Worm-Child Curricular Discontents: Multispecies Relations as Sites for Producing Counternarratives

• In Event: Common Worlding Pedagogies: Unsettling Early Childhood Curriculum

Abstract

This paper unearths some of the messy multispecies relations co-habiting early childhood education on the Lekwungen and SENĆOŦEN-speaking territories of southern Vancouver Island. In particular, it pays attention to tensions and possibilities that emerge through everyday encounters between worms and young children in a childcare centre and surrounding area as part of a collective intention to disrupt Euro-Western romanticisms embedded in early childhood pedagogy and curriculum. By foregrounding the subterranean worlds of consumption, excess and decay this piece critically engages with extractive relations that continue to exploit socio-political, cultural, and ecological futures. The purpose of this presentation is to take seriously worm-child entanglements as generative forces in reimaging multispecies pedagogies beyond anthropocentric frameworks that insist on positioning early childhood on colonized lands as “pure and innocent” (Taylor, 2013).
This paper draws on the Indigenous, new feminist and enviro-humanities perspectives of Billy-Ray Belcourt, Leanne Simpson, Thom van Dooren, Lesley Instone, and Donna Haraway to consider mutual vulnerabilities with(in) the imperfect socialities of worm-child relations. Far from cohesive, these differentiated perspectives expose deep ontological and theoretical frictions in considering what and for whom ethical futurity means. This presentation invites participants to think critically with early childhood-multispecies relations in an effort to inspire pedagogical and curricular re-figurations for refusing habitual practices that threaten abundant futures (Collard, Dempsey & Sundberg, 2014).
With an emphasis on resituating early childhood within multispecies interdependencies, this presentation employs visual and textual data to re-consider what it means to care for each other with(in) complex, relational matrices. Pedagogical narrations and walking as methodology are used to support deeper understandings of the multifaceted way that place, with its historical, colonial and ecological particularities, holds and connects us, revealing its constantly unfolding potentialities over time, with and through material encounters. Unsettling romanticized notions of child-animal relations invites possibilities for participants to consider the ways in which commodification seeps into the places childhood co-inhabits in a variety of forms. What happens if we take seriously and follow the curiosities and tensions that emerge beyond the mechanistic, developmental frameworks that usually frame vermiculture compost cultures and early childhood education curriculum?
Through this paper I hope to contribute to a growing body of scholarly and pedagogical intention of resisting anthropocentric, neoliberal and colonial reproductions in early childhood education. By recognizing more-than-human beings as dynamic participants in worlding practices, worm-child relations illuminate life and death implications of perpetuating colonial convulsions through bodies and on the land. This piece also explores possibilities for moving away from dominant early education frameworks by paying attention to the shadowy places where care exists, thereby contributing to understandings of multispecies pedagogies as relational and specific versus static and everywhere.

Author

• Narda Nelson, University of Victoria