Early Childhood Pedagogy Network BC

Today, July 31, 2026, marks the end of government funding for the Early Childhood Pedagogy Program.

This is a significant moment for ECPN, for pedagogists, and for the many educators, programs, children, families, and communities who have been part of this work over the years. The Pedagogist Program has created spaces for sustained pedagogical conversations, collective thinking, curriculum-making, and responsive work alongside educators across British Columbia.

We extend our deepest gratitude to all of the pedagogists, educators, program leaders, community partners, scholars, and collaborators who have shaped, supported, and carried this work. Your commitments, questions, relationships, and pedagogical efforts have made this program meaningful and continue to matter.

Although this phase of government-funded work is coming to an end, ECPN remains committed to supporting the pedagogist role and continuing to advocate for the value of pedagogical work in early childhood education.

ECPN will be taking a break from social media in August for the summer holidays. We look forward to reconnecting with everyone in September as we continue thinking together about what comes next.

ECPN would like to acknowledge and thank our partners at Early Childhood Educators of BC for their continued support, collaboration, and advocacy for the Early Childhood Pedagogy Program over the years.

In their recent statement in response to the decision to discontinue funding for the program, ECEBC affirmed the importance of pedagogical leadership within British Columbia’s early childhood education system and highlighted the impact this work has had on educators, children, families, and communities across the province.

This kind of partnership matters deeply. Sustaining pedagogical work requires more than one program or organization. It requires collective commitment, shared advocacy, and relationships that enable us to continue speaking about the value of educators’ thinking, the complexity of pedagogical practice, and the conditions needed for early childhood education to flourish.

We are grateful for ECEBC’s ongoing commitment to the pedagogist role and for their advocacy alongside educators, pedagogists, and communities. Their support has been an important part of making this work visible, valued, and understood across the province.

Link to ECEBC statement: https://www.ecebc.ca/download_file/view/11072/1

We recommend reading the article “Pedagogists and educators engaging ethical-political dimensions of early childhood education,” available on the ECPN website.

This article offers an important account of the pedagogist role and the work pedagogists and educators do together in early childhood centres. It describes pedagogists as working alongside educators to engage in situated, dialogical, and transformative pedagogical projects. Rather than offering quick strategies or ready-made answers, pedagogists help create conditions for educators to think with the complexities of their own contexts.

The article highlights how pedagogists support educators in working within complex circumstances, rethinking early childhood education’s familiar language, composing educational spaces, and engaging in situated curriculum-making.

As the Early Childhood Pedagogy Program comes to an end, this article feels especially significant. It helps make visible the depth and importance of the pedagogist’s role, and the ways in which sustained pedagogical support can create space for educators to engage with the ethical and political dimensions of early childhood education.

We invite you to read the full article on the ECPN website: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1476718X251391023

Last week, we posted about “minor moments.” This week, we think about the players who often create those moments. In Countering the Conceits of the Anthropos: Scaling Down and Researching with Minor Players, Affrica Taylor writes about the importance of paying attention to those who are often overlooked in dominant stories of the Anthropocene.

For pedagogical work, minor players invite attention to who and what is usually treated as peripheral. Children, animals, plants, materials, weather, waste, and places are not background to education. They participate in shaping questions, relations, and possibilities.

Thinking with minor players can help educators resist the urge to centre human mastery or control. It asks us to stay close to the small, situated, and often overlooked relations through which worlds are being lived, damaged, and remade.

This quote from the B.C. Early Learning Framework reminds us that language is never neutral.

The words educators use shape what becomes visible, what is taken seriously, and how children are understood.

When we pause with language, we can begin to notice the assumptions carried by familiar words. What changes when “challenging behaviour” becomes a question about relation, environment, or expectation? What shifts when “mess” becomes experimentation, “wandering” becomes searching, or "busy” becomes moving between many relations?

New words do not simply make practice sound different. They can help us see differently. They can create space for more careful interpretations, more generous responses, and more complex understandings of children’s ways of being in the world.

Language matters because it participates in pedagogy. It shapes how educators notice, respond, document, and make meaning with children.

We are resharing the 2024 Field Note, “Wasps Live Here.”

This field note invites us to pause with a small but charged encounter: the presence of wasps in an early childhood space. Wasps can quickly call forward fear, urgency, removal, and control. Yet staying with this encounter pedagogically opens different questions about cohabitation, discomfort, safety, and the more-than-human lives that already share the places where children live and learn.

Wasps Live Here asks us to think about what happens when educators slow down before deciding what something is or what must be done. What other relations, responsibilities, and possibilities become visible when wasps are not only understood as a problem to solve?

Read the full Field Note on the ECPN website: https://ecpn.ca/wasps-live-here/

This year, ECPN and ECEBC offered two cohorts of the re:materia Waste-As Material course: a winter cohort from January 19 to April 12, 2026, and a spring cohort from March 30 to June 21, 2026.

Across both cohorts, educators spent time thinking with waste as more than something to discard. Through readings, conversations, pedagogical invitations, and encounters with materials, participants explored how waste can provoke new questions about childhood, consumption, responsibility, creativity, and the worlds we share.

We recently received the collated survey response report, and the feedback speaks to the impact of this work. 98% of respondents reported that the content and materials presented added to their knowledge.

This response reminds us of the importance of creating sustained opportunities for educators to think together, experiment with materials, and reconsider familiar classroom practices. We are grateful to all participants who brought their questions, curiosities, and commitments to this course.

Check back later in the year for the next course offering.

Learn more about the course and the re:materia project: https://ecpn.ca/project/re-materia/

In Playing in the Anthropocene: Pedagogical (Re)Openings, Lisa Goddard invited us to linger with moments that cannot be easily assessed, resolved, or explained.

This week, we want to think with these “minor moments” as part of the substance of everyday pedagogical life. What might become possible when we grant the subtle, unfinished, and overlooked moments more space, time, and significance?

The full conversation is available to watch on the ECPN website.
https://ecpn.ca/playing-in-the-anthropocene-pedagogical-reopenings/?fbclid=IwY2xjawTLRZlleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFwOWdyZnR6N0pReXNEUG1rc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHok1m_fqn7raORsHixB03ncuar7JdBVs8_MHNvqqU8dLx9PKnj9TiswZfrcg_aem_zhnUg_M-A-uG-Tjgb2sV9Q