Professional Love on Purpose: Two Early Childhood Education Researchers Write Love Letters Across the Canadian Prairies
Abstract
In this paper, two early childhood educator-researchers consider what it might mean to offer our fellow educators “professional love”, and to do so on purpose. Dwelling in what might be termed an epistolary methodology, writing to each other across the Canadian Prairies, we offer a practice in professional love that resists conclusions and foregrounds activity. We suggest that the act of writing letters across our troubled Prairies is equally an act of practicing professional love. The letters themselves span several months and trace the tensions and celebrations of our lived experiences as early childhood educator-researchers.Keywords
epistolary methodology, practice, love, early childhood education, professionalism
Supplementary File(s)
PDFAuthor Biography
Dr. Catherine Dunnington
Catherine-Laura Dunnington holds a Ph.D. in education from the University of Ottawa and an M.Ed. from the University of Montana. Her work focuses on intersections of materiality, early childhood, literacy, and embodiment. She has written for the Bank Street College of Education’s Occasional Paper Series, Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, and the International Journal of Education & the Arts. She has been Chair of the Board at Dartmouth Daycare Centre for the past five years.
Dr. Noah Kenneally
Dr. Kenneally’s research interests include children’s perspectives of social life; their active involvement in socialization processes; critical approaches to early childhood education; caring early childhood practices as political practices; and children’s rights. His work is generally conducted within a relational sociological conceptual framework, thinking about how relationships between children, between children and adults and between the human and more-than-human locate us in networks of action, responsibility and care. Dr. Kenneally’s research often involves arts-based methodologies, drawing on his creative background to generate new knowledge and perspectives. He has extensive teaching experience, having taught in the School of Early Childhood Studies at X (Ryerson) University in Toronto, ON before coming to MacEwan. His teaching focuses on curriculum and creativity, family-centred practice and social justice.