Supporting slow scholarship through building reading practices with first-year early childhood studies students

This article details a two-year small pilot project investigating possibilities for enacting slow scholarship reading practices with first-year undergraduate early childhood studies students. We follow the emerging push to think with “slow” practices as an antidote to the consumptive, reproductive, fast-paced knowledge politics of the neoliberal university. To begin, we review the literature on slow scholarship in the early childhood studies and education context, before sharing the structure and content of the course that housed this slow-reading experiment. Then, we analyse student responses to an optional online questionnaire that gathered insights into their reflective experience of slow reading. We argue that slow reading disrupts quotidian student subjectivities and opens space for reconfiguring our relations with knowledge, which stretches beyond the post-secondary context into work with young children and families. To conclude, we offer provocations for cultivating slow-reading practices.