From “Barbaric” to “Knowing”: Disrupting teaching to resignify “Toddler”

Mainstream images of “toddler” tend to serve a humorous purpose in mass media, most often presenting children of this age (18 months–3 years) as out-of-control. This assumed “barbaric” toddler promotes early childhood as a time for intervention, expecting adults to be the shapers of behavior and knowledge within discourses of social regulation which delineate possible childhoods. Within the Capitalocene, possible childhoods are inextricably linked to future adulthoods where this intervention is desired early to prepare children for future schooling and thus, future work to further industrial progress and consumption. This article revisits narrative, self-reflexive data from a larger study to identify and deconstruct mundane, acceptable teaching practices that promote the positioning of very young children as “lesser beings” through the constant control of children’s bodies, ideas, and subjectivities. Through this deconstruction of practice and in turn adult-child power relations, ruptures in habitual ways of knowing and teaching lead to a reimagining of toddlers’ actions in an effort to build counternarratives. Practices of disruption and resignification aim to challenge the positions of classroom subjects as they are continuously reproduced through discourses of development and the neoliberal agenda.