Getting on their level: Preschool teachers embodying the ideal preschooler

An ethical commitment to liberating children has led childhood scholars to overlook pedagogies that afford children’s active participation. This article thus shows how preschool teachers contribute to less hierarchical moments of intergenerational interaction with their students, facilitating opportunities for agency. Teachers do so by embodying the ideal preschooler, becoming readable to children as affiliative through their bodies. The author describes these practices and highlights the ideological contexts that facilitate their emergence, and then explores contexts that limit, constrain, or change them