This Paper is a Conversation: Turning Toward the Trouble in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

This paper is structured as a conversation between the authors, exploring how dialogue among early childhood educators can function as a minor gesture of hope, resistance, and pedagogical possibility. Drawing on the authors' involvement in the "Playing in the Anthropocene Inquiry Group," we reflect on ongoing discussions about children, play, and ecological and social crises—spaces where educators lament, celebrate, and imagine differently. We argue that these conversations are themselves a form of practice: relational, playful, and serious. Inspired by Manning’s (2016) notion of the “minor gesture” and Barad’s (2007) and Haraway’s (2016) concepts of response-ability, we frame conversation as a site where educators enact care, solidarity, and ethical engagement. Through examples such as children’s interactions with scarce resources, we show how small, reflective exchanges prompt new ways of thinking about abundance, scarcity, and co-creation. These conversations resist reductionist, developmentalist approaches and instead cultivate attentiveness, curiosity, and joy—echoing Johnson’s (2022) idea of finding where need, skill, and pleasure intersect. By taking private threads public, we model relational pedagogy, serious play, and everyday acts of feminist refusal (Ahmed, 2017). Ultimately, this experimental, conversational paper invites readers to recognize and value the minor gestures already happening in their own professional communities, highlighting the potential for dialogue to sustain hope, imagination, and action in the challenging conditions of contemporary childhoods.