Session Date and Time:
27.7.2017 – 27.7.2017
Thursday, 3pm to 5pm
Location:
FKA Children’s Services, 42 Dight St, Collingwood VIC 3066
Costs:
Free*
For more information contact:
FKA Children's Services 03 9428 4471 | fkacs@fka.org.au
Eligibility:
*FREE for fkaCS Members / Member Forum launch special offer - Limited release tickets (FREE) for non-members
About our Member Forums:
Our vision is for all children to actively participate in quality education and care services that recognise, value and celebrate diversity.
In line with our vision and purpose, and in response to our members’ needs, FKA Children’s services will be hosting a number of FREE member forums during Term 3. Covering a range of topics, these forums are guaranteed to be topical, evidence-based, relevant and practical. Take advantage of this member benefit. Come along with your colleagues to learn something new, challenge yourself and leave with some practical tips to support your work with children and families.
About the presenters:
As walkers, talkers, and place makers, Mat, Catherine and Mindy come to the project in different ways.
Mat Jakobi, an Aboriginal teacher educator at Victoria University brings a commitment to embedding Aboriginal standpoints in early childhood teacher education, research and practice. Importantly, within these standpoints are the overarching concerns for sovereignty and self-determination.
Catherine Hamm comes to this project as a white settler woman, but also with a connection to the Victorian Aboriginal community. As a lecturer at Victoria University, she is interested in the role of place in (re)centring Aboriginal knowledges as part of everyday practice in early childhood education.
Mindy Blaise, professor of early childhood education at Victoria University, is an Australian-American settler woman, and has lived in Melbourne for 12 years. However, place never feels quite ‘right’ to her. She comes to this project with a history of and commitment to troubling the developmental, racist, (hetero) sexist, and imperialist knowledge base that dominates early childhood education.
Forum summary:
Australia has many layers of colonial inscription that are not always visible and these layers create a mixture of knowledges that have been remapped over a much longer history of Aboriginal knowing. In more recent times early childhood education has sought to pedagogically reconcile Australian practices, but as we argue, educators are troubled in placing Aboriginal ways of doing and being within and against the multicultural, diversity, and developmental discourses that have dominated the field.
Making Aboriginal knowledges visible requires a shift in how we understand place in early childhood education. To trouble place as a pretty and safe back drop for children to play in, master, or learn about, we propose that different kinds of practices are required to recognise and think-with the local places in which children live, learn and grow.
In our work together, we sought potential new cosmologies that include engaging with the tensions that come when Aboriginal perspectives are foregrounded, rather than ‘included’ or ‘bolted on’ in everyday curriculum and pedagogy. Rather than seeking neat research outcomes, that could clearly identify a pathway to pedagogical reconciliation we acknowledged and worked with the multiple and sometimes conflicting standpoints of the research team, and paid attention to how Land generated these dialogues.
By experimenting with a walking, dialoguing, and placing methodology, we show how an Australian Aboriginal teacher educator and two settler white women are dialoguing in ways that scratch at the layers of inscription that are present in the Australian landscape. Three critical placing practices (engaging, scratching, and (re)centrering) will be presented as a dialogic performance and as a strategy to make visible the processes of troubling place and reconciliation pedagogies in early childhood education.
Forum format
3pm-3:15pm: Registration, tea/coffee
3:15pm-4:15pm: Forum presentation (1hr)
4:15pm-4:35pm: Audience question time/discussion
4:35pm-5pm: Wrap-up, tea/coffee, networking
Not a member?
Register to attend and become an fkaCS Member! Join fkaCS to take advantage of our membership benefits and support children’s cultural and linguistic rights. Our new membership year runs from 1 July 2017 to 30 June 2018. Complete you're membership application online, via email, over the phone or in person at the forum.