Activity 2.1 | Examining and Identifying Social Location

To deepen your understanding of social location and identity, this section provides a curated selection of blogs and readings that offer diverse perspectives and insights. These resources, written by experts and practitioners in the field, highlight the complexities of identity and its impact on leadership, relationships, and early childhood education practices. 

As you engage with these materials, reflect on how the ideas presented connect to your experiences and consider their relevance to your work as an ECE leader. These readings will challenge you to think critically and empathetically about the role of identity in shaping inclusive and responsive leadership.

Firstly, a 2021 School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences (SAFS) Washington University Blog, the concept of "social location", highlights the importance of educators reflecting on their social identities and how these affect their relationships with students. It also suggests sharing social locations can foster vulnerability and connection, helping to bridge differences and create a more inclusive environment.

Next, in the chapter entitled Enacting Twenty-First-Century  Early Childhood Education: Curriculum as Caring(Hodgins et al., 2021), the authors focus on "the potential that a feminist materialism reconceptualization of care holds in efforts to unsettle Euro-Western developmental and anthropocentric hegemony and reimagine pedagogies for and with twenty-first-century children" (p. 204). 

Finally, First Nations Pedagogy Online has created a multimodal resource to help you explore interconnection, a central core of First Nations, Inuit, and Metis worldviews and ways of knowing. Access the First Nations Pedagogy Interconnectedness page to access relevant readings, visual downloads, models and videos that situate interconnection and examine how we relate to ourselves, each other and our world. 

References

First Nations Pedagogy Online (n.d.). Interconnectedness. CC-BY. 

Hodgins, D., Yazbeck, S., & Wapenaar, K. (2021). Enacting twenty-first-century early childhood education: Curriculum as caring. In Curriculum in early childhood education: Re-examined, rediscovered, renewed(pp. 203–225).