Attending to Children's Relations With Palatable Pedagogies: Thinking With Our Indigestions

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

Abstract

Children's responses to current food crises have profound sociocultural, political, and economic implications in Canada and internationally. The purpose of this poster is to take up these concerns with children, as we move beyond stewardship perspectives that romanticize children’s engagements with the environment (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Khattar, 2018). We attend to the lack of attention given to children’s capacity to be agents of action on issues of food crises by engaging with palatable pedagogies.

Using a feminist environmental humanities framework, we share narratives that complicate the subjectivities and epistemologies sustained by dominant discourses of health, safety, choices, and appetite in two Ontario early years settings around relations with food. We present these narratives as hybrid, partialized experimentations with food pedagogies (Sumner, 2008; Levkoe, Brady & Anderson, 2016) to reimagine complex human-food relations within living, breathing environments. We theorize food pedagogies as palatable pedagogies; ways of thinking that offer the conditions to think with food and our becoming with food in post-truth paradigms. Palatable pedagogies do not offer a recipe for how to ethically consume food; rather they look closely at human-food encounters and stay with the indigestion from the ethical tensions of our relations with other species as foods in these post-truth times of climate change.

This research utilizes mixed-method approaches of case study (Yin, 2014) and multispecies ethnographic methods to frame children’s everyday food encounters from a local knowledges and perspectives basis. Drawing on pedagogical documentation (Ministry of Education Ontario, 2014), we narrate three co-labouring palatable pedagogies that emerge when staying with tensions (Harway, 2016), when slowing down (Stengers, 2018; Tsing, 2015), and when engaging in acts of reconnaissance (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Khattar, & Montpetit, forthcoming) to map out perspectival fooding relations. These narratives present overlapping experiences of indigestions that demand a slowing down as we encounter our discomforts, savourings and shifting appetites.

This poster responds to the call for post-qualitative methodologies in education research that seek to reimagine our ways of knowing and being in the world through an awareness of our situated ontologies and epistemologies (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; Lather, 2016). This reimagining is embodied in our entangled multispecies narratives and work to democratize education research in a post-truth era through the focus on relationality in the early childhood lived curriculum (Aoki, 1978) that includes the more-than-human.

Exploring human-food relations in environmental education is significant given the widespread disconnect between humans and the species we call food, and the ecological cycles we collectively depend upon (Sumner & Wever, 2016). Human-food relations are relevant in early childhood education due to the growing recognition of global ecological challenges and increasing awareness of the climate-related risks children face (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2014; UNICEF, 2007, 2015). Palatable pedagogies respond to this urgency by cultivating an appetite for a relational awareness of food and a communal goal for a sustainable food future while reconsidering how we define “truth” in these times of climate change.

Authors

• Lisa-Marie Gagliardi, University of Western Ontario

• Randa Khattar, Charles Sturt University

• Maureen Cullen, Fanshawe College