Gathering

• In Event: 34.056 - Doings and Dialogues of Post-Qualitative Experimentations: Transversal Methods and Justice-to-Come in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Inuit scholars (Price, 2008; Watt-Cloutier, 2000, 2015; Williamson, 1992) have written about land in many ways including as a caring, nurturing, knowledge holder; and as a provider and disciplinarian. Price (2008) explains that “things to learn [are] lessons that come from interacting with the land (p. 129). Inuk Elder Mariano Aupilaajuk, elaborates his understanding that “the living person and the land are actually tied up together” (Bennett & Rowley, 2004, p. 118). Cenkl (2012) builds on this conceptualization in writing that “in working the land, the individual comes to embody the land itself” (p. 298). It is these conceptualizations of relationships with land as dynamic, vibrant, loving being and not as a singular, stable, inanimate and knowable place, that I want to work with in proposing to think with Nunangat as both a methodological and pedagogical (Rowan, 2015) approach to post-qualitative research in early childhood education.

Nunangat is an Inuit term which references the land, ice and water that forms the Inuit homeland (Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, 2009). I wondered when I embarked on my PhD research project if thinking with Nunangat, could position me, and those with whom I was working to access Inuit worldviews in early childhood practice in the Canadian Arctic. A concern for myself and the community collaborators, with whom I was working was that Inuit children were spending diminishing amounts of time on the land. Our priority was to create multiple opportunities for young children to live experiences, speak the Inuit language, work with local materials/technologies and develop knowledge of Nunangat (Rowan, 2011, 2015).

Drawing on Indigenous research methodologies, I sought to support the emergence of local methodologies, informed by the cultural specificities in which the research is situated (Hart, 2010). This, I thought, could be well supported by drawing on ideas of immanence and becoming as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (Colebrook, 2002). I appreciated Lather’s guidance when she described methodological practices that “court unknowingness, fluidity and becoming” (Moss, Phillips, Erickson, Floden, Lather, & Schneider, 2009, p.506). I also understood that the work I engaged in must benefit the community and support participants in better understanding themselves and their community (Battiste, 2008; Ermine, Sinclair & Browne, 2005). Blackstock (2010) contributed to my thinking when she explained that engaging with Indigenous perspectives in research methodologies emphasizes knowledge translation as a priority. Emphasizing that making existing wisdom accessible is a priority for many Indigenous people, and quite different from knowledge production.

Could a Nunangat centered methodology support knowledge translation activities? How does one engage with Nunangat as methodology? What are the key ideas? In this paper I will narrate the story of an event involving wind, snow, ice, berries, gathering, children, educators and researcher. I will also consider the concept of silaq piqujppat, which translates as, the environment chooses. All in a focussed effort to attend to the possibilities of Nunangat methodology as a vibrant approach to empirical research as always becoming.

Author

• Mary Caroline Rowan, Concordia University