Complexifying Entanglements With Natural and Developmental Sciences in Children's Everyday Encounters With Ecologies

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

Abstract

Extending upon a core assertion of this session, that dominant environmental education pedagogies remain rooted in 20th century conceptualizations of childhood and learning, this poster argues that such pedagogies also perpetuate hierarchical relationships between early childhood education and natural and developmental sciences. Importantly, we contend that cultivating pedagogical relationships with natural and developmental sciences relevant to the fraught post-truth knowledge politics of 21st century Canada is an urgent priority for environmental early childhood education.

Scholars across multiple disciplines critique how education discourses position science as a universalized interpretative mechanism, which functions to sustain racial, gendered, and cosmological power structures. In early childhood education, reconceptualist scholars argue that locating developmental science as a universalized benchmark pathologizes non Euro-Western experiences of childhood (Burman, 2016; Dahlberg & Moss, 2005); feminist science studies scholars make visible how Euro-Western scientific paradigms are inextricably entangled with settler colonial politics (Tallbear, 2013; Hamilton, Subramaniam & Willey, 2017); and scholars in environmental education ground natural science pedagogies alongside social justice issues (Tolbert, Schindel, & Rodriguez, 2018; Tolbert & Bazzul, 2016). Drawing these threads together, scholars who think with a common worlds framework call for researchers, educators, and children to disrupt existing relationships between early childhood education and science by engaging with scientific knowledges as situated, politicized, and tentative forms of knowing (Land, 2017; Nxumalo, 2017; Taylor, 2017).

Concurrent to critiques of the violent consequences of contemporary educational relationships with science, we adopt a common worlds ethic that aims to respond to our complicity in environmental precarities in the common worlds we inherit with children (Nxumalo & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017) – ecological and childhood inheritances that are often made perceptible (actionable, concerning, fundable) to privileged systems and populations through data from natural and developmental sciences. This presentation contributes to debates about how common worlds pedagogies might engage with sciences (Nxumalo, 2017; Rooney, 2018) when dismantling Euro-Western epistemological hegemonies that lend science overt power, emphasizing the urgency of current ecological inheritances to educational and governmental institutions, positioning science as one mode of learning with the environment, and creating pedagogies that generate more liveable 21st century worlds are all core priorities. Put differently, when Euro-Western epistemological hierarchies continually re-inscribe natural and developmental sciences with dominant interpretative clout and these sciences are a common method for making visible shifting climate health, we ask how educators, children, and researchers might engage with sciences while grappling with the boundaries, content, and power sciences hold.

We draw upon ethnographic, action research projects with educators and children in Ontario and British Columbia to share practices of thinking differently with natural and developmental scientific knowledges in a cemetery and urban forest. We discuss how we might create pedagogies that position scientific knowledge as one situated, partial participant (Haraway, 2016) in children’s complex encounters with ecologies. In our efforts to develop practices with children that carefully trace the partiality of natural and developmental sciences while thinking with the knowledges articulated by these sciences, we work to reconfigure how early childhood education and natural and developmental sciences might converse in complex post-truth worlds.

Authors

• Nicole Land, Ryerson University

• Meagan Montpetit, University of Western Ontario