Mary Songyi Kim

Pedagogical Commitments:

As a pedagogist located on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish people, I am committed to leading collaborative dialogues with educators. Collectively we reconfigure how we want to work with young children in the name of education that nurtures children to care about all their relations. To enable this idea to be actively practiced and meaningfully understood in our daily lives, I work with educators to think with living inquiries (Government of British Columbia, 2019) that matter to us all. Through each living inquiry project, we grapple with the meaning of children encountering Others in their lived experiences. Living inquiry projects can create a place for children to explore who they are related to in the world around them.

In our collaborative work, educators and I engage in the following actions toward transformative change. In our continuing discussions, we think about who we are as early childhood educators—what beliefs about children, learning, and relationships are reflected in our daily practice? We strive to think pedagogically in our weekly gatherings. This transformative change is about understanding education and children’s learning differently. It produces an attunement rather than looking for right answers about what learning is. Instead, we strive to keep learning about how children (and educators) make sense of their lives with others. Because we are not holding on to a “universal truth” to teach the children, we listen carefully to the knowledges and experiences we cocreate with them so that we can be ready to welcome new knowledge through the curriculum we live together.