Visual Pedagogies in Early Childhood ITE: Pre-Service Teachers’ Encounters with Ethical Childhoods

Abstract

This article examines how visual artefacts and digital media actively participate in pre-service early childhood teachers’ engagements with ethical dilemmas in an Australian initial teacher education course. Drawing on posthuman and new materialist scholarship (Barad, 2013; Haraway 1988, 2016), the authors conceptualise visual pedagogies as material-discursive agents that shape how ethical issues become noticeable, intelligible, and possible. Across weekly in-class activities and assessments, pre-service teachers intra-act with video design and analysis, visual mapping, and multimodal learning sequences in ways that co-produce ethical sensibilities around care, children’s rights, inclusion and reconciliation. By tracing how ethical dilemmas materialise through pre-service teachers’ engagements, this article highlights the generative potential of visual pedagogies to make dilemmas visible, provoke relational awareness, and support more-than-human understandings of ethical practice in early childhood education, offering insights into how teacher education might cultivate conditions for attuned, responsive, and relational ethical practice.