Care and Conviviality: Reconfiguring Everyday Place Encounters in Early Childhood Education

• In Event: 18.043 - Assemblage Thinking and the Mobilization of Education for Sustainable Development Policy Within a Canadian Province

Abstract

Thinking with a Common Worlds framework (Taylor & Giugni, 2012; Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015), this paper explores the tensions present in a local cemetery space, visited by a group of children and educators. Troubling the multispecies and place-attuned relations, the authors consider how an ethics of conviviality (van Dooren & Rose, 2012) might emerge from everyday encounters in the cemetery. To facilitate a move toward a more-than-human centred ethics of sharing spaces, we use pedagogical documentation to challenge accepted developmental discourses of a human-centric way of being. We explore questions of care through storying a particular inquiry involving a mythical crocodile at the bottom of a sewage grate, attending to the opportunities for practices of sustainability and inclusion.

Authors

• Meagan Montpetit, University of Western Ontario

• Sarah Black, University of Western Ontario