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

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel draws together our encounters from around the world and across generations to make conceptual contributions to our understandings of childhoods. Together we challenge the status quo notion of schooling as human-centric and adult driven by instead centering learning through encounters about and beyond time, space, and the human. In this conceptual/theoretical panel, we further the literature about childhood becomings to examine the multiplicities and complexities of children’s interconnected relationships with matter and more-than-human worlds by weaving together and redefining the concepts of time, place, and teacher.

Memories and multispecies encounters form the foundation which we build upon existing work about childhoods beyond the Western horizon. First, we examine the connection between the human body and Earth through memories of childhoods and everyday life during the Cold War. This memory work illuminates the “multispecies knots of time” that connect pasts and presents that co-evolve with landscapes and places (Rose, 2012, p. 128). This exploration of time, through memory, lends itself to a deeper attuning to childhood across geographic locations and timescales. In the second paper, we introduce the conceptual framing of pancha bhutas (D. Saraswati, 2012; T. Saraswati, 2004), an elemental framework which allows us to break down hierarchical divisions of humans and nature and of teachers and students. This approach shifts the focus to how children, as unique configurations of the five basic elements, are reconfiguring the elements, and, in doing so, reconfiguring themselves. This view of self is interconnected to multispecies landscapes and raises the question of who, in this context, is a teacher. In the third paper, the notion of teacher is reconsidered from a broader perspective. In this inquiry, the author immerses herself in re-membering activities with three family members to reconceptualize who is considered a teacher and what is valued as learning. Revelations from these innovations on memory work methods open the door to broader conceptualizations of multispecies learning in the fourth paper. Overall, the panel addresses the urgent need to look beyond the Western horizon and perspectives to highlight learning which promotes living in greater balance and harmony with/in more-than-human worlds.

Together, these papers are a direct response to the power disparities which constitute and are perpetuated by modern schooling’s myopic focus on development. We argue that education’s role in addressing the global emergency of climate change requires a dismantling of systems of oppression which thrive by further existing inequalities. This panel contributes to existing work which pushes back against linear frameworks of childhood development and the notion that education is primarily a tool for producing a workforce that grows economies. It adds nuance to how we are all interconnected not only in our physical forms but also through our basic, elemental forms, interwoven encounters, and memories across time and space. This conceptual/theoretical work has implications for how we question the role of education as a system and context that imperils an already vulnerable planet.

One of the approaches we take to addressing the role of education in fostering systemic oppression and planetary harm is to dismantle adult-child or teacher-student hierarchies that characterize educational research . We take as a starting point the call for children to be co-researchers (Punch, 2002) whose relationships deserve due weight while also empowering ourselves to access our own childhood memories to remember the children within us. Our collective remembering and active co-researching with children occurs across geopolitical contexts including Brazil, China, Finland, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and the United States as well as across generations with children today and with the children of our pasts. The resulting contribution of these methods is to offer illustrations of how we are learning with, in relationality with each other and the planet. The use of collective biography and rememberings of multispecies, multi-mattered relationships is possible only when we disengage from notions of linear time to relive moments assumed to be since past. This disruption to the taken for granted assumption that we are all on a linear trajectory toward development - on individual and systems levels - opens space to situate ourselves in different relationships and encounters across worlds.

Taken together, the papers in this panel tell a story of multidimensional childhoods across disparate geographies and timescapes. Bringing ourselves back to our foundational elements, we learn that our intersecting vulnerabilities are of our own making. Our embodied experiences of learning through multispecies encounters directly decenters the dominant narratives about childhoods that have fostered these vulnerabilities and instead calls for the important rethinking of the epistemological, ontological, and methodological assumptions of Western educational research and practice. While research on childhood and schooling has been bound to the assumption that children are separate from teachers and humans are separate from and in control over nature in Western societies, we actively look to see beyond the Western horizon to understand how we learn in relational encounters with memories and more-than-human worlds.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Iveta Silova, Arizona State University

Individual Presentations

• Elemental Childhoods Beyond Space and Time - Anu Sachdev, EAST STROUDSBURG UNIVERSITY; Janna Goebel, Arizona State University

• Reconfiguring the notion of teacher: Memories, thought experiments and encounters with alternative ways of teaching and learning in China - Jieyu Jiang, Arizona State University

• Reclaiming Multispecies Learning: Childhood Memories of Common Worlding - Iveta Silova, Arizona State University; Ann Nielsen, Arizona State University; Keti Tsotniashvili, Arizona State University; Dilraba Anayatova, Arizona State University

Discussant

• Noah W Sobe, Loyola University Chicago