Critical Perspectives on "Place" in Early Childhood Curriculum: Thinking With Indigenous Onto-Epistemologies and Black Feminist Geographies

• In Event: 54.026 - Troubling Colonial Dualisms in Curriculum-Making: Critical and Generative Encounters With the More-Than-Human World in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Situated within current times of ever-increasing human and more-than-human environmental precarity, the purpose of this paper is to contribute to critical engagements with normalized erasures in environmental and place-based early childhood education by considering possibilities for challenging human exceptionalism, settler colonialism and anti-blackness in curriculum making.

In examining possibilities for ethico-political engagements with place in early childhood education, we begin with the premise that within the context of North America, environmental vulnerabilities, human exceptionalism, anti-blackness and settler colonialism are interconnected (Tuck, Guess, & Sultan, 2014). Accordingly, in this paper we co-theorize curricular potentialities in early childhood education for critically encountering, generatively engaging with, and responding to these situated entanglements. To consider these generative responses, we center Indigenous onto-epistemologies (Cajete, 2000, Le Grange, 2011) and Black feminist geographies (Lethabo King, 2016; McKittrick, 2013) in considerations of place, environment and ‘nature’ in early childhood education. We inquire into how these perspectives, in conversation with posthumanist geographies (Castree & Nash 2006; Whatmore, 2006), might enact knowledge-making that politicizes, unsettles, and (re)stories place-based curriculum in early years education. In particular, we are interested in possibilities for unsettling the dominance of EuroWestern knowledges in both normative and critical encounters with nature/culture and human/non-human dualisms. Furthermore, while noting the tensions between posthumanist geographies, Indigenous onto-epistemologies, and Black feminist geographies, we consider how together they might enrich critical place-attuned curriculum making in early childhood education.

In this theoretical paper, our modes of inquiry begin with a consideration of why conceptualizations of place that pay attention to Indigenous onto-epistemologies and pastpresent land histories within ongoing settler colonial contexts are necessary to decolonize place-based early childhood studies. In particular, we attend to how early childhood curriculum might engage with specific places as storied Indigenous land; foregrounding specific Indigenous knowledges and place relations where both human and more-than-human actors participate in the storying of places (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014). Next, we attend to the decolonial and anti-racist potentialities enacted by thinking with situated Black feminist geographies of place. We consider how these geographies unsettle both human-centric and universalized views of place and we discuss what they might bring to curriculum making. Finally, we discuss how Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies might ‘walk alongside’ (Sundberg, 2014) other considerations of human/non-human and nature/culture entanglements in early childhood education; in particular, those drawing from posthuman geographies.

While Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies are largely absent from mainstream research and practice in the early childhood field, they bring much needed politicized attention to place in environmental education curriculum making. We discuss these perspectives as a necessary part of developing, within the context of North America, a decolonizing, anti-racist, and situated ethics in environmental and place-attuned early childhood curriculum. Taken together, the perspectives in this paper are significant in opening up potentialities for (re)storying young children’s place relations in ways that more explicitly engage with issues of racialized environmental (in)justice, human/more-than-human relationalities, and pastpresent settler colonial histories of place. These critical engagements are important interventions into the inequitable terrains of early childhood education.

Authors

• Fikile Nxumalo, The University of Texas - Austin

• Stacia Cedillo, The University of Texas - Austin