Teaching Through the Trouble: Children’s Minor Gestures Toward Radical Hope

Abstract

This paper draws on one author’s practitioner research and the other author’s doctoral research to explore how educators and children might co-create early childhood pedagogies of radical hope by resisting the impulse to turn away from injustice, discomfort, and complexity. Working with Erin Manning’s (2016) concept of minor gestures, we ask: what subtle acts, small resistances, and affective ruptures can activate the conditions for more just, affectively engaged ways of being and teaching? These gestures—fragile, relational, and emergent—might not dismantle structural injustices in isolation, but they open space for alternative modes of presence, solidarity, and response-ability (Barad, 2007). Rather than shielding children behind a veneer of “innocence,” we carry forward Loris Malaguzzi’s vision of children as “rich in potential, strong, powerful” and capable of confronting complex realities (Rinaldi, 2006).