Past Exposures

The work of a pedagogist is not only about engaging with the world of early childhood education and how it appears in the present. The work of the pedagogist—the ability to envision and co-create pedagogical processes—is intimately related to pedagogists’ subjective dispositions towards the world more broadly, its past and futures, and thus to how they co-compose with the world and its inhabitants. Pedagogists envision. Envisioning, in this vital work, is tied to the ability to incorporate an idea into the present without repeating the present. Envisioning, then, requires that pedagogists enrich and alter the habituated regimes of perception—the sense making patterns—that sustain, reiterate and secure the present into the future.

An exposure creates a space for “being with”—being exposed to— ideas or situations that have the potential to create alterations and “redistribute the sensible” (Ranciere), as well as its ways of participating in common/shared living. Estrangement, refiguring, altering, being called by a sensing that can’t yet be made sense of are the generative instantiations that exposures offer to pedagogists, and that in turn pedagogists offer to their milieu.

~Cristina Delgado Vintimilla