Disrupting the “Typical” Child: Developmentalism, Dominant Discourses, and the Politics of Knowing Children

This review reads Adam Davies’ and colleagues’ Disrupting Developmentalism in Canadian Early Years Education: Centring Marginalized Knowledges as a timely invitation to unsettle dominant developmental discourses in early childhood education. Rather than treating child development as a neutral foundation, the edited collection shows how developmental frameworks shape what educators are trained to notice, which differences come to matter, and how quickly those differences can be translated into concern or deficit. Thinking with alternative narratives, conceptual violence, pedagogical documentation, and the ethical question of whether “what works” is enough to decide what is educationally worth doing, I explore how the book reframes developmentalism as a contested language of childhood, care, and educational judgment.