Search

In this article, the author forwards the importance of mad autobiographical poetic writing to challenge and disrupt epistemic injustice within pre-service early childhood education and care. They explore their own mad autobiographical poetic writing as a queer, non-binary, mad early childhood educator and pre-service early childhood education and care faculty member, and argue that mad poetic writing can methodologically be used as a form of resistance to epistemic injustices and epistemological erasure in early childhood education and care. This article argues for the importance of autobiographical writing in early childhood education and care, and the necessity of centralizing early childhood educators' subjectivities and histories when addressing -- and transforming -- issues of equity, inclusion and belonging in early childhood education and care. The personal and intimate mad autobiographical poetic writing of this article -- written by the author -- focuses on how personal experience with madness as it pertains to working within pre-service early childhood education and care can challenge norms that govern and regulate madness. Ultimately, the author argues that transformation in early childhood education and care can take place by reflecting on experiences of mental and emotional distress, and considering poetic writings as starting places for imagining new futurities and a plurality of educator voices and perspectives.

Home economics is a diverse helping field that includes the areas of child development and education, nutrition, cooking, and the dietetics profession. Historically, these fields have been the domain of heterosexual cisgender women, with research and discussions of queerness limited. In this article, using queer methodologies and a queer autobiographical writing approach, we explore our experiences as two queer individuals who teach in disciplines within home economics, with the intent of cultivating more space for queerness within the fields of early childhood education and dietetics. We created common themes of queer subjectivities and queer knowledges from our autobiographical writing. In the queer subjectivities theme, we analyze the regulation and surveillance of masculinities and queer subjectivities. In the queer knowledges theme, we explore issues of queer pedagogies and practices within teaching. Recommendations for creating queer potentialities that disrupt normative notions of care that silence queer subjectivities and knowledges within home economics are discussed.

Open conversations regarding sexuality education and gender and sexual diversity with young children in early childhood education settings are still highly constrained. Educators report lacking professional training and fearing parental and community pushback when explicitly addressing these topics in their professional practices. As such, gender and sexual diversity and conversations of bodily development are left silenced and, when addressed, filtered through heteronormative and cisnormative frameworks. Through a Foucauldian post-structural lens, this article analyses data from open-ended qualitative questions in a previous research study regarding early childhood educators' perceptions on discussing the development of sexuality in early learning settings in an Ontario, Canada context. Through this Foucauldian post-structural analysis, the authors discuss forms of surveillance and regulation that early childhood educators experience in early learning settings regarding the open discussion of gender and sexuality. The authors explore how both the lack of explicit curricula addressing gender and sexuality in the early years in Ontario and taken-for-granted notions of developmentally appropriate practice, childhood innocence, and the gender binary -- employed in discourses of sexuality education in the early years -- regulate early childhood educators' professional practices. The authors provide recommendations which critique the developmentalist logics -- specifically, normative development -- that are used to silence non-heterosexual and non-cisgender identities in the early years, while articulating the need for explicit curricula for educators in the early years regarding gender and sexuality in young children.

With no standardized approach to sexuality education among Canada's 13 provinces and territories and the various curricula focusing on neurotypical and non-disabled children, educators have insufficient instruction and lack appropriate training on how to address sexuality education for children and youth with disabilities, particularly children and youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This article provides the current context of sexuality education for children and youth with ASD in Canadian schools and guidance for more inclusive approaches with attention to three important areas: puberty, relationships, and gender and sexual diversity. Recommendations are offered to support more inclusive approaches to sexuality education, acknowledging that a one-size-fits-all approach is insufficient for children and youth with ASD. The recommendations focus on three goals: (a) moving beyond simple knowledge-based approaches to include skill-building; (b) including parents, autistic voices, and advocates in planning and ongoing conversations; and (c) providing supports for educators.

This article engages in an autoethnographic analysis to offer an argument for the importance of bringing mad studies to pre-service early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs. Through both analysing reflections on two "maddening moments" during pre-service teaching as a mad-identified pre-service ECEC educator and discussing relevant mad studies literature, I aim to forward an argument for the criticality of maddening pre-service ECEC programs and pedagogies. I argue that mad studies can provide ruptures to normativities ingrained in the developmentalist curricula and pedagogies in pre-service ECEC post-secondary programs and offer new ways of thinking of children, educators, and ECEC outside of developmental and normative tropes of early childhood educators (ECEs). As such, I examine how a maddening pedagogy in pre-service ECEC can bring affect into the classroom and disrupt how sanism functions through the knowledges and normativities prioritized within pre-service ECEC.

