Reclaiming Multispecies Learning: Childhood Memories of Common Worlding

• In Event: Childhood and Schooling Beyond the Western Horizon Encounters with Memories, Matter, and More-than-Human Worlds

Proposal

“To re-member, to com-memorate, is actively to reprise, revive, retake, recuperate” (Haraway, 2016, p. 25). Committed to the multispecies learning for survival in the era of extreme planetary vulnerability of the anthropocene, we engage in multi-perspectives and multi-species inquiry aiming to actively remember and (re)animate the conviviality between human and the extended natural world, which has been interrupted by the logic of Western philosophy. Modern(ist) schooling insists that sentience, or subjectivity, is the exclusive possession of humankind (Abram, 2007), therefore, as we grew, we were taught to forget “our human inheritance in a more-than-human world” (Abram, 1996, p. 154), including ways of perceiving, relating to, and communicating with other species. We learned to disrupt the reciprocal experiences of our multispecies relations, replacing equity with a hierarchical order of species, where humans were always in charge of using and managing other species, including our plant companions. But memory, especially collective memory, has the power to reclaim what we may have been separated from, recovering the capacity to honor and animate the experience of ‘becoming-with’ in our multispecies worlds. Drawing on our own childhood memories, we bring into focus reciprocal relations between humans and plants that are “always already going on” (Abram, 1996, p. 41), but that may be neglected, forgotten, or even erased in the processes of growing up and schooling.

Building on the frameworks of collective biography and diffractive analysis, we combine our memories of multispecies, multi-mattered childhoods (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2015; Davies & Gannon, 2006, 2012) to investigate responsible, responsive, and sustainable ways of learning with the plant world in ways that foster multi-species community building. We came together with the goal of revisiting the international perspectives of our own childhoods in Brazil, China, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and the United States and explored memories of relationships with plant species at home and encounters with plant species in the wild. Drawing on a year-long collective biography practice, we bring together memory work and sustainability education by picking up the threads of our childhoods and weaving together stories from our memories to (re)claim our capacity for multispecies relational learning while (re)animating pedagogical possibilities for ongoing ‘common worlding.’ In this process, we experiment with re-membering how those relations produced our worlds then, how they continue to shape our multispecies multimattered worlds now, and investigate how multispecies learning can be implicated in improving our educational systems in the future.

Authors

• Iveta Silova, Arizona State University

• Ann Nielsen, Arizona State University

• Keti Tsotniashvili, Arizona State University

• Dilraba Anayatova, Arizona State University