We’re Not Migrating Yet: Engaging Children’s Geographies and Learning with Lands and Waters

Toward Just and Sustainable Futures: Human Learning and Relationality Within Socio-Ecological Systems

“…Another body of work has considered the ways in which embodiment, mobility, and outdoor places shape learning and reflect fundamental constructions of people’s relationships and understandings with each other and place (e.g., Bruce et al, 2023; Lees & Bang, 2023; Marin & Bang, 2018). This work argues that the where of embodiment and mobility alongside the goal of activity significantly shape learning and identity development.…”

“…In cultural-historical terms, the binary of subject-subject and subject-object relations is productively reimagined to consider not only how particular subject-subject relations support expansive subject-object relations but also how the goals of learning involve deepening subject-subject relations (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016;Vossoughi, Nzinga, et al, 2021), including ethical expansions in who is afforded full subjectivity or personhood (Marin, 2020;McDaid Barry et al, 2023) and how relationships are mediated and lived (Vossoughi, Nzinga, et al, 2021). A key edge of research on social interaction and learning therefore weaves across the strands of relationality outlined here, with particular attention to how learning designs can support just and thriving subject-subject relations across humans, more-than-humans, and place (Lees & Bang, 2022;Marin & Bang, 2018;Nxumalo & Cedillo, 2017). It is important to note that conceptualizing subject-subject relations in wider socio-ecological terms is not a mere "add-on" to existing theories of learning (a kind of absorption of cultural variation).…”

“…Dramatic shifts in expressed gender identities and ways of being beyond binaristic logics, for example, are tied to historical shifts in societal and mediational conditions and speak to these forms of collective possibility. We also contend with the ways human supremacy and related conceptions of nature-culture relations are often unexamined or taken for granted within Western paradigms, including within socialized units of analysis and views of dynamic systems, in ways that shape relations with place, historicity, more-than-human life, and ethical decision-making in consequential ways (Lees & Bang, 2022; Marin, 2020; Tzou et al, 2021). We argue that conceptualizing learning in collective and relational terms holds deep implications for pedagogical design and mediation, for how we understand the heterogeneous purposes and practices of education, and for research that takes seriously the ongoing forms of human adaptation, ethical relations, and worldmaking required for socio-ecological well-being.…”

“…Of importance is how these scholars have drawn on Indigenous scholarship and Indigenous ways of knowing to conceptualize how lands, waters, and more-than-humans are constitutive of developmental contexts. These conceptualizations are grounded in orientations to relationality that center models of nature-culture relations (i.e., relations between human worlds and natural worlds) that foreground humans as “a part of” the natural world and “responsibility to land and water as kin” (Lees & Bang, 2023).…”

Returning Children to the ’Āina and Fanua: Indigenous Survivance in Pacifica Early Childhood

“…In Sāmoa, Hawai’i, and many other Indigenous communities, the introduction of age-segregated schooling was catastrophic—removing children from land, elders, and traditional ways of knowing (Lees & Bang, 2023). For example, following an 1835 gubernatorial order, coral and lava rock schoolhouses were constructed in Hawai’i, and beginning with the Aliʻi (or chief’s children), classes were divided by age and instructed in pedagogy aligned with middle-class, white standards.…”