Troubling the Agentic Teacher: An Early Childhood Critical Autoethnography

My autoethnography is a critical examination of agency in early childhood education in Australia, when agency is framed as a humanist concept within the national curriculum. I describe and analyse my personal-professional-social-political experiences as an early childhood who turned to post-qualitative and post-humanist theories to inform my autoethnographic writings and practices of reading-writing-thinking with agency. I surface agency as transformable from a fixed and outcome focused conceptualisation to a generative one. I make space to imagine a more empowered future that can challenge humanist centred notions of agency with the hope to bring about change in how agency is positioned in early childhood education as a purely humanist concept.