On hard work in early childhood education pedagogical inquiry research—Or, how do we do hard work while researching together?

Abstract Drawing on public writing from a pedagogical inquiry research project collaboration between three early childhood educators, a pedagogist-researcher, and preschool-aged children, this article debates how pedagogical inquiry research becomes “hard work.” Against the backdrop of mainstream early childhood education in the lands currently known as Canada, where research is often conducted toward producing universalized best practices or contributing to the machine of child development, this article pays patient attention to rhythms, tensions, and practices of attuning that animated our research, pausing and unpacking moments that felt especially like “hard work.” Refusing to see “hard work” for its colloquial neoliberal connotations, we ask how hard work happens and how hard work makes happen. Thinking with three modes of hard work—remembering, dis/placing and re-placing, and manifesting into a commons—we share questions and encounters that crafted a character of hardness within our laboring together. Importantly, we resist naming all that might be hard work in pedagogical inquiry research, instead inviting readers to consider the situated, slippery, and continually made and re-made contours of hard work in pedagogical inquiry research.