Holes, Gaps, and Openings: Crafting Collective Climate Pedagogies with/in Complex Common Worlds

Abstract

Holes, the concept that holds together this special issue of the Journal of Childhood Studies, may seem a strange choice as a metaphor for a collective project like this, yet holes poke through each article we share in "Responding to Ecological Challenges with/in Contemporary Childhoods. " In this editorial we ask what centering holes, gaps, and openings might make possible for reinvigorating the relations of the interdisciplinary colloquium on climate pedagogies that sparked, and shares its name with, this special issue. Held in February 2020, the colloquium took place on the lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Attawandaron peoples, at Western University. This special issue picks up strands of thinking shared at the event and asks: How might we, more than two years later-two viral, extraordinary years-reenter the colloquium's openings and explore its gaps and holes?We see holes as endemic to climate realities: We dig literal holes, large and small, into the ground while the profound erasures and egotism of anthropocentrism pretend not to notice the holes increasingly needled into the Euro-Western fallacy of its impenetrable skeleton. Concurrently, we see holes as a practice of hope-a mark worth tending to and ready to be cared for as a way of immersing ourselves into the mess and vitality of our contemporary worlds. As we worked on this special issue, we met many holes: COVID-shaped holes in our timelines, holes in our memories, and increasingly urgent holes in our own scholarship as we imagined how we might respond well to our ever changing common worlds. Before visiting with each article and its hole-making, we propose three manifestations of holes that poke through the articles: holes as fragile reading practices, puncturing holes in the human, and thinking holes with climate pedagogies. We invite readers to experiment with these holes.Within neoliberal logics of individualized perfection, romanticized holistic approaches to education, and ontologically indestructible relations with knowledge, a hole might seem almost an apology, akin to a marker of unavoidable imperfection or a highlighting of something too slippery to be contained by the margins of an article. These manifestations of holes certainly hold energy in this special issue, as authors name their positionality and the limits of perceptibility that accompany their situated relations, where not everything is knowable to everyone. But holes also matter otherwise throughout this gathering of articles. Holes, as Isabelle Stengers (2005) proposes, are about "giving to the situation the power to make us think" (p. 185). In early childhood education and beyond, the drive for certainty and solutions during the climate conditions of the Anthropocene (Drew & MacAlpine, 2020;Hodgins et al., 2022;Nelson & Hodgins, 2020;Taylor et al., 2021) urge us to read toward innovation, explanation, and stopgaps. This is reading animated by the panic felt by the all-knowing, powerful human amid ongoing settler colonialism (Nxumalo, 2019) who feels a n...