From padhana (पढ़ाना) to play pedagogy: a collaborative autoethnography of an immigrant early childhood educator

ABSTRACT

Research exploring the influences of cultural experiences, future imaginations and aspirations on the formation of pedagogy among immigrant Early Childhood (EC) educators remains scarce. This collaborative autoethnography (CAE) is about the first author’s pedagogical journey. Educated and trained in India as an EC educator, the stories shared in this paper offer insights into how the first author navigated and negotiated her understandings of pedagogies from padhana, a more traditional Indian focused pedagogy to ‘Western’ play-based pedagogy. Using photo-elicitation techniques from visual images as data and Appadurai’s theoretical framework on cultural global flows, the changes and continuities of conceptions of pedagogy influenced by cultural experiences, future imaginations and aspirations are explored. The iterative process supported by CAE helped redefine understandings about pedagogies, teacher identity and EC education.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigrant
• Early Childhood education
• play-based pedagogy
• collaborative autoethnography
• imaginations
• aspirations

Acknowledgments

I am and will forever be grateful to my parents, Vijay and Sarju for instilling the curiosity to learn and providing the strength to achieve my goals. Surviving my academic journey would not have been possible without the unconditional love and support of my dear husband, thank you for your patience and listening to my talks. A big shout out to my two boys for motivating me to continue, especially during the challenging periods.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Funding

The findings presented in this paper are from a larger doctoral study which is kindly funded by the Australian Government Research Training Program and the Graduate Women Victoria Extension Fund within the State of Victoria, Australia.