Nurturing relational reading spaces for difficult questions: Building critical awareness with early childhood postgraduate student teachers

Our paper explores forms of relationality that nurture critical awareness for postgraduate student teachers about the gaps between theory and practice. Critical awareness of the contested nature of early childhood education is vitally important within an intense policyscape. Postgraduate student teachers find themselves in a double bind, as they are presumed academically competent and must navigate teacher proficiency in a condensed timeframe. To build critical awareness, we propose that nurturing relational reading communities can support policy-practice tensions. We propose that whilst they can open dialogue about the contested nature of practice, there is a vulnerability in leaving spaces for questions that do not have easy answers.