This article theorises the concept of sane-heteroprofessionalism as a regulatory mechanism operating at the intersections of sanism, cis-heteronormativity, and other structural oppressions within pre-service post-secondary education programmes. Building upon existing discussions of heteroprofessionalism, we examine how sane-heteroprofessionalism functions to govern m/Mad, queer, and trans knowledge and subjectivities within these programmes, positioning professionalism as a tool of social control. We advocate for future critical analyses of sane-heteroprofessionalism to explore how notions of professional competency and regulation systematically marginalise queer, m/Mad, and trans perspectives among faculty, students, and instructors in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comprehensive sexuality education is increasingly being employed on a global scale, with controversies arising regarding the content of such education and the rights of children to access sexuality education versus parents' rights to decide the moral education of their children. In this paper, we utilise crip theory and a critical disability studies lens to analyse controversies surrounding parents' rights versus children's rights in the context of comprehensive sexuality education in Ontario, Canada. Using a disability studies perspective, this paper discusses the erasure of disabled children and youth in debates over children's and parents' rights while problematising the liberal humanist and legal frameworks often employed in comprehensive sexuality education and children's rights. As such, we theorise how a more relationally attuned version of both children's rights and comprehensive sexuality education can avoid oppositional politics and the reification of liberal humanist and ableist ideologies.

Muscle regeneration can be permanently impaired by traumatic injuries, despite the high regenerative capacity of skeletal muscle. Implantation of engineered biomimetic scaffolds to the site of muscle ablation may serve as an attractive off-the-shelf therapeutic approach. The objective of the study was to histologically assess the therapeutic benefit of a three-dimensional spatially patterned collagen scaffold, in conjunction with rehabilitative exercise, for treatment of volumetric muscle loss. To mimic the physiologic organization of skeletal muscle, which is generally composed of myofibers aligned in parallel, three-dimensional parallel-aligned nanofibrillar collagen scaffolds were fabricated. When implanted into the ablated murine tibialis anterior muscle, the aligned nanofibrillar scaffolds, in conjunction with voluntary caged wheel exercise, significantly improved the density of perfused microvessels, in comparison to treatments of the randomly oriented nanofibrillar scaffold, decellularized scaffold, or in the untreated control group. The abundance of neuromuscular junctions was 19-fold higher when treated with aligned nanofibrillar scaffolds in conjunction with exercise, in comparison to treatment of aligned scaffold without exercise. Although, the density of de novo myofibers was not significantly improved by aligned scaffolds, regardless of exercise activity, the cross-sectional area of regenerating myofibers was increased by > 60% when treated with either aligned and randomly oriented scaffolds, in comparison to treatment of decellularized scaffold or untreated controls. These findings demonstrate that voluntary exercise improved the regenerative effect of aligned scaffolds by augmenting neurovascularization, and have important implications in the design of engineered biomimetic scaffolds for treatment of traumatic muscle injury.

Contemporary and mainstream representations of gender and sexual minorities within pop culture provide an opportunity for marginalized narratives and stories to reach audiences otherwise excluded. As gay adolescent youth narratives become normalized within mainstream representations, ideas of coming out, the invisibilization of gay femininities, and the privileging of gender normativity within gay young adulthood percolate in film and media. This article presents an interpretive analysis of the regulation of femininity—femmephobia—within Love, Simon through depictions of Simon (the main gay adolescent character) and Ethan (Simon's feminine gay peer). Using femme theory and "fag discourses," this article problematizes femmephobic depictions of gay adolescence. Moreover, this article argues that Ethan's position as a "femme failure," and thus an exemplar of femme resistance, offers opportunities for challenging femmephobic gender relations amongst gay adolescence in media and pop culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inclusive classrooms with complex, diverse students have many challenges, including that of effective physical design. One included element that should be considered is a relaxation station, designed to teach and promote everyday self-regulation skills within a calmer and more private space. A relaxation station is an essential component in every classroom to support sensory needs, self-regulation, and so on, in an everyday and easily accessible manner appropriate for students with disabilities and their typical peers. This article presents a rationale as well as practical guidelines on how to develop such a space effectively, including recommendations for its design (e.g., boundaries), procedures (e.g., entry/exit), and elements (e.g., items, tools, and visuals).

