This time at the University of British Columbia has been transformative. I feel incredibly grateful to have been privileged with the opportunity to extend not only my education, but also myself - the ways in which I see and
Haines, Alaska, taken August 2022
understand who I am as I occupy this space today and what has influenced that journey. It has shifted how I see the spaces I inhabit, as if a curtain has been pulled back to reveal what was always there. The scripts I had memorized and so easily stood behind are no longer invisible. I see them now, though in all honesty, there is still a fog, but I can sense that something different exists than what I saw three years ago. I want to see more. I want to know more. I want to be part of transformative action.
Clandinin & Connelly (2000) explore the idea that:
“experiences grow out of other experiences, and experiences lead to further experiences. Wherever
one positions oneself in that continuum – the imagined now, some imagined past, or some imagined
future – each point has a past experiential base and leads to an experiential future” (as cited in
Clandinin, 2020, p. 216).
Alissa Mwenelupembe (2023), in her collection Stories of Resistance, shares reflections from Black women in early learning and childcare who discuss systemic barriers and the challenges they have faced on their journeys. She writes:
“My experiences have been the stepping stones that have helped me cross to the other side of the river. Sometimes, other people have given me a stone along the way. I leave these stones for the women who come after me, and I return from time to time to make sure they are still visible” (p. 11).
To me, this exemplifies a pedagogy of care. In many ways, I have forged my own path, but I do not know that I would be here today were it not for the many strong women who have either placed stones for me or showed me where they were laid.
Revelstoke, British Columbia, taken Summer 2021
My next steps are grounded in both hope and vision. Ultimately, I seek to teach in a graduate level ECE program, to truly activate my role as an instructor, and to contribute scholarship that supports early childhood educators in navigating the grey areas of practice - where policy collides with lived experience and where accountability meets care. My current research interests include critical race theory and its connections to the systemic and social harms experienced by descendants of transatlantic slavery; culturally sustaining critical literacy practices; and positioning intergenerational resilience in Black communities as a counter-story to narratives of intergenerational trauma.
Recognizing the privilege of graduate education, I plan to continue creating tools that make this work accessible to all early childhood educators seeking to expand their learning. I am elated to continue my scholarship, having been accepted to Western University’s Doctor of Education program in the field of Equity, Diversity, and Social Justice. I am also beginning to make plans with one of my children, a History major, to visit Nova Scotia after his graduation so that we might more deeply explore our own history and that of other Canadian descendants of slavery.
"Right action requires only that we respond faithfully to our own inner truth and to the truth around us"
(Palmer, 1990, as cited in Tatum, 2017, p. 341)
I am deeply passionate about this work, open to where this journey leads, and committed to co-creating conditions in which children and educators feel “visible, valued, [and] validated” (Mwenelupembe, 2023), can take risks in the spirit of learning, think otherwise with place, and challenge inequities woven into our educational and social institutions.
Remaining
in the
Tangle
“He who looks outward dreams.
He who looks inwards awakens”
(Carl Jung as cited in Mwenelupembe, 2023, p. 90).
Photo from UnSplash, Estefania Ventura
