The first day of my inquiry falls within the opening week of the summer program (a form of public pedagogy in my research). Lindsay (the program coordinator) describes these first days as an emotional time for both children and educators. She explains that this week tends to function as ritual-setting, when children begin to familiarize themselves with the flow of time—moving through activities, lunches, and bathroom routines that are coordinated around a shared, though pre-determined, rhythm. She notes that while these times create necessary structures, they are also adjusted responsively according to the group’s emerging needs. The predictability of a schedule helps to mitigate the storm of emotions in these first days.
I sit with the intensity of this beginning. When I ask Lindsay how my role might be received in this newness, or what expectations the program might hold for me and for the research, she reminds me that I am welcomed into this unfolding. This is the first time the summer program is being run at this location, she tells me, and my presence is understood as an opportunity: a way to collaborate to imagine what the program could become, and how it might continue the rich work that has already been taking place in their early childhood programs.
As I sit in this opportunity, I return to the commitments of a post-qualitative inquiry. My thinking, and therefore my actions toward research, follow alongside a deep reading of the literature. Specifically, I am considering how I might enter into this space of inquiry through the scholars whose theories, ideas and propositions I have read. These are scholars who write about onto-ethico-epistemologies that are queer, feminist, and above all, steeped in an ethics that resists the colonial and sanitized nature of scientific research.
I am aware that I cannot begin to enter this research imagining that I am beginning anew in a sanitized environment, as if I were a clean subject or researcher. For me, this raises the question of what I mean when I say this research project is beginning. A beginning is not innocent. In my research, the beginning is full of context, history, and values. All participants bring these with them into the place we call a research site, including me, the researcher.
The phrase “leaving your baggage at the door” is not real. I borrow this idea from a saying I often heard in my preservice training, practicums, and classroom experiences as an educator. Instead of leaving baggage behind, I choose to inspect what is already there.
Here I would like to echo Ursula Le Guin’s (2019) Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. So that the first sound of my research may not be the violent thunk produced by a heteronormative, patriarchal “theory of everything.” Its assumptions are still resonant in quantitative and qualitative scientific research. Instead, my research leans toward a quieter beginning. It is one that carries, holds, and gathers.
At the same time, I echo Erica Burman’s (2008) deconstruction of the phrase “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Rather than discarding everything, Burman invites us to inspect the bathwater that babies, and I would add educators, researchers, and children, find themselves in. This provocation reminds me to both critique the foundational theories that order early childhood education and childcare, and also to attend to the excesses that escape these theories. To begin, then, is to enter into this space with an invitation to notice and respond to the entanglements that already exist, and to implicate myself within them.
References
Burman, E. (2008). Deconstructing developmental psychology (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Le Guin, U. K. (2019). The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Cosmogenesis.