Shifting Ethnicities: ‘Native Informants’ and other Theories from/for Early Childhood Education

Abstract

This article presents and deconstructs discourses of being ‘white’, being ‘other’, being ‘foreign’ and being ‘native’, with local examples from early childhood education events, sites and documentations. Working theoretically (after Spivak) and via subjectively told anecdotes and narratives, a postmodern theory of shifting ethnicities emerges. For hybridity and diaspora in early childhoods and later adulthoods, the modernist and colonial notion of singular and even binary ethnicity is unfixed. The work begins from interview data with ‘bilingual assistants' in pre-school day care centres in Norway.