements (see Cooke & Francisco, 2020 for further details), similar to the ways leadership shaped emancipatory possibilities in project one. Yet it is not only arrangements and praxis that enable and constrain risk-taking, it is also agency. Active engagement with praxis and agency towards professional risk-taking can be viewed through Stetsenko’s (2019) transformative action stance. Stetsenko identifies that while arrangements might exist that invite agency (and risk-taking), it is up to the individual to actively respond to these invitations (Stetsenko, 2019). For example, in one setting, educators shared leadership of group times with 4 and 5-year-old children to position them as equal participants in the class community. This democratic practice required educators to trust that children would behave in ways supportive of a positive class climate. Class climate is often used to judge the quality of educators’ practices, thus positioning the sharing of leadership with children as risky for educators. One educator said, ‘giving children a voice, an equal voice, that was quite risky and that took some time in terms of communicating with families and explaining why you do a certain thing’ (Stephanie, Teatree Children’s Centre). This reflects Stetsenko’s view that agency is not an individual response to the world, rather a collective view of ‘ourselves as agentive co-creators’ (Stetsenko, 2019, p. 7) in a world that is constantly changing through our ‘collectividual’ (Stetsenko, 2013) transformative practices.

The interdependence of practices and constant shaping and reshaping in an ecology of practices within the ECE complex was realised in this project through educators’ enactment of a transformative action stance in their teaching and professional risk-taking. The risks educators took, executed collectively through ethically and morally guided praxis, reveal deliberate and thoughtful transformational practices towards developing children as active members of society, equipped with the skills and knowledge to participate, understand, and enact rights, and contribute towards a socially just world.

Research Project Three: Participation, Play, and Agency with Infants (Salamon)

The third project aimed to document and deconstruct infants’ powerful, evocative social and emotional practices. Drawing on previous work that identified infant agency as having the capacity to shape the arrangements of ECE (Salamon, 2017), this project highlighted how infants can also shape the arrangements of ECE research as agentic participants. According to the UNCRC, as all children do, infants have a right to participate in cultural life and express their own views in matters affecting them (UNICEF, 1989). In research (and pedagogy), it is necessary to consider different degrees of participation for infants when making decisions about research activities they should—or can—participate in (Bergold & Thomas, 2012) and ways they might express their views. Because babies cannot participate in the research activity of making decisions beforehand, they exercise little control in relation to those. There are, however, many research activities infants can participate in and decisions they can make in the context of the ‘happening-ness’ (Kemmis, 2012) of ECE research, described earlier as dynamic, emergent encounters and enactments. These democratic underpinnings of participatory research necessitate an emphasis of the unique strengths and complementary expertise of researchers and participants (Cargo & Mercer, 2008). Any effort to enable participation of infants in research must thus be underpinned by the researcher’s capacity to understand and relate to babies’ unique strengths and complementary expertise.

A methodological attitude of ethical symmetry, acknowledging the similarities of babies to other research participants while honouring and working with their differences (Salamon, 2015), enabled space for babies to naturally participate to some degree in the enactment of the research via methods and materials designed to invite their participation. The babies were present in group meetings with educators and, following a past method for participation (see Salamon, 2015, for further details), laminated pictures of the data being shared were provided for the babies to engage with. Before the next meeting, however, the pictures were placed on the wall so they were no longer able to be used as planned. After discussion with educators, pedagogical resources (old business cards to be used for putting into empty tissue boxes found at the site) were included for babies to engage with during meetings instead. Over the course of the first month, infants acted with agency and ‘stepped into’ the space created by these enabling research arrangements, engaging with them in different ways (see Fig. 6.3).³

Fig. 6.3

Infants during research meetings engaging with pedagogical resources

Stetsenko and Ho (2015) consider agentive actors as unique people with an irreplaceable role in co-authoring social interactions, shared practices, and the world itself. Some babies began to interact with me and, as the researcher I am, with decades-long history as an ECE professional with (and advocate for) babies, I responded to their bids. The project ethics application stated that if babies initiated interaction I would respond, because, in fact, it would be unethical not to respond. In the second month, the developing mutual and co-constructed engagement between myself and participating infants turned into play.

