(Re)connecting Bodies and Beings With Country Through an Indigenous Australian Early Childhood Outdoor Program

• In Event: Cross-Cultural Storying of Early Childhood Place Pedagogies for World Sustenance

Abstract

This paper engages with past-present Indigenous Australian conceptualizations of Country (Land) through autoethnographic accounts of care for a colonized place. The study is centered as part of an outdoor early childhood program, ‘bush kinder’ which takes place weekly on a human-made quarry on Bunurong Country and is led by the author, a descendant of Adnyamathanha and Nukunu communities in South Australia, who is also a teacher experiencing dis/ability with an assistance dog.

Autoethnographic accounts are memoried events or storied experiences (Barraclough, 2014). Such narratives of/about the (desired) self are told through culture analysis and socio-political interpretation (Chang, 2008). Within a context of dominance of whiteness and white Anglo-Australian culture in Australia (Author et al., 2022), returning to Country, the outdoor early childhood program continually revives cultural identity through Indigenous understandings relationally with one another enacting pedagogies of place. In doing so, understandings of Country, in connection with different bodies and beings, are ongoingly reshaped and transformed through equity and care, as retold within this presentation.

Author

• Kim Michelle Kinnear, Deakin University