Anti-Colonial Orientations to Place-Based and Environmental Education

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Education across the African Diaspora: Emerging Research Perspectives, Practices, and Connections

Proposal

This paper examines anti-colonial environmental and place-based education in both the African diaspora and on the continent of Africa in my home community of eSwatini. I am particularly interested in developing pedagogical, conceptual, and methodological disruptions to deficit constructions and erasures that universalize and privilege Western science in environmental education. Underpinning this disruptive work is attention to the need to center natural and cultural worlds as interconnected rather than approaches that perpetuate human centrism and the hyper-separation of (non-human) nature from (human) culture. I come to this work shaped by a multitude of personal and work experiences including: experiences growing up in postcolonial eSwatini and encountering a Eurocentric curriculum throughout my pre-university education; as an immigrant to Canada encountering anti-Black racism alongside celebratory discourses of multicultural inclusion and the erasure of Indigenous lands; experiences with Western science education through undergraduate and graduate training in the Biological sciences; experiences with normative Canadian early education as a mother to Black children; and, experiences as an early childhood educator encountering settler colonial imaginaries of ‘the great outdoors’ and romanticized child-nature relationships amidst ecologically damaged landscapes.

Bringing anti-colonial concerns to environmental and place-based education for young people means that my work is inherently interdisciplinary. In this regard, my research works across multiple fields including early childhood education, childhood studies, children’s geographies, Indigenous and Black studies, social studies of science, and the environmental humanities and sciences. In bringing these fields of study into conversation, I draw inspiration from multiple theoretical perspectives; I am especially interested in the interruptive possibilities offered by placing early childhood environmental and place-based education into conversation with Black feminist geographies, Black ecologies, situated Indigenous relational ontologies and epistemologies and selected critical posthumanist theories.

Overall, my work seeks to make conceptual, methodological, and pedagogical contributions within two interconnected research foci within early childhood environmental and place-based education: (1) Disrupting settler colonial epistemic erasures by affirming Indigenous childhoods and land relations; (2) Disrupting anti-Blackness by affirming Black childhoods and land relations. Importantly, this work is rooted in community collaborations and supports community activisms at multiple scales related to early childhood education research and pedagogical practices. Black and Indigenous community partnerships in this work include ongoing collaborations with the Coahuiltecan Miakan-Garza Band in Central Texas, with Black families and Black early childhood educators in Ontario, Canada, and with teachers and community elders in the rural community of Nkambeni in eSwatini.

Author

• Fikile Nxumalo, University of Toronto