1 PORTRAYALS OF SNOW AND HERMENEUTICS AS AN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATIONAL THEORY David W. Jardine Werklund School of Education University of Calgary Abstract. This paper is a combination of a grandfather’s musings over his grandson’s drawings, combined with a reconsideration of hermeneutics as an early childhood educational theory. Key Words. early childhood education; children’s art; hermeneutics Introduction: Portrayals of Scholarship, World-Weariness, and a Grandparent’s Amusement So, then, what of hermeneutics? “We can entrust ourselves to what we are investigating to guide us safely in the quest,” 1 but earning this trust takes practice, over and over again, because what we are investigating holds in its hands part of the answer to how we might carefully, adequately proceed. It is not just “given” laying before us, ripe for analysis [or manipulation or indoctrination]. It speaks, it interrupts, it often says “No, wait, that won’t do.” And we have to shake off the spell of immediate experience [or wizened assurance] and [maybe] learn something new [or again], perhaps even about what we thought was old and settled and irrelevant. 2 This paper is an interpretive musing of a grandparent watching a recent fascination of his nineteen-month-old grandson. Watching him repeat the word “snow” (pronounced “[small nasal outbreath] no”), as he has been doing for several weeks, but now, insistently saying it as he draws brilliant yellow-green lines on bright white paper. And only with this sort of marker, and only with this color. Such an event and its allure can be simply a luxurious commonplace for a grandparent to stop, and perhaps chuckle, over. That certainly is part of what this paper is about — a grandparent’s amusement and exaggerated noticing. Given the work I have done for decades, it cannot help but spill over into what the import might be for thoughts of education, teaching, learning, now long distant from my work in a Faculty of Education and in early childhood and elementary school classrooms. Part of what readers will find, here, is something quite familiar — how the words or actions or questions of a student (or, in fact, a colleague, or a student-teacher) can sometimes set into motion thought of things done, things read, things tried in the classroom, and memories of students from years back. Often, such things simply pass by without much notice. But occasionally, and often unexpectedly, these experiences can lead to a refreshing new experience 1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), 378. 2. David Jardine, “Guest Editorial: Locus and Soul: Uncoiling Hermeneutics from Phenomenology,” Journal of Applied Hermeneutics (2022): 2, https://doi.org/10.11575/jah.v2022i2022.75826. EDUCATIONAL THEORY 2024 © 2024 The Authors. Educational Theory published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Board of Trustees, University of Illinois. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.