Plastics, Birds, and Humans: Awakening and Quickening Ecological Minds in Young Children and Their Teachers

• In Event: 58.082 - Roundtable Session 25
  In Roundtable Session: 58.082-4 - Disrupting the Status Quo in Early Childhood Research: Shifting Toward New Possibilities

Abstract

Seeking to understand educators, artists and children places/worlds affected by human environmental impacts, this study zooms in on a documentary of dying birds who’ve swallowed plastics. The birds’ habitat, 2500 miles from the nearest continent, is infested with trash. The birds ingest plastics and die from human-induced starvation. This research paper focuses on engagements with a documentary and collage making in reuse bottle caps; participants are teacher educators at an international conference, and educators and artists in our own context. The research captures dialogues and reuse-material interactions at each of three gatherings about possible children’s research on daunting ecological issues.
This study utilizes narrative inquiry approaches (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) and pedagogical documentation (Author, 2012). Narrating experiences connect to the minds and heart-strings of those engaged in the narrative exchange. Narrative inquiry offers meaning-making and interpretation from one set of contexts and forms relationships of ideas to another set of contexts. Seamon (2012) calls this deepening of learning through narratives mixed with other mediums “cross-hatching” (p. 1). We find cross-hatching deepens our stories.
We collected data through journal-keeping and photography during meetings, and by collecting up materials-work and visible thinking artifacts. Photography is a primary form adjoining the narration to provoke a bird's-eye view into our experiences. We analyzed data collaboratively holding stories in open-ended ways together.
Findings show that teacher educators would share the documentary with children more readily than educators and artists in our own context. Teachers and artists views’ showed that they would create alternative bottle caps and plastics lessons to engage in ecology. A data example includes Amelia’s response to our question about sharing the documentary with children. She stated,
“In considering Froebel’s perspective of the child being ready to live in the world, I think children need more time to feel safe in their own context. And, we may be deliberately altering their development if we push children out of their context of safe world and into a perspective that he world is unsafe. If we do this as educators, the child may not recover into a position of ever feeling like their world is a safe place to live.”
Further, a researcher journal-noted, “There were many points of view in the room and the discussion became heated after Amelia’s expression.” Such examples are in the data discussions along with photos of the artists working with bottle caps to recast and “honor the birds.”
Further, we found the image of the child shifted away from capable toward fragile. Educators and artists in our own context searched for alternative ways to explore “the plastic problem.” Rethinking our images of children’s capabilities and strengths is paramount; implications for research between teacher educators, educators, artists and young children would shift the romantic view embedded in the ‘fragile’ images. This research offers many possible avenues for investigating and fostering intelligent moderation in human and more than human contexts.

Author

• Will Parnell, Portland State University