“Should We Move the Worm?”: Designing Learning for Ethical Attunement through Affect and Embodiment

• In Event: Designing for Affect and Embodiment: Ethical Attunements in the Futuring of Education

Abstract

This paper explores how the ethical, embodied, and affective dimensions of early learning can be designed for, made visible, and felt within place-based education. Drawing from the Learning in Places project (Learning in Places Collaborative, 2021; Authors et al., 2021; see also Vossoughi et al., 2024), we examine a “Should We” deliberation activity centered on kindergarten children’s investigations of earthworms and their relations with Lands, Waters, birds, and humans. Through iterative, play-based engagement, this activity invites children to deliberate over a civic and ecological dilemma: Should we move the worms we find on the sidewalk after it rains? We analyze a sequence of classroom micro-interactions in which children navigate across wonderings, perspective-taking, role play, and structured dialogue, supported by their teacher’s pedagogical mediation. In doing so, we illustrate how design that foregrounds affective and embodied experiences support young learners' complex forms of consequential, ethical sensemaking as a part of complex socio-ecological systems (Authors, 2015; Wilensky & Reisman, 2006)
First, affective realities and their histories are central to how children come to know and care with the natural world alongside one another (Fleer 2013; Author, 2023). For example, students’ laughter, frustration, contemplation, joy, and curiosity serve as interpretive threads of becoming for themselves and the collective learning environment. Second, embodiment is treated as a means of nourishing ethical deliberation; through role play, children exhibit birds and worms, feeling what it’s like to resist being removed from soil, and re-storying socio-ecological dynamics as a way of perspective taking through relational epistemologies and multispecies entanglements (Cajete, 1999; Bang, 2015). These embodied experiences ground and recursively shape corporeal arrangements, gestural patterns, and verbal organization in ways that nurture axiological, ontological, and epistemic heterogeneity and fundamental to ethical learning (Goodwin, 2000, 2017; Rosebery et al., 2010; Warren et al, 2020). Third, this activity stretches towards a broader socio-ecological inquiry storyline, where learning communities engage in place-based wondering, observation, modeling, and data collection, connecting their sensemaking to real-world ecological and civic change-making (Authors, in press).
We argue that the teacher’s interpretive facilitation, or dignity-centered mediation, is key to opening up spaces for shifting thinking, making disagreement generative, inviting ethical complexity to emerge (Espinoza et al., 2020; Rosebery et al., 2016). Through prompts like “Is that your thinking?”, and “Has your thinking changed?”, educators can position students’ ideas as provisional, valuable, and worth revisiting, encouraging students to experience change in their thinking not as failure, but as a sign of growth and responsibility to others. This work informs conversations on the role of affect and embodiment in learning by demonstrating how they can be ethically and ecologically productive in classroom practice. It also expands the horizon of what counts as civic and scientific reasoning in early childhood education. We offer this case as an example of how designing for affective and embodied learning opens up new possibilities for more just and relationally attuned educational futures—where the question is not only what should we learn, but how should we live in relation to others, human and more-than-human alike?

Authors

• Jordan D. Sherry-Wagner, University of Washington - Bothell

• Miguel Angel Garcia-Bocanegra, Northwestern University

• Carrie T. Tzou, University of Washington - Bothell

• Megan Bang, Northwestern University