Situating Black Childhoods in the Anthropocene

• In Event: Equity and Agency in Climate Change Education

Abstract

This presentation aims to contribute to current debates on the failure of dominant climate change education discourses to account for colonial and raced human differentials in the causalities, ongoing effects of, and responses to the Anthropocene. Despite the ever-increasing popularity of environmental education programs for young children in North America, the raced and colonial erasures of dominant Anthropocene discourses are often reinforced (Taylor, 2017). The insufficient and problematic engagements of the Anthropocene in many early childhood education spaces are not surprising, given the prominence of human-centred developmental understandings of the benefits of nature education for children. This developmental framing reinforces colonial nature/culture and human/non-human divides and contributes to the psychologizing and pathologizing of the perceived absence of certain children’s relationships with nature (Taylor, 2013, 2017).

Clearly, there is a need for more socio-politically and ethically-attuned approaches to climate change education with young children. There remains a gap in terms of curriculum, pedagogy and research that specifically problematizes erasures of and deficit-orientations towards Blackness within the Anthropocene, and that works to unsettle developmental anthropocentric modes of environmental education (Authors, 2017b). This presentation attends to these concerns by conceptualizing ways to disrupt Black erasure and deficit perspectives in early years climate change education. My intent is to attend to particular omissions in climate change education for young children by thinking with Black feminist onto-epistemological concepts and their possibilities for interrupting the ongoing absenting, essentializing and deficit perspectives of Black lives and land relationships in dominant North American nature education for young children. Building on recent work that has considered ways to center Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black land geographies in place based early childhood education (Authors, 2015, 2016, 2017b), my specific entry point in this presentation is to bring forward Black feminist onto-epistemologies of testifying-witnessing (Collins, 2000, 2016; Tarpley, 1995) as ways of knowing and becoming that have the potential to presence Black children’s relationships to nature; relationships that disrupt dominant salvation discourses while attending to racialized inequality.

To illustrate the generative and interruptive potential of testifying-witnessing, I place it into dialogue with ethnographic fragments of young children’s everyday multispecies encounters, children’s literature, Black speculative fiction and Black place stories. I discuss how early childhood educators might engage this concept in their everyday practices with young children and discuss the ethical implications of doing so within ongoing conditions of settler colonialism and anti-blackness. I frame the interruptions brought by thinking with testifying-witnessing as propositional approaches. My use of the word propositional is intentional; rather than putting forward enclosed prescriptions for research and practice to be followed, the intent is to provoke new ethical potentials in relational and situated encounters with knowledges, more-than-human relations, practices, and places. In other words, this is a speculative approach that aims to reimagine different kinds of educational encounters, but not just any kind of encounter; encounters that are particularly oriented towards disrupting erasures and deficit orientations in relation to Black childhoods in the Anthropocene.

Author

• Fikile Nxumalo, The University of Texas - Austin