Toward an Ethics of Care and Vulnerability: Refiguring More-Than-Human Presences in Preschoolers’ Multispecies Encounters

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Sunday 7:45 am
  In Poster Session: Childhoods, Materials, and Critical Learning Encounters

Abstract

This praxis-oriented paper draws from a yearlong multispecies ethnography of preschoolers’ encounters in an urban garden through child-led documentation. Thinking-with common world pedagogies, I attend to young children’s everyday multispecies encounters with worms, bees, and flowers and describe their embodied, affective, and relational learning-with the more-than-human that was messy, situated, and relational. Important to navigating the environmental precarity of the Anthropocene, I share moments of children’s developing ethics of relational care and environmental vulnerability surface as hope. Seeking to unsettle disconnected, humancentric, nature-as-resource scientific learning, I mobilized a pedagogy of refiguring more-than-human presences to center human/more-than-human entanglement, interconnectedness, and interdependency. Findings narrate learning encounters and pedagogical moves through vignettes and children’s documentation of photographs, drawings, and writings.

Author

• Luke Max Muscat, St. Luke's School