High quality early intervention is a crucial component of supportive and inclusive early childhood education and care (ECEC) and crucial for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). For children with ASD, there is limited access to ECEC services and there is little research or writing on the importance of bridging even conversations between the fields of ECEC and special education needs. This paper addresses the importance of starting a conversation by delineating current literature on ASD and early intervention services while making recommendations for how practitioners and policy-makers can consider the needs of young children with ASD in ECEC programming, bringing together clinicians and educators in ECEC settings into broader and closer collaborations. Through investigating current wide-scale reports on ASD in ECEC and inclusive settings, screening, early intervention, and evidence-based interventions, as well as the specific needs of parents of children with ASD, we seek to bring such essential discussions to the forefront. In turn, practitioners can provide supportive early-years environments for children with ASD, as well as early intervention and identification services that support inclusive practices.

Schools are often sites of surveillance for students as behaviors are governed and regulated by gendered norms and sexed expectations. For transgender and gender non-conforming students, school environments can produce anxiety as students are categorized into gender binaries. This article draws from Canadian policy in public schools and higher education, interview data, as well as transgender teen narratives, to analyze gender policing in schools through gender binary washrooms. Building upon prior research and writing on gender binary washrooms [Cavanagh, S. L. 2010. "Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination." Toronto: University of Toronto Press; Ingrey, J. C. 2012. "The Public School Washroom as Analytic Space for Troubling Gender: Investigating the Spatiality of Gender Through Students' Self-Knowledge." "Gender and Education" 24 (7): 799-817; Ingrey, J. C. 2013a. "Shadows and Light: Pursuing Gender Justice Through Students' Photovoice Projects of the Washroom Space." "Journal of Curriculum Theorizing" 29 (2): 174-190; Ingrey, J. C. 2013b. "The Public School Washroom as Heterotopia: Gendered Spatiality and Subjectification." PhD diss., University of Western Ontario. http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3175&context=etd], we argue that through advocacy, policy implementation, and the creation of gender-neutral washrooms, safe(r) and more positive school environments can be created for transgender and gender non-conforming students.

Teaching About Gender Diversity: Teacher-Tested Lesson Plans for K-12 Classrooms edited by by Susan W. Woolley and Lee Airton Canadian Scholars, 2020, 334 pages ISBN: 9781773381664 (print) Within current schooling [...]

