Staying-With Children’s Realities through Radical Hope and Minor Gestures
Abstract
This paper explores resistance to deficit portrayals of childhood through relational presence with children’s affective, social, and cultural realities (Noddings, 2012; Zapata et al., 2019). Drawing on the notion of radical hope (Lear, 2006), and Manning’s (2016) concept of minor gestures, the analysis examines how child agency both emerge from and unsettles systemic constraints. Using Sean Baker’s (2017) film, The Florida Project, as a pedagogical text, the study employs a hybrid methodology in which analytic prose is “intercut” with poetic fragments written in the imagined voice of Moonee, the six-year-old protagonist. These poems correspond to Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological layers, serving as moments of pedagogical presence that witness without reducing, lingering with the immediacy of play, laughter, and fear. This analysis suggests that educators who practice staying-with (Haraway, 2016), can resist deficit frames, cultivate reflective listening, and affirm children’s everyday narratives as legitimate knowledge and ways of being.Keywords
relational pedagogy, ecolgocial systems theory, radical hope, poetic inquiry, pedagogical presence, early childhood education