Unsettling Anthropogenic Absent Presences in Early Childhood Education: Everyday Stories of Witnessing Damaged Landscapes

• In Event: Responding to Current Times of Anthropogenic Inheritance: Multispecies Relations in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

There is ever-mounting evidence that we are in the epoch of the Anthropocene; marked by humans as a damaging geologic force (Yusoff, 2013). In response, recent scholarship in early childhood education has sought to unsettle innocent and romantic visions of children’s relations with nature and called for pedagogies that explicitly situate and contextualize children’s relations within the messy worlds that they inhabit (Taylor, 2011, 2013; Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2013). However, environmental early years education remains largely premised on a pure nature, separate from human culture and enacted through practices that embed imageries of mute untouched landscapes and a romantic wilderness awaiting children’s discoveries. This is particularly salient in the context of Canada, where nature kindergartens are increasingly popular and where many early childhood programs have sought to replicate northern Europe’s nature kindergartens (Pelo, 2013; Warden, 2010). These programs inadvertently participate in reinscribing colonizing imaginaries of ‘untouched’ idyllic Canadian “natures”.
This paper challenges these anthropocentric perspectives through stories drawn from a multispecies ethnography (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010) that paid attention to children’s relations with damaged places within the context of four group childcare settings for preschool aged children in suburban British Columbia on unceded Coast Salish territories. In this paper, I attend to the ways in which children’s pedagogical encounters foregrounded ethical more-than-human relationalities. Using textual and visual narratives of these encounters, I explore interconnected stories of children’s and educator’s attunements to place, paying particular attention to pedagogical encounters that enmeshed educators and children in tenuous relationalities with specific situated anthropogenic (forest and wetland) places. I discuss how these damaged places as contested material-discursive issues of concern (Latour, 2004) came to matter in childhood pedagogies. I point to the ways in which these emergent frictional relationalities continuously leaked outside of the abstractions that commonly count as environmental early childhood education.
In centering these damaged places as witnesses that interrupt and complicate everyday pedagogical encounters, this paper draws inspiration from posthumanist theorizations to enact responsive witnessing as pedagogy and ontological methodology (Law, 2004). That is to say, I put figurative and literal acts of witnessing to work as creative material-semiotic ways of mapping relations of knowledge, practice, and place in ways that counter anthropocentric views of the world (Haraway, 1992, 1997). I discuss, with illustrative examples of pedagogical encounters, how the children’s everyday place attuned encounters can be interpreted as enacting affective, material, literal and metaphorical interferences of the ‘absent presence’ of colonial anthropogenic inheritances in this particular wetland and forest. In this finding, I echo environmental humanities scholars who argue that we need more scholarship and practices that entangle us in small details, and that take up creative approaches towards noticing our implicated relationalities in a world where humans are not the only actors (Haraway, 2014; van Dooren, 2014). I discuss the implications and contributions of this work in relation to refiguring early childhood pedagogical practices in ways that productively inhabit the difficult questions of whom and what lives and dies well within particular situated damaged lifeworlds.

Author

• Fikile Nxumalo, The University of Texas - Austin