There is a lack of research regarding dietary supplement (DS) use among Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Two-Spirit, Queer (GBT2Q) men and non-binary individuals, despite the higher prevalence of body image issues and societal pressure within this community. This study aimed to investigate patterns and predictors of DS use in this population, including types of DS used, sources of information, and reasons for DS use. A validated and anonymous online questionnaire was completed by 204 participants (52.5% men, 43.1% gay, mean age 29.34 + 6.77 years) across Canada, who were consuming DS at the time of the study. Analyses included descriptive statistics to characterize the sample based on gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, and other demographic attributes, using Pearson's chi-square tests and multi-way cross-tabulation analyses. Additionally, regression analyses, including binary and logistic regressions, were employed to identify predictors of DS use. Data analysis concluded that vitamins/minerals (92.2%), proteins (84.3%) and carbohydrates (75.5%) were the most consumed types of supplements. Identifying as certain genders and sexualities was significantly associated with supplement preferences, such that men reported higher use of amino acids (p = 0.033) and non-vitamins/mineral antioxidants compared to individuals identifying as other genders (p = 0.006). Moreover, bisexual participants consumed amino acids (p = 0.043) and carbohydrates (p = 0.026) more frequently when compared to non-bisexual participants. The most listed reason for DS use was to improve immunity (60.3%), with health care professionals being listed as the source of information by most participants (51.0%). Findings from this study can serve as a foundation for further research in this area and can guide the formulation and implementation of adequate policies targeting this underserved population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early childhood education (ECE) spaces within settler-colonial societies operate as sites of violence and oppression whereby non-conformity to white, rational, ableist, cisgender norms is weaponised as developmental deficits. In this paper, we refer to the refusals of non-dominant ways of knowing as forms of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007). We describe the foundational underpinnings of ECE throughout the twentieth century in Ontario, Canada and trace how normative ideas of children, educators, education, and childhood developed through a largely positivist, developmental orientation. Ultimately, we call for epistemic justice (Fricker 2007) as an emancipatory way forward in post-secondary ECE programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Queer experience is often considered at odds with 'the South;' moreover, notions of Southern belonging are commonly formed through experiences with place and are riddled with contradictions. Utilizing qualitative data collected from twenty-three semi-structured interviews, this paper seeks to understand the ways lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) students, faculty, and staff at a large state college in Metro Atlanta understand their identity in place, and negotiate experiences of belonging within a rural, suburban, and urban Southern milieu. By engaging the qualitative interviews of LGBTQ + people as stories of place, this paper queers essentialist and one-dimensional understandings of 'the South,' Georgia, and Metro Atlanta, by attending to the ways gender identity/expression and sexuality are produced through and felt in place. These queer feelings provide the context to consider the everyday negotiations of belonging that take place and the ways LGBTQ + Southerners live, love, and resist in 'the South.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors draw on feminist theorizations to examine ethnographic data, illustrating how femmephobia is enacted among boys in kindergarten. They also examine how teachers' well-intended responses may inadvertently legitimize femmephobia when a femininity-affirmative orientation is not applied. The authors argue that intentional gender-affirming actions by education stakeholders are necessary for promoting and supporting fluid gender explorations in kindergarten, especially in terms of valuing and validating femininity among boys. Specifically, they consider the potentials of femininity-affirmative pedagogy as one approach to countering femmephobia and working towards gender inclusion and equality in early education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors argue for a rethinking of kindergarten education from a critical feminist perspective. They illustrate how the devaluation and denigration of femininity and care – otherwise known as femmephobia – that permeates patriarchal societies is present in the seemingly innocent spaces of play in kindergarten. Tracing femmephobia in the spatial-material arrangements of play, teacher–student interactions during play, and children's play practices in two Canadian classrooms, the authors show how care-related activities and learning are deeply marginalized in kindergarten education. Given these findings, the authors propose a femininity-affirmative pedagogy in early learning. Specifically, they discuss the importance of intentional practice around an ethics of care. The authors argue that a refocus on an ethics of care in early childhood education is urgently needed in collective work towards social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has extensively studied adult attachment theory, a fundamental psychological framework, particularly regarding its implications for adult attachment and sexual dynamics. The previous literature has established relationships between adult attachment and various sexual behaviours as well as communication patterns. Specifically, individuals with secure attachment styles typically engage in open communication and cautious sexual behaviours, whereas individuals with anxious or avoidant attachment styles exhibit less sexual communication and engage in riskier sexual activities. That said, limited research has explored the relationship between adult attachment style and perceived knowledge regarding partner sex history. This study aimed to fill this gap by investigating how adult attachment style relates to perceived knowledge about partner sexual experiences. A sample of 237 undergraduate students completed surveys assessing attachment style and their perceived awareness of their partner's sexual past. Attachment style was evaluated using the Revised Adult Attachment Scale (RAAS) and perceived knowledge was measured using the Partner Sexual History Scale (PSHS). The results indicated a significant correlation between adult attachment style and perceived knowledge of a partner's sexual history. Specifically, individuals with secure and avoidant attachment styles demonstrated greater perceived awareness of their partner's sexual experiences compared to those with an anxious attachment style. This research contributes to our comprehension of the complex interplay among adult attachment, sexual knowledge, sexual communication, and relationship dynamics in young adult populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While conversations pertaining to school‐based sexuality education are becoming more prominent, the experiences of disabled children and youth are still under‐discussed in research. Despite disabled childhood studies emerging as a field of inquiry, there is still a lack of critical conversation pertaining to disabled students' sexuality education within their respective schooling. This article draws from Fricker's theory of epistemic injustice to describe some of the ethical questions that arise in the denial of disabled children and youth's access to sexuality education in school contexts. By engaging with relevant literature on sexuality education and disabled students in schooling, this article puts forward that the continual exclusion of disabled students from accessing school‐based sexuality education promotes a form of epistemic injustice and silencing of the voices, perspectives and experiences of disabled students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]