Cultivating relational worlds

• In Event: Coastal communities in Latin America: Honoring children’s everyday sensemaking of changing lands and waters

Proposal

Relevance: These times in human history require us to reimagine schools within the places where children and families live. The first paper examines a pedagogical strategy of Caminatas Comunitarias (community walks) in the community of El Pacifico that sits between a mangrove lagoon and the Pacific Ocean, in a federal CONAFE primary school in Chiapas, Mexico.

Theory & Context:
Indigenous knowledges and deep place-specific responsibilities and belonging are advanced through the living and material engagements across human bodies and place (Marin, 2020). In this paper we offer Land - the collective actors embedded with histories of place are at the center of interaction for many Indigenous and land-based communities - as the first context of human learning and development (Marin, 2020; Meixi & Elliott, in press; Tuck et al., 2014). In particular, we study the role of Land or the multitude of natural world entities in the development of children’s ethical intelligences and their insights into their changing climate worlds in both hyperlocalized and yet, global entanglements.

Mode of Inquiry & Methodologies
The stories gathered and presented here come from GoPro videodata gathered while walking and storying lands (Marin & Bang, 2018), where family members and children share stories of place, with teachers and educational leaders positioned as witnesses and learners. We present two key episodes where community members brought their teachers to two key spots - the edge of the mangrove forest and the tip of the Pacific Ocean to understand the vast ecological and ethical knowledge that children share in interaction with their waterscapes.

Findings
We find that caminatas comunitarias support children’s affect and ethical interactions in the presence of their natural world ecosystems (mangrove forests, pacific ocean) in relation to broader concerns of overfishing and intergenerational cultural change with lands in two ways. First, we find that walking in the presence of Land and the natural world actors that make up children’s constellations of relationships expanded possibilities for teachers to learn about children’s climate worlds, what they noticed and cared about. Second, these caminatas comunitarias made visible the ways intergenerational family life cultivated children’s ethical attunements to their lands and waters. Together, these offered rich ontological starting points for teaching and learning at school. We illustrate how the configuration of emplacement, intergenerationality, storytelling and storylistening (Archibald, 2008), affect, and agency together supported the development of children's ethical intelligences to cultivate relational worlds in the midst of ongoing climate heartbreak in their community.

Contribution
This paper contributes to core understandings of intergenerational life on land as a resource for understanding children’s climate worlds. Furthermore, it offers caminatas comunitarias as a kind of land-based pedagogy that deepens children’s relational worlds across the landscapes of land-school-family/community. Particularly when climate and environmental education can often erase actual attention to place, this paper offers practical strategies for teachers and educators seeking to design and develop climate education that builds on families’ knowledges on how to live well in our places as they continue to navigate climate futures.

Authors

• * Meixi, University of Minnesota

• Erma Fetić Mujić, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

• Giselle Caretto, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Maria Cecilia Schwedhelm, Independent Scholar