Walking a desire track: Montessori pedagogy as resistance to normative pathways

Following calls to ‘bewilder the pioneers’ (Snaza 2013) of early education, this article positions Montessori pedagogy as a ‘desire path’ that acts as resistance and disruption to normative policy driven pathways in early childhood education and care. Desire paths are alternative tracks made aside from officially established walking routes (Macfarlane 2018). Such desire tracks can also be considered as resistances and acts of ‘civil disobedience’ (Ballard et al 2012). In this paper I look to the metaphor of pathways and desire paths to position an educator’s choice to study and practice Montessori pedagogy as an approach to wander outside of mainstream qualifications and education. To do this, I take fragments of a life story that chart the agentic nature of choosing Montessori pedagogy as a way to problematise how walking that desire line challenges, subverts and defies normative pathways. I also propose a re-reading of Montessori’s pedagogy, not as pioneering but as nomadic and suggest that social desire paths enable Montessori education to be viewed as a collective alternative track to well-trodden pathways.