Thinking with language as a complex practice for educators, advocates, and researchers in early childhood education is a necessary gesture for countering the anti-intellectualism that designates early childhood education as a service providing custodial care. Vitalizing Vocabulary insists that early childhood education in Canada must unsettle our inherited demand for technocratic, instrumental, and accessible relations with language.

At the collision of research and practice, Nicole Land and Cristina D. Vintimilla propose that cultivating playful, speculative, inventive, accountable, and answerable relations with words, concepts, and language is a critical move toward broadening early childhood education’s intellectual and interdisciplinary horizons. The book is organized into four actions that activate pedagogical grammars: reading, writing, citing, and speaking. Each section plays with the purposes of a glossary by proposing language that we would work to erase, reclaim, and introduce. This situates language as an ethical, political, and creative pedagogical process that puts specific relations, curricula, and subjectivities into motion.

Vitalizing Vocabulary ultimately envisions a project of early childhood education where students, educators, pedagogists, researchers, community, and others share a common commitment to creating responsive, meaningful, ethical, and political pedagogies.