With(in) the Forest: (Re)conceptualizing Pedagogies of Care

Abstract

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?

New Obligations and Shared Vulnerabilities: Reimagining Sustainability for Live-Able Worlds

“…With the words of Tsing (2015), Haraway (2016) and others who advocate for telling situated stories in mind, we suggest that it is in the micro-moments of everyday patterns of relating that new possibilities exist. By reflecting on such moments, we hope to attend to 'otherwise' stories, that is, the lively stories that exist outside of the dominance of grand narratives, such as Esquimalt, Songhees, and WSÁNEĆ (also known as the Lekwungen and SENĆOŦEN-speaking) peoples' knowledges of the places we live and work with young children, despite ongoing colonial attempts at extinguishment over the past hundred and fifty-plus years (Deerchild, 2018b;Haro Woods et al 2018, Land, et al 2019. Equally important, are the stories yet to come.…”

“…Although it exceeds the parameters of this discussion to further detail of our efforts to make space for Esquimalt, Songhees, and WSÁNEĆ territories peoples' placebased knowledges in our everyday practice, we raise it here to signal a serious commitment to include them and other Indigenous knowledges (that are available and appropriate for us to use), as well as an array of speculative feminist scholarship, to decentre and complexify our Euro-Western-centric understandings. We do so as part of an ongoing effort to better appreciate past, present and future connections that continue to shape the places we live and work while creating response-able early childhood pedagogies (Haro Woods et al, 2018). 2018found that no country currently meets its citizen basic needs at a globally sustainable level of resource use.…”

“…Over the past five years, several of our inquiry projects have explored the everyday relations that the children and educators have with(in) a small urban forest that borders the childhood centre at the edge of the university campus (Haro Woods et al, 2018;Land, et al, 2019;Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2013;Yazbeck & Danis, 2015). Educators regularly take children for walks in the forest, whose inhabitants are also keenly observed through the chain link fence that surrounds their centre's yard.…”

Tracing Transit (in)Tensions Between Settler Colonized ECE Contact Zones

“…IDEAS FROM PRACTICE require early childhood educators to come up with answers, we believe that the questions we continue to ask in this piece provide an alternative and necessarily unsettling approach. We do not know exactly what is required to care with the stories, presences, histories, and connections we share across oceans (Haro Woods et al, 2018;Iorio, Hamm, Parnell, & Quintero, 2017), but we continue to ask: How do we think together while we grapple with different settler colonial politics?…”

Rethinking Nature-Based Approaches in Early Childhood Education: Common Worlding Practices

“…Instead, inspired by feminist practices, common worlding involves attending to the small, mundane, seemingly insignificant everyday relations in our immediate common worlds and staying with the trouble that these entangled worlds bring . Over the last few years, we have been collectively experimenting with modes of attunement to children's entangled, messy, and uneven relations with more-than-human worlds in particular places and spaces of early childhood education (Haro Woods et al, 2018;Nelson, 2018;Nelson, Coon, & Chadwick, 2015;Nxumalo & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017;Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor, & Blaise, 2016;. We approach our research practices as political acts of common worlding, as collective and compositional practices that not only account for the other species with whom we live but acknowledge that these dynamic entangled multispecies relations gestate our common worlds and bring them into being.…”