Shenuri Nugawila

Pedagogical Commitments:

My many years of experience working in the early years field both as an early childhood educator and a children’s librarian have given me the opportunity to reflect on and challenge developmentally appropriate practices that are normalized as best practices in Euro-Western society. This dominant narrative of early childhood education perpetuates a single story that limits how we understand the child and childhood and how we respond to what early childhood education needs and what childhood could be.

As a pedagogist, I am interested in how the field of early childhood education might open to other stories beyond the dominant developmental narrative. Through the processes of photography, I am drawn to looking at how storytelling takes place, the ways in which it might disrupt linear ways of thinking within the field, and how it might expose something that is yet unknown.

I work with educators to think with multiple stories, diverse perspectives, and what is unnoticed and taken for granted. My pedagogical intentions are to generate different narratives that might shift or refocus our dominant developmental narrative. My hope is that it might even open new ways of seeing how we are in relation with our world.