Learning How to Inherit and Respond: Toward a Common Worlds, Early Years Pedagogy for the Anthropocene

• In Event: Roundtable Session 18
  In Roundtable Session: Rethinking/Reworking/Responding to the Common

Abstract

At the eve of the Anthropocene, this paper picks up on Haraway’s calls to ‘stay with the trouble’ and to ‘learn how to inherit and respond’. It explores the pedagogical possibilities of these calls, by drawing upon ethnographic observations of encounters between young children, worms and ants in Australian and Canadian ‘common world’ environments. It addresses these questions: How might we learn to inherit and respond to the Anthropocene in our own common worlds? How might we interrupt education’s anthropocentric concerns to take serious account of children’s multispecies relations? How might we engage in common world pedagogies that acknowledge our environmental responsibilities, stay with the trouble facing current and future multispecies life-worlds, and still provide hope for children?

Authors

• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, University of Victoria

• Affrica Taylor, University of Canberra