Cross-Cultural Storying of Early Childhood Place Pedagogies for World Sustenance

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers and educators from diverse geopolitical locations who center the role of place in revitalizing and sustaining communities’ cultural identities in/and relations with land through decolonizing and antiracist practices and methodologies in early childhood settings. The multiplicity and plurality of place stories from cross-continental and cross-cultural locations disrupt the dominance of Eurocentric educational approaches and understanding of place. Importantly, the selected papers refuse universalist, colonial, racist, and neoliberal formulations of Early Childhood Education (ECE), and alternatively generate a conversation about how situated approaches to place pedagogies in ECE enliven the complex relations between the local and the global as they intimate our collective response-ability to world sustenance.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Critical Perspectives on Early Childhood Education

Chair

• Iris Berger, University of British Columbia

Papers

• (Re)connecting Bodies and Beings With Country Through an Indigenous Australian Early Childhood Outdoor Program - Kim Michelle Kinnear, Deakin University

• Pedagogies of Place in Kenya and South Africa: Early Childhood Ecologies, Permaculture, and Curriculum - Bekisizwe S. Ndimande, University of Texas - San Antonio; Beth Blue Swadener, Arizona State University

• Mingas de Pensamiento: A Research Process With the Embera Chamí Indigenous Community for the Design of Culturally Responsive Early Childhood Education - Luz Vivas, Concordia University - Montreal

• Rooted in Ancestral Lands: Sharing the Knowledge Through Indigenous Storywork - Lori Ellen Huston, University of British Columbia