An Autoethnographic Exploration About Wearing/Not Wearing the Niqab in Early Childhood Education and Care Settings

On October of 2018, the province of Quebec passed Bill 62 becoming the first Canadian province to ban the wearing of a face veil when providing and receiving publicly-funded services, including childcare. Literature examining the practice of face-veiling in workplace settings is limited if not non-existent. Scholarly literature examining the ‘burqa ban’ laws in European countries affirm the laws are based solely on neo-orientalist and postcolonial assumptions of face-veiled Muslim women with no empirical research supporting claims that face-veiled Muslim women pose a threat to the security of Western nations or Western values of secularism and gender equality. Yet, face-veiled Muslim women are being pushed towards unveiling in order to access public funded services and actively participate in the public sphere. This Master’s Research Paper (MRP) aims to explore the idea of wearing/not wearing the faceveiled early childhood education and Care settings (ECEC). Using an autoethnographic approach, I use my experiences working with young children to explore the equitable inclusion of face-veiled early childhood educators in ECEC settings.

Keywords: Autoethnography, Niqab in the Early Childhood Education (ECE), Islamophobia in the workplace