early childhood curriculum + food + pedagogy

Making curriculum at the table: feminist theory and relational ethics in early childhood education.

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I work at the intersections of early childhood curriculum, food, and pedagogy, exploring the textures of everyday eating moments: tasting, sharing, savouring, refusing, in/digesting, planting, harvesting, cooking, plating, cleaning up, composting... and how they become sites of lived curriculum, relational ethics, and learning. Drawing on feminist and postfoundational scholarship, and in dialogue with Indigenous ways of knowing, I attend to how children, educators, materials, and more-than-human life come together at the table in ways shaped by land, power, regulation, memory, and care. My research asks: What becomes possible when we slow down with food in early childhood settings, treating eating not as a task to manage, but as an encounter to stay with, so that taste, memory, attention, and more‑than‑human life can teach us how to live more carefully and responsively together? My dissertation shows that food is not just nutrition but a daily practice of relations, care, and ethical learning shaped by land and power, and that staying with these ordinary encounters can unsettle taken‑for‑granted “best practices” while opening more just, responsive, and ecologically accountable ways of living and learning together.