Playful Inquiry as Fugitive Hope: Making Sanctuary in Early Childhood Education in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This paper examines an inquiry group of early childhood educators who come together to play, reflect, and reimagine education in response to the Anthropocene and neoliberal constraints. At its core, the group engages in “making sanctuary” (Akomolafe, 2019), a fugitive space that resists colonial paradigms of knowledge production and transmission. This sanctuary is a place of escape from the urgency and pressures of standardized education, allowing for “slowing down in times of urgency” (Akomolafe, 2019) and the emergence of alternative futures. Within this space, speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2016) becomes a mode of collective imagining, enacting hope through play. By foregrounding the group’s participatory and experimental nature, this paper explores how such spaces disrupt dominant educational paradigms, offering new relational possibilities between children, educators, and the more-than-human world.

Drawing on posthumanism (Haraway, 2016; Braidotti, 2013), feminist new materialism (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010), and pedagogical principles from the Reggio Emilia approach, this paper focuses on the group’s processes, protocols, and playful structure. Through play provocations, collaborative documentation analysis using a Pedagogy of Play protocol (Mardell et al., 2023), and open-ended discussions, the group enacts a fluid, emergent form of inquiry that challenges fixed models of professional development. Rooted in pedagogical documentation and the hundred languages (Malaguzzi, 1996), the group fosters a decolonial approach to educator learning, where knowledge is co-constructed rather than transmitted. Here, hope itself is fugitive (Young, 2020), escaping the confines of the group and rippling into broader educational contexts.

Play within the inquiry group functions as both a response to crisis and a method of “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016). Rather than treating play as separate from research or professionalism, the group enacts it as a methodological stance that generates emergent, collective knowledge. Each gathering becomes a site of material-discursive entanglement (Lenz Taguchi, 2010), where educators intra-act (Barad, 2007) with one another, children’s contributions, technologies, and pedagogical materials. In this space, play operates as a minoritarian practice (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), resisting dominant logics of efficiency and control.

Interviews with group members conducted as part of the researcher’s doctoral study highlight the group’s capacity for solidarity, renewal, and experimentation. Educators value the opportunity to engage in multimodal play, disrupt hierarchical knowledge structures, and reimagine their pedagogical roles. The sanctuary of the inquiry group enables a collective re-imagining of education, one that does not conform to neoliberal imperatives but instead embraces relationality, uncertainty, and interdependence.

This paper argues that inquiry groups structured around play and collective experimentation are essential for resisting neoliberal and rightwing pressures in early childhood education. By making sanctuary and engaging in worlding (Haraway, 2016), educators co-create pedagogical futures that extend beyond human-centered frameworks. In doing so, they cultivate alternative modes of learning attuned to the ecological, social, and ethical demands of our time, positioning play as both an act of resistance and a catalyst for transformation.