When one of them is in our place: Early childhood settings as spaces of resistance

Abstract

When they come to us in our place, what happens, for them and for us? This article investigates conceptions of Otherness through the story of an immigrant early childhood teacher, seen as the stranger, foreigner, who comes to our place, our early childhood setting. It provokes and challenges orientations, towards teacher-foreigners in a teaching team, towards difference and towards considerations of our place, as culturally drenched in local knowledges, values and practices, as relationally complex and as a possible site of resistance. This article disturbs and complicates dominant constructions of the Other by positing teacher-subjects through a Kristevan lens as dynamic and constantly evolving. Tracings of Kristeva’s philosophical influences and treatments of Otherness help to present entangled historicised, contemporary and future insights into the recognition and marginalisation of teacher-foreigners. Finally, the teacher’s story becomes further challenged with Kristeva’s suggestion that each one of us is a foreigner inside, Other to ourselves, when they come to us, in our place.