Troubling Place in Everyday Encounters in Early Childhood Education

• In Event: 21.040 - Children's Common Worlds in Times of Climate Change and "Post-Truths"

Abstract

This poster presentation provides preliminary mapping of the ongoing process of reconfiguring place within three early childhood educational centres, and one summer camp in Southwestern Ontario. We seek to understand how transforming pedagogies affects children's (re)conceptualization of place. Within the broader context of human/more-than-human entanglements and settler colonialism, we wonder how transformative pedagogical work might resituate or unsettle place. Our collaborative work is guided by the question: how do children’s understandings of place shift when educators engage in disrupting pedagogical norms?

Thinking with a common worlds framework (Taylor & Giugni, 2012; Taylor, 2014; Taylor, 2017), children, researchers and educators grapple with tensions that arise in understanding place within the context of the environmental and socio-political realities of life in the Anthropocene. The concept of place in early childhood settings is frequently culturally constructed as a neutral domain or “mute backdrop” (Nxumalo & Cedilo, 2017) that transcends social, political and historical tensions from which they emerge. By reconceptualizing place as assemblage (Duhn, 2012; Taylor, 2014), our projects seek to draw pedagogical attention toward the visible tensions inherent to place, including settler colonial appropriation of unceded Indigenous lands, displacement of more-than-human others, and ecological devastation.

Offering a pedagogical methodology and framework for reconceptualizing childhood, common worlds thinking frames our practice within a non-human centred ethics of inclusion. Building on Bruno Latour’s call for an ontological shift from “matters of fact” to “matters of concern” and Donna Haraway’s commitment to circumventing human exceptionalism by attending to a multitude of “situated knowledges” inherent in a co-constitutive common world, our poster focuses on “learning with” rather than “learning about” place (Taylor, 2017).

By moving away from pedagogies of abstract mastery, common worlds pedagogies provide connectivity with hidden human and more-than-human dimensions informing place. To facilitate this move we engaged in extensive and ongoing consultation with children and educators to share strategies and perspectives on how we might rethink the place we live in. Researchers and educators collaborated on pedagogical disruptions, including emerging relations with land and water whereby educators model the practice of “modest witnessing” (Haraway, 2008) encouraging the children to pay close attention to their immanent surroundings (Tsing, 2015).

Our data and evidentiary framework draw from a mixed-methods approach utilizing both case study (Yin, 2014) and visual ethnography (Pink, 2013). As a collaborative research project, this poster includes pedagogical documentation alongside photos, videos, recordings, and artistic renderings in order to share and reflect on emerging children’s conceptualizations of place.

Our poster contributes to ongoing understanding of the always already present tensions of place in what Taylor describes as “political and uneven grounds” (2014, p. 123), and how transformative pedagogies seek to reconfigure place as an assemblage of human and more-than-human others cohabitating in what is surely a common world.

Authors

• Kelly-Ann MacAlpine, University of Western Ontario

• John William Drew, The University of Western Ontario

• Sarah Black, University of Western Ontario

• Cory Jobb, University of Western Ontario

• Ashley Do Nascimento, The University of Western Ontario