According to Stetsenko and Ho (2015), ‘play offers unique opportunities for children to develop and exercise their agency, identity and voice’ (p. 221). Infants did this by drawing on and demonstrating the social and emotional practices that were the focus of the research, extending these to cognitive practices of imitation and acting with intention through playful exchanges that included pretending to laugh and cough and blink and sneeze in humorous ways. Infant meaning-making centres around lived experiences and rather than play with objects or abstract imaginative concepts, through and within our dynamic, reciprocal, and playful interactions, the babies played with what they know about their everyday perceptual and relational world. The Sneezing Game, for example, was a seemingly simple game (adult puts mega block on head, adult pretends to build up a sneeze, adult pretends to sneeze with a dramatic ‘atchoo’ and brings head forward letting the block fall on the floor) that promoted cognitive, social, and emotional play around the everyday experience of sneezing. Babies would eagerly offer me the block to continue the game, with obvious reciprocal actions, and repeat the sound of the ‘ahhh’ in atchoo, again seemingly inviting me to continue. The game was played at the setting in the final month with eager participation of and initiation by the infants with educators, families at home, and myself.

The interdependence of democratic practices and constant shaping and reshaping in an ecology of practices within the ECE complex were realised in this project through the enactment of educational research. In similar ways, leaders and educators enacted a TAS, shared deliberate, thoughtful, and intentional research practices with infants emancipated them as active members of society able to participate in, lead, and contribute to, matters affecting their world.

Conclusion

Last, but certainly not least, all practices are interdependent and persist in some kind of relationship of reciprocity: while practices are always inherently unique and situated, they are also connected to social life both locally and, potentially, globally. (Nicolini, 2012, p. 48)

This chapter has worked to illuminate how democratic ECE practices exist in ecological, interdependent, reciprocal relationships that are always already situated in historical and contemporary, local and global practice landscapes. Threads of ethical activism are evident in the individual and collective transformation (through agency) of leading, teaching, and researching across the research presented, grounded in a social justice and rights-based ECE stance. As part of the project of democratic ECE, the stance is inherently unique and situated, and at the same time the stance is a pedagogical one that is connected to a broader view of professional practice and education. From this broad, zoomed-out perspective, the projects reflected how researching and theorising ECE using the theory of practice architectures, can reconnect ‘practice with individual and collective praxis’ (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 25). Zooming in using these examples reflects the double purpose of education, that is, to help people live well in a world worth living in (Kemmis et al., 2014) as unique, ongoing, and complex within the specifics of an ECE complex. To enact the aspirational democratic individual and collective project of ECE pedagogy, all participants in the ECE complex must understand, align with, and work towards a shared vision with and for our youngest citizens. This is a big task and one that can only be achieved when constraining arrangements (including an increasingly market driven, low status, and inconsistently professional sector), are identified, understood, and overcome.

It has been striking, and heartening, to see the similarities between contemporary ECE philosophy, practice theory and broader educational and pedagogical perspectives. Malaguzzi’s 100 languages of children, as discussed earlier for example, is an ethical pedagogical provocation that welcomes and honours children’s unique individual voices within co-constructed communities, enacted in practice through pedagogical documentation. These philosophy and practice align with Stetsenko’s (2019) TAS to see our youngest children as agents for whom things not only matter but ‘who themselves matter in history, culture and society’ (p. 7). In such a view, children’s voices constitute activist deeds that contribute to shared, ongoing, and ever-changing ECE practices. As this chapter has shown, the next step is listening by intentionally creating conditions that make such socially just, democratic, participation and agency with our youngest citizens possible. This is because, as a Reggio Emilia Approach and the Australian ECE Code of Ethics (Early Childhood Australia, 2016) remind us, ECE sites in themselves can and should be democratic communities that contribute both to individuals (children, families, educators) within these sites and the societies around them. Democratic ECE pedagogy thus fulfils an aim of educational practice to initiate learners into acting and interacting with others (and the world) in ways oriented towards the good for each person (individually) and (collectively) the good for humankind (Kemmis et al., 2014) and promotes the work to be done together to live well in a world worth living in.