Moving and Learning With Wind: Shaping New Pedagogies in Times of Climate Change

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

Abstract

Educational perspectives that aim to teach children ‘about’ the world often posit humans as somehow separate from the world. In the context of environmental education, the challenges of Anthropogenic climate change mean that we require different approaches; one where children come to understand themselves as part of the environment, entwined and entangled somehow in the shifts and trends of wider climatic change. Given that everyday weather conditions are responsive to and indicative of wider climate patterns, we look to child-weather relations for insight into how we might better shape environmental pedagogies that are responsive to climate change. We adopt a theoretical position that draws attention to the significance of human-weather relations (Neimanis and Walker, 2014; Author a, 2018).

To better understand children’s relations with the weather, we have undertaken the first phase of a three year multispecies and affect focused ethnographic study of children’s relations with the more-than-human. Our research site is based at a child care centre in Canberra, Australia, and includes the surrounds that stretch out along the shores of an urban lake. Our project brings together researchers, educators and young children to explore the pedagogical potential of learning-with weather. Rather than only look at weather from inside the classroom, we venture outdoors, and walk along through the landscape as a way of coming to know the world through sensory, affective and bodily encounters.

In this poster presentation, we report on one aspect of our findings: the learnings and pedagogies that have emerged by attuning to children’s relations with wind. Wind is in many ways invisible, and yet children sense or witness its presence through the shifts and changes in the landscape, such as when dust or leaves swirl through the air. In different ways, children come to notice a floating, shifting and ever-moving world; a way of coming to know the world by thinking-with wind. We present lively, unruly, and non-innocent wind stories to show how children move, sway, feel, listen, and move-along-with the wind. In doing so, we draw attention to the diversity of child-wind entanglements that are often exciting, yet sometimes discomforting. Thinking with the pedagogical potential of ‘windy’ environments invites us to better understand that children’s learning is always positioned within an ever-changing landscape; one where weather patterns are being dramatically shaped by human activity while we (humans) are also constantly responding to weatherly affects.

This research has given rise to the development of new types of pedagogies that respond to everyday weather movements and relations in spaces that come to be understood as lively, unruly, non-innocent, windy, weathered and generative. This has led to the development of new ‘weathering-with’ pedagogies that offer a less human-centric way of coming to know and respond to environmental challenges.

Authors

• Tonya Rooney

• Felicity Royds

• Mindy Blaise, Edith Cowan University