Shimmering and Crowing: Activating Pedagogies of Concern

• In Event: 67.057 - Common Worlding Methods: (Im)Possibilities of Post-Qualitative Research

Abstract

The purpose of this poster presentation is to show how “pedagogies of concern” are activated and enacted in early childhood settings. We argue that such pedagogies are necessary for disrupting the developmental logic that persists in early childhood education, requiring us to be accountable to our messy, unpredictable entanglements in the settler colonial places we live in. We share two lively stories, Shimmering and Crowing, to highlight methodological practices that work to make precarious the effects of binary logic, linguistic imperialism and human exceptionalism. The authors draw from their work with children’s relations with place by paying attention to the pulses of multispecies relations and encounters (with herons and crows) and show how these moments call teachers and children into relation. By experimenting with shimmering and crowing the authors dissolve the hierarchies that typically situate human and more-than-human entities as separate. By telling lively and animate stories (Shimmering and Crowing) the authors activate pedagogies of concern.

Our inquiries are situated within a common worlds framework (see www.commonworlds.net). Bruno Latour’s concept of common worlds refers to a broader understanding of the social to include all constituents of our worlds, including nonhuman life forms, forces, and entities. In addition, we build on Latour’s (2004) notion of “matters of concern” to move away from the problematic practices of focusing exclusively on “matters of fact” in early childhood practice. Both projects utilize a multispecies ethnography that is “characterized by an attempt to move beyond research practices that confine themselves to exclusively human (or social) concerns and interests” (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor & Blaise, 2016 p. 151). Using an actively inclusive more-than-human framework, we work to resist the onto-epistemological division that is often perceived between sociocultural contexts and natural environments. Such resistance is necessary in order to reimagine and engage with/in 21st-century pedagogical practices that acknowledge the complexities of children’s real-life worlds.

Data for this poster is drawn from two multispecies ethnographies: one conducted in Australia and one conducted in Canada. Visual and sensory ethnographic methods (i.e., sound recordings and mappings, sound and place mappings, walking-talking, affect notes) were used to document children’s relations with the more-than-human. As a result of our research, two lively stories were created. These highlight a methodology of awakening and seeing, and show how they activate pedagogies of concern. This is not a confirmation of “best” practice or conclusion that this work is complete. Instead, pedagogies of concern happen in the doing and help us to become more intentional with our pedagogies. This work makes visible the practices that emerge when research attends to entanglements that provoke complex and difficult conversations of what it means to live well with others, human and more-than-human, in particular situated contexts.

Authors

• Mindy Blaise, Edith Cowan University

• Catherine Hamm, La Trobe University

• Kathleen Kummen, Capilano University