Sticks, Ticks, and BB Pellets: Making Oddkin in a Forest Kindergarten

• In Event: PhEmaterializing Pedagogy and Curriculum

Abstract

This paper takes its cue from Pacini-Ketchabaw & Nxumalo (2015) and Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw (2015) multispieces ethnographies and Youdell’s (2017a; 2017b) notion of “biosocial ethnography” to explore the materialities that followed a pre-school age child home from a forest kindergarten in Southwestern Germany over a two-year period. This “oddkin” (Harraway, 2016) assemblage included insects, mud, plantlife, sticks, BB-gun pellets, burrs, microbia, bacteria, bones, feathers, nails, screws, pollen, wax, dirt, string, and rocks. Working with arts-based methodologies (Hickey-Moody, 2017; Ivinson & Angharad, 2017), this piece explores these data sources affectively through material relays of touch (Barad, 2012; Springgay, 2010), assemblage, and image-making.

Theoretically energized by feminist philosophies bridging the sciences and humanities (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Brennan, 2005; Haraway, 2016), I draw on Haraway’s (2016) notion of “oddkin” to theorize a notion of oddkin pedagogy. As Haraway (2016) urges “[s]taying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations” (p.4). I propose an oddkin pedagogy as “stitching together improbable collaborations without worrying overmuch about conventional ontological kinds” (Haraway, 2016, p.136). Such a pedagogy involves an active traffic between conceptions of living non-living (Tallbear, 2013), human non-human, inanimateanimate (Chen, 2013), among others. I hone in on particular vibrant materialities (Bennett, 2010) to explore four capacities of an oddkin pedagogy:

• Movements: BB pellets collected are used to think through oddkin capacities for unexpected affiliations, migrations, and movements. BB pellets acted as uncanny boundary crossers in the forest, showing up in unexpected spaces, travelling in pockets, sticking within boot profiles, skittering across hardwood floors. I argue an oddkin pedagogy results in kin-shipping, a spatial transgressing of humanist boundaries (inside/outside, school/home, nature/culture) as well as a process of moving-in, taking temporary residence in other bodies.

• Affixities: Wax from Babybel packaged cheese affixed to a stick is used to explore how an oddkin pedagogy results from stubborn affixities between particular bodies. Here for example, connectivities between human practices of consumption and refuse and the refuse of the forest affix to each other varying a/effects and ethical considerations.

• Mediations: A strip of bark that came home was used as an iPad. This piece of data is used to foreground how an oddkin pedagogy allows for unexpected connections that, in this instance, refuse distinctions between the ‘natural’ and ‘technologically-mediated.’

• Entangled Futurities: A collection of ticks, date-stamped and encased in adhesive tape, is used to think through entangled futurities. I explore how the threat of borrealia burgdorferi (the bacteria responsible for Lyme’s Disease) opens a recognition that oddkin pedagogies entail “risky embodied connections” (Haraway, 2016, p.138) that foreground the vulnerability and permeability of bodies (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015).

As conclusion, I shuffle the materialities presented to explore how each item possesses all four oddkin pedagogical capacities (for example, the ticks embody at once movements, affixities, mediations, and entangled futurities). An oddkin pedagogy then recognizes affective co-presence between unexpected elements opening up pedagogical and ethical “response-abilities” (Barad, 2007, 2012; Morrison, 1992; Miller, 2005; Haraway, 2016) as we teach-with, learn-with, and live-with/in the Anthropocene (Braidotti, 2013; Crutzen, 2006).

Author

• Alyssa D. Niccolini, Teachers College, Columbia University