(Un)finding childhoods in citational practices with postdevelopmental pedagogies

Abstract

Taking up the contention that child development manifests through the developmental logics it enacts, the authors work with citational practices as iterations of how developmentalism's logics are done in everyday practices in early childhood and teacher education. They work with Erica Burman's method of ‘found childhood’ to propose citational practices as artefacts of found childhood – as traces of how childhood happens in contemporary life and as an indicator of the dominant knowledges and knowledge-making practices that animate 21st-century childhoods. With disciplining and failure as moments of citational practices, the authors follow how practices of citing do and do not do developmental logics. In dialogue with postdevelopmental pedagogies, they wonder how one might cite into otherwise futures beyond the certainty and temporalities dictated by child development. The authors refuse the progress-oriented logics of child development and do not articulate new ‘best’ practices for citing, but instead write through provocations that might take up questions of world-making, pedagogy and life in line with the propositions offered by postdevelopmental pedagogies.