Teaching with Madness in Pre-service Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

Pre-service early childhood education and care (ECEC) post-secondary education – both historically and currently – is dominated by an emphasis on child development theories and the training of future practitioners to work with and care for young children by applying developmental theories to “understand” and assess young children. Within child development theorizations, the practitioner – or early childhood educator (ECE) – is predominately considered only through their ability to assist children in ascertaining “normative” developmental milestones. For ECEs with lived experiences with mental distress and “mental illness” – or Mad ECEs – this often means the denial of their experiences with madness or mental distress in workplace settings and the regulation of their diverse emotions, feelings, and experiences to be considered “capable” of working with and caring for young children. Drawing from Mad Studies frameworks that deconstruct binaries between the private and public and mental health and “illness,” this chapter calls for the explicit incorporation of Mad autobiographical narratives in pre-service ECEC to dismantle exclusionary norms promulgated within both pre-service training and ECEC widely. Placing Mad Studies in conversation with curriculum studies work around the “autobiographical self” and teaching with madness in higher education, this chapter forwards the absolute necessity of centralizing Mad epistemologies, pedagogies, and promoting wonder and curiosity through autobiography to dismantle unrealistic ideals of ECE identity and “development” within pre-service ECEC.