Envisioning Black Space in Environmental Education for Young Children

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Abstract

There is a gap, in both scholarly and pedagogical attention to Black childhoods in the field of environmental early childhood education in North America. The specificities of Black childhoods and Black geographies in environmental science education are largely marked by absence. In addition, early childhood environmental education discourses reinscribe antiblackness in a focus on decontextualized environmental science learning, while failing to attune to the racialized exclusions of certain childhoods from discourses of the assumed natural coupling of ‘pure and innocent children’ in ‘pure, romantic nature’ (Taylor, 2013). In response to these absences, the purpose of this paper is to imagine Black childhood futurities through the production of Black space in environmental education.

In imagining possibilities for (de)constructing environmental education through the production of Black space, we begin with the premise that the education of young Black children in North America needs to be situated within the context of the afterlife of segregation (Author 4, forthcoming). Drawing from Hartman’s (2007) concept of the afterlife of slavery and its ongoing subjugations, the afterlife of school segregation as a framework, centers the ways in which despite the end of legal segregation of schooling, education for Black children remains marked by the impossibility of Black childhoods (Dumas & Nelson, 2016), and manifests in the form of dehumanization, surveillance, deficit perspectives, punitive discipline and more (Colleague & Author 4, 2016). Black space, then, is a mode of envisioning educational futurities that respond to the realities of antiblackness in the afterlife of segregation but are also situated within educational desire (Tuck, 2010) that imagines otherwise possibilities – possibilities that refuse the erasure of complex relationships between Black people and the natural environment. In theorizing Black space in environmental education, we draw on Indigenous feminisms (Todd, 2016), Black feminist geographies (King, 2016; McKittrick, 2013), Black science fiction (Butler, 1995, 1998) and Black poetics (Giovanni, 1970) that offer profound transgressions of the assumed dislocation of Black childhoods and Black knowledge from nature spaces.

Authors

• Fikile Nxumalo, The University of Texas at Austin

• kihana miraya ross, Northwestern University