Witnessing the Ruins: Speculative Stories of Caring for the Particular and the Peculiar

Abstract

Educational scholars and practitioners are confronting long-held anthropocentric pedagogical practices as well as notions of care. To trouble the notion of care, this article draws from the collaborative research that stories the collective experiences of children, educators, and researchers at an early years learning centre located in an emerging suburban enclave of a mid-sized city in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Our work is guided by the question of how we as educators and scholars reclaim and augment the politics of care. Through the practice of storying everyday encounters, we explore how emerging and precarious relations with more-than-human others, both real and imaginary, challenge anthropocentric notions of care.

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

“…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 neoliberal responsibility to become a better steward of the world (Taylor, 2017).…”