Doing Twitter, Postdevelopmental Pedagogies, and Digital Activism

Abstract

In this article, we interrogate how we might manifest early childhood education’s Twitter purview as a space for thinking with postdevelopmental pedagogies. Accordingly, we pay attention to the ethics and politics that shape our Twitter practices, asking how these activate postdevelopmental provocations. In this sense, postdevelopmental pedagogies refer to processes and questions that interrupt the assumptions, objectivity, universalism, and technocratic instrumentalism of child development that so often pervade ECE practice, including much of the #earlychildhoodeducation content. Anchored in the two Twitter accounts that we coordinate, we outline four practices for doing Twitter with postdevelopmental provocations: counterpublics, counter-narratives, and counter-memory, collectivity, and digital feminist activism. We then work through two examples, showing how we draw these practices into our decision making as we craft tweets to activate postdevelopmental questions. We conclude by offering forward questions that educators, pedagogists, researchers, and activists might carry into their own Twitter practices.

Keywords: early childhood education, Twitter, postdevelopmental pedagogies, digital activism