Stories for Living on a Damaged Planet: Common World Bee-Child Pedagogies

• In Event: Common World Pedagogies for the Anthropocene: A More-Than-Human Take on Environmental Education-as-Collective Action

Abstract

This presentation examines children’s encounters with dead and dying bees in their everyday common worlds (Latour, 2005; Taylor, 2013). Within the context of childcare settings located in suburban British Columbia, I visually story situated bee-child relations to illustrate Donna Haraway’s (2008, 2011, 2015) concept of learning with other species in anthropogenically damaged worlds.

Haraway (2015) suggests that we need different kinds of stories for living on a damaged planet. She suggests that we pay attention to stories that enact caring for the messiness of the places we co-inhabit with more-than-human others, help us consider livability without anthropocentric progress narratives, and centre learning within entangled multispecies socialities and becomings. Inspired by this call to (re)story modes of relating and learning within messy anthropogenic inheritances, I visually narrate stories of children’s pedagogical, affective and responsive encounters with dead and dying bees.

I use imagery, textual narratives and video clips gathered from a multi-year multispecies inquiry with young children, educators and more-than-human co-inhabitants of a childcare setting. These juxtaposed and interruptive visualities illustrate everyday arts of noticing (Tsing, 2012) and learning to be affected (Latour, 2004) within children’s anthropogenic inheritances. The intent is to illustrate the effects of shifting pedagogical practices away from learning about bees as objects of human knowledge, towards a situated attention to entangled bee-child relations. These relations engage questions and practices of living, dying, risk, and inequitable vulnerability.

Western bumble bee populations are just one of many more-than-human others that have become vulnerable in the Anthropocene to, what ecofeminist scholar Deborah Bird Rose terms, double death – “cascades of death that curtail the future and unmake the living presence of the past” (Rose, 2014, n.p). Multiple intertwined factors such as parasitic disease, climate change, habitat loss and pesticides have contributed to the decline of bee populations (Green & Ginn, 2014). Several scholars have addressed how these losses are taken place and have examined the significant ecological effects thereof (for example, Cameron et al, 2011; Williams & Osborne, 2009). Yet, there is a paucity of research that examines children’s responses to bee loss and that inquires into the partially recuperative (Haraway, 2015) actions enacted by embodied and affective learning with bees.
Taking seriously the provocation to interrupt grand narratives of progress (Haraway, 2015), this inquiry does not seek any final grand resolutions to the troubles of bee decline. Instead, the performative visual stories are put to work as environmentally attuned collective actions that offer different possibilities for inhabiting damaged places. The visual and textual provocations presented illustrate how responsive bee-child relations and socialities have emerged in ways that trouble anthropocentric ways of learning in early childhood environmental education.

Author

• Fikile Nxumalo, The University of Texas - Austin