As a professor of early childhood studies, I see education and pedagogy as complex and interconnected with the ethical and political contexts of both the academic classroom and the early childhood classroom. The pedagogical conditions that students experience in the academic classroom influence how they will approach teaching and learning with young children in their care. Students come to the early childhood profession with many different goals and future aspirations. They also come from many different standpoints and subjectivities, having been shaped by their own educational experiences. My role as a professor is to create classroom conditions for learning that invite students to weave their unique knowledge, perspectives and lived experiences with the research, theories and practices of early childhood studies so that they meet the program outcomes and are ready to practice as professionals or to continue their education.

An important theoretical disposition that I forefront in my work as an educator is an ethics of care informed by intersectional and post-structural feminism (Powell, Johnston & Langford, 2021). While teaching through the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, I have come to value and reassert an intersectional feminist ethics of care in my work with students. Acknowledging that we are all marked by this collective global event, we find ourselves now in a different world: one that is forever changed. I am working to understand where we are now, to re-orient myself, in both digital and physical classroom spaces, with a generation of students who have increased mental health needs and more complex student lives. For me the question is not so much how we get students "back on track" as much as how we meet them where they are now. Intentionally grounding my pedagogy in an ethics of care as an embodiment of equity as praxis (Powell, Johnston & Langford, 2021), helps me balance increased student needs and complexities as well as academic accommodations with supporting their accountability and success in meeting the rigour of the program and professional standards for practice.

I believe that students want to learn new knowledge and skills that they can apply in their work with young children and families. In tandem with the practice knowledge that students desire, education must create conditions for students to think critically about how their practice is shaped by histories of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, racism, heteronormativity, ableism and patriarchy in education. How students practice will be directly informed by how they understand their relation and responsibility to the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions Calls to Action and to creating anti-racist and liberatory pedagogies. As such I work to co-create educational conditions for students to understand who they are in the world and what they have to contribute, as well as “how” they are in the world (Biesta 2022) and how they respond as educators to the concerns of the communities in which they live and work. Now more than ever, I believe this is an important and urgent aim of education.

As a professor who is a white, cis-gender, able-bodied settler, it is my ethical and political responsibility to work at dismantling the structures of colonialism, capitalism and white supremacy in education and to create liberatory conditions in classrooms where students can think critically about the systems in which they live and work. I take seriously my responsibility to notice and disrupt the colonial and racist foundations of our education systems and to create possibilities for thinking and doing education otherwise (Bezaire & Johnston, 2022; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015). My recent article with Dr. Kimberly Bezaire explored the various ways that we have been thinking with subjectivity and complexity in our teaching practices alongside students in the academic classroom and in field practicum (Bezaire & Johnston, 2022). In this work, we share some of the strategies we have used to co-create critical collaborative communities with students and to rethink authentic assessments that rigorously value and account for students’ subjectivity and critical thinking. We intentionally lean into the complexity of subjectivity as a condition that fosters relational and intellectual capacities of students who are becoming educators. I am hopeful when students are engaged in critical and creative dialogue with each other, making sense of who they are as "becoming educators" in the current contexts ofthe worlds inside and outside of the classroom.

Critical thinking and collaborative inquiry are essential to pedagogy in early childhood as identified in How Does Learning Happen?: Ontario’s Pedagogy for the Early Years (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014), the Ontario Kindergarten Program (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2016) and the College of ECE Code of Ethics and Standards of Practice (College of ECE, 2017). In creating conditions for critical thinking and collaborative inquiry, I use a variety of active and reflective pedagogical methods including:

• Engaging students in reading current texts, scholarly articles and novels, videos and films, that are reflective of a multiplicity of voices and that challenge dominant discourses in education.

• Organizing class time for students to read, think, and write both individually and in groups. This fosters a sense of relationality and an expectation for intellectual rigour within the class which is essential for education to take place (Ladson-Billings, 1995).

• Writing weekly journal entries or response papers that provide space for making personal connections to the course content and to think through concepts and questions before engaging in group discussion. This helps students to stay on track with readings and prepares them for more public group work and dialogue.

• Creating glossaries of terms and concepts as they read and discuss course texts, making connections to quotes and their own reflections on their reading and discussion.

• Using online collaborative tools such as padlet, miro and mentimeter as effective methods for engaging students in larger group discussions and interactive learning.

• Using drawing as an interpretive method of analysis that helps students explore concepts and challenge assumptions about who the educator is and who the child is (Barry, 2020).

My aim as an educator is to foster conditions for learning and success in meeting course outcome and program standards. I find these pedagogical practices encourage students’ active participation, critical thinking, and learning while also providing feedback on how and what students are learning in the course. These pedagogical practices also help me understand how students are orienting themselves toward the world and their work as educators. I always provide an opportunity for students to anonymously share feedback directly with me through a Stop, Start, Continue or Rose, Thorn, Bud exercise. I compile the feedback into and share it with students addressing any misunderstanding and issues in the course delivery and content that they have brought to my attention. In this way, my aim is also to empower students to be advocates for themselves as professionals and public intellectuals, working with and for more just and livable worlds for children, families, and communities. I want students to have confidence in the knowledge they bring and to see their roles in caring for and educating young children in the contexts of families and communities as valuable and ethical work.