Centering Queer Joy in Early Childhood Classrooms by Co-Constructing Invitations to Play

Children regularly play joyfully with notions of gender, sexuality, family, and community, through dramatic play, fantasy play, dizzy play, and role playing to make meaning of the identities and communities around them. In a study we conducted with white female early childhood educators in New Brunswick, Canada, we found that educators were concerned with parents’ imagined reactions to queerness or gender play in the classroom. We wondered: how might we support educators to center queer joy and resistance in their classrooms through play? We seek to center queer joy in ECE through the creation of‘ “Invitations to Play”—unstructured play spaces that are child-led and organized by educators. Through an examination of four Invitations to Play: 1) reading and role playing about gender joy, 2) centering queer families; 3) drawing our queer heroes; and 4) learning about community care as queer joy (how we can work together to make change, drawing on examples of joyful queer organizing), we explore how we made queer joy a space of playful inquiry. We hope that by sharing invitations to play, educators too will embrace the opportunity to play joyfully with queerness and resistance.