‘Who has the last word?’ – Thinking from the middle of pedagogical encounters in early childhood education

This paper explores everyday encounters in early childhood education as sites of curiosity and disruption, challenging taken-for-granted perceptions. Conceptualisations of children and childhood continue to be shaped by binary developmental frameworks, where pre-learned and often tacit orientations guide forms of thinking that come to organise pedagogical practice. As an event of inquiry, this study seeks to unsettle such assumptions by working with data from the middle of material–discursive entanglements and interrogating pedagogy as thinking–doing in early childhood education.