Maddening pre-service early childhood education and care through poetics: Dismantling epistemic injustice through mad autobiographical poetics

Abstract

In this article, the author forwards the importance of mad autobiographical poetic writing to challenge and disrupt epistemic injustice within pre-service early childhood education and care. They explore their own mad autobiographical poetic writing as a queer, non-binary, mad early childhood educator and pre-service early childhood education and care faculty member, and argue that mad poetic writing can methodologically be used as a form of resistance to epistemic injustices and epistemological erasure in early childhood education and care. This article argues for the importance of autobiographical writing in early childhood education and care, and the necessity of centralizing early childhood educators’ subjectivities and histories when addressing – and transforming – issues of equity, inclusion and belonging in early childhood education and care. The personal and intimate mad autobiographical poetic writing of this article – written by the author – focuses on how personal experience with madness as it pertains to working within pre-service early childhood education and care can challenge norms that govern and regulate madness. Ultimately, the author argues that transformation in early childhood education and care can take place by reflecting on experiences of mental and emotional distress, and considering poetic writings as starting places for imagining new futurities and a plurality of educator voices and perspectives.