Sid Mohandas, School of Education, Middlesex University

Abstract

Drawing from data generated from an ethnographic study at a Montessori nursery in North London, this research focuses on mundane everyday encounters with tea, to unsettle notions that position the ‘real’ and ‘natural’ as exempt from gendering practices. By employing a feminist relational and diffractive analysis the paper uncovers how gender is inextricably woven into the fabric of early childhood practice. Tea is therefore ‘not only’ (de la Cadena, 2019) a hot beverage, a resource or an evergreen shrub, instead it is understood as an eruption of complex, multiple and contradictory gendered relations, stories and worlds. Whilst the early years is perpetually framed as a female-dominated sector, the paper brings to light how ordinary encounters, such as that with tea, are entangled with colonial capitalist projects of ‘making up of the economical Man’ as well as possibilities for feminist re-imaginings. The paper concludes by introducing and thinking-with figures such as Mythiri Jegathesan’s (2021) tundu and Katie O’Neill’s (2017) tea dragon, to consider the generative potential for rich possibilities of becoming-gendered otherwise.

Key words: tea, gender, Montessori, early childhood education, diffractive analysis

Bio

Sid Mohandas is a former Montessori educator and teacher trainer, and the founder of The Male Montessorian (TMM). They are currently doing their doctorate at Middlesex University investigating how a gendered workforce is materialised in Montessori spaces through a feminist relational onto-epistemology.

Sid’s recent publications include Beyond male recruitment: decolonising gender diversification efforts in the early years by attending to pastpresent material-discursive-affective entanglements, a paper they co-authored with Professor Jayne Osgood titled Reconfiguring the ‘‘Male Montessorian’’: The mattering of gender through pink towering practices and a chapter co-authored with Jayne in the SAGE Handbook of Global Childhoods titled Figuring gender in early chil

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