Drawing on moments from an early learning forest inquiry located on Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSÁNEĆ territories, otherwise known as Victoria, BC, this paper engages with the messy politics of “care” that emerge when early childhood education and colonized forest ecologies meet. In it, we take up the challenge of unsettling our deeply held conceptualizations of care through a series of pedagogical stumblings with young children’s worldly forest relations. Foregrounding the question “what constitutes good care in troubling times?” this discussion explores the logics we draw on to respond to the increasing sense of urgency in contemporary calls to teach children how to care for the earth. Can we learn to inhabit pedagogies of care in early childhood educational practice beyond simply retooling the extractive settler-colonial stewardship frameworks that brought us to this era of uncertainty? And what happens if we invite a wider cast of participants into our understandings of care than those prevailing early learning approaches tend to promote?
Working with stories of children’s relationships with place and technologies from an early childhood education pedagogical inquiry research project in Melbourne, Australia and Victoria, Canada, this article takes up the concept of “pedagogical intentions” to consider how educators and researchers might cultivate intentional teaching practices relevant to the complex worlds we inherit with children. We think with a common worlds pedagogies approach to extend conceptualizations of intentional teaching held in dominant Euro-Western early learning frameworks in Melbourne and Victoria. After situating our understanding of pedagogical intentionality as an ongoing, purposeful, answerable practice of shaping and caring with everyday pedagogical relationships, we share three stories of how we activate our Donna Haraway–inspired intentions with children. By questioning how our pedagogical intentions inform our work, we assert that sharing and putting at risk our intentions is a necessary practice for thinking collectively with children, more-than-human others, and technologies within early childhood education.
<p>The focus of this paper is to tell stories and grapple with questions about place. We share documentation gathered during explorations in an art studio we created in an urban forest located next to our childcare centre. We work with multiple forms of knowledge about place in order to develop complex (and situated) forest pedagogies. Our stories engage with clay and the use of maps, and lend themselves to thinking of place as assemblage with more-‐than-‐human others. We conclude the paper with an examination of how our newly forming forest pedagogies creep into other stories—unfolding, changing, and creating frictions in our practice, explorations, and inquiries—just as English ivy does in our forest studio.</p>
Our program, like many other early childhood programs, is an environment of emergent and playbased programming for twenty-five 3-and 4-year-old children. In September 2011 we decided to introduce clay into our program. We had been moving toward presenting materials in our space that are open ended, rather than fixed or prescribed in meaning, and that allow for change. Materials that inspire imagination, creativity, and exploration. It was hoped that the introduction of clay would extend on and allow for a creative and divergent thinking process that only open-ended materials can provide for the children, families, and educators of the centre. What follows are my reflections on our work with clay: how this material led us to a state of inquiry, exploration, wonder, and dialogue. The story of how clay became alive in our space, our ideas, and our minds and ultimately led us to a line of flight we couldn’t have imagined, a place of new questions and changing dialogues.
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