Otherwise Encounters: Cultivating New Possibilities for Meeting With Parks and Young Children on Colonized Lands

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Antiracist and Decolonial Approaches to Teaching and Learning

Abstract

This paper invites audiences to reconsider how parks and young children encounter each other on colonized land. Recognizing the exclusions contributing to injustice and alarming rates of degradation, how might we create the conditions for parks and children to encounter each other otherwise in pedagogy, research, and everyday early years practice? Otherwise, that is, than the structuring forces of domination, extraction, human [white] supremacy, and other well-worn societal scripts tend to allow for, even within the most innocuous-seeming corners of early childhood everyday exchange. It asserts that unhinging early childhood educational frameworks from dominant modes of thinking and doing on Indigenous lands is an integral part of the process in cultivating equitable education systems for the 21st century.

Author

• Narda Nelson, Western University