Practicing Palimpsest: Layering Stories and Disrupting Dominant Western Narratives in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Interpreting and contextualizing the meanings of spoken, transcribed, visual and embodied languages, we explore how the life stories of immigrant educators evoke socio-cultural and diverse imaginaries. We incorporate the Greek practice of palimpsest - a layering of stories, voices, fragments, and traces - to understand forms of active becomings which provide possibilities for dissonance and transformation and treat the self as relational and inherently multiple. Critically reflecting on this stratum of narratives and cultural understandings, we draw on the insights of several theoreticians and scholars to consider how the language of immigration, trauma, and displacement emerge in educator’s thinking about the curriculum they are given. In transcribing stories - the participants and our own - we heard “layered voices” (Aoki, 2005) that pointed us to different understandings about the immigrant experience, the connections between the self and other and what it means for immigrant educators and students to live together in ECE settings.  Keywords: hermeneutics; early childhood education; narrative; identity; diversity; language  Â

Keywords

• hermeneutics
• early childhood education
• narrative
• identity
• diversity
• language