What does it mean to be a feminist educator and why is it so important now

Feminism is still a relatively dirty word in early childhood education. Feminism has, as Valerie Walkerdine (1990) once wrote, dirtied the sanitised space of the classroom in ways that have and continue to question the inequity and inequality of the structures and the content of our education system. Partly this is due to the illusion that education is apolitical. Conservative political agendas perpetuate this illusion in an attempt to inscribe the citizenry with a story that feminist thought and practice, is irrelevant to education. Of course, the shifts in who can experience education and how that happens has changed over centuries and feminism has played a pivotal part in making education a central part of many societies across the world (though not all) as well as a centrepiece of political campaigns. Thus, a contradiction in the stories that create us and our worlds.