Month: April 2020

“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.” –Robin Wall Kimmerer 

Hello everyone,

Thank you for continuing to post and reply to each other in such thoughtful, reflective ways!  While I cannot respond to everyone, I do read them all and so appreciate your generosity, time and effort in sharing.

I posted an article a day or two ago on our CCS Resources page from Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose (2012).  Some of you might remember it from previous years, but I feel like it asks something slightly different of us as readers in these COVID-19 times.  As you continue to explore your various inquiry questions, perhaps it’s time to rethink the question of ‘whose stories come to matter in the emergence of a place?” (van Dooren & Rose, 2012, para. 6) and our place-based pedagogies? 

What stories are we actively cultivating through our inquiry work? Listening for?  What about the stories we have been trained to turn away from or think we are outside of in early childhood?  And what do we do with the unintended consequences that sometimes emerge when we put our understandings of what it means to ‘share a place with others’ into motion with young children and each other?  Sometimes stories collide and contradict each other.  What then? (competing stories of what Haro Woods is ‘for’ come to mind)

In sharing stories of penguins and bats in a ‘multispecies city’, van Dooren and Rose shine a light on the way life wants to continue living, even under narrowing or seemingly impossible conditions.  It reminds me of the choices certain creatures continue to make in Haro Woods, despite all of the disruptions (see photos, below, taken last week in Haro Woods).

Perhaps others have had the choice taken away from them (thinking here of salmon who used to spawn in Finnerty Creek). And what about new opportunities that others can, and do, seize on in this constantly changing urban landscape (looking at you, Ivy and Bacteria!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

The stories van Dooren and Rose share are not simply there to entertain us.  They are intended to draw us into paying attention to the shared responsibility of holding space open for others.  Maybe they succeed for you in doing so and maybe they don’t.  But as van Dooren, Rose, Haraway and others suggest, in virtue of living in this world we are increasingly called to take a stand and ‘cast our lot behind one thing or another.’  Not all things, but some things.  What stories draw you into a feeling of obligation beyond the ‘self’?  What response-abilities are you trying to promote with children, families and colleagues?  As you are all showing, this can be done by focusing on any number of things, including children’s material relations, weather, creature and cosmos connections, the BC ELF or other lines of inquiry, but it seems to me that the important thing is to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016) of whatever choice your team has made and continue to turn with it, together.  I’ll be posting another article by Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2015) soon that will hopefully add to this line of thought.

As Denise has said in the past, it is actually not desirable or even possible to care about EVERYTHING all at once., which is where narrowing each team’s collective focus for a sustained period of time in our inquiry thinking matters.  We are coming closer to the end of this year’s sustained focus, but I wonder if you find your interests and concerns shifting, in light of the new conditions we find ourselves living under?  There is, of course, the added complexity of doing this work in the absence of being physically present with children and families.  If nothing else, COVID-19 is showing us that the ‘smallest’ of stories matter across time and distance, whether we are aware of them or not.

Shifting terrain

A number of you have expressed feelings of frustration, grief, and uncertainty in the face of COVID-19 upheavals.  We are sitting in a strange but necessary paradox of taking collective action through isolation, which is not an easy thing to do.  Thankfully, love, joy and humour continue to live here too.  Government responses change daily, adding shifting layers to the ‘forced experiment’ of working from home, but this is the way things are for now and so it begs the question of how we can continue to respond to the best of our abilities (as part of a scattered collective that has the uneasy privilege of being paid to continue working from home).  I want to encourage you all to keep engaging and documenting this moment in whatever way works best for you.  The collective level of engagement has been amazing, despite the challenges.  Thanks again for continuing to try.  It’s all we can do and I look forward to seeing what keeps emerging!

Schedule

As I mentioned to Amber this morning, I’ve been feeling badly about not being able to respond to everyone more consistently and in the timely manner I’d like to.  Doing my best and not always succeeding, but want you to know that I am always happy to receive your requests and shared reflections – so great!!  If something slips between the email cracks, please feel free to reach out and remind me or ask where things are at.  I might need a prompt:0

Going forward, I will be available:

Tuesdays and Wednesdays (team mtgs, responding via email, posting new readings)

I will try to respond and engage with teams and individual emails/requests at other times throughout the week, but a heads up for everyone that Mondays and Thursdays are reserved for my Early Childhood Pedagogy Network (ECPN) hours, reading/writing and finding resources for you all to engage with.  I am flexing Fridays between UVic CCS and the ECPN.  Feeling very grateful to have paid work during such financial uncertainty, but my half-time hours have been feeling a little more full-time lately so I’m trying to create a more structured approach going forward and hope this helps in terms of getting back into a more ‘predictable’ schedule for us all.

For the rest of this week and next, I invite you to check out the CIES Living Schedule for online presentations (another one at 5pm this evening called ‘Beyond the Western Horizon in Educational Research’, for example).  Sarah Board, one of our former subs, also forwarded the link for a series of interesting webinars taking place in honour of Earth Week that I uploaded to the Events page if you haven’t already seen it (thx Sherri-Lynn for passing that along!). https://creativelyunited.org/earthfest-live/

Lastly, Ildikó has put out a lovely provocation for everyone to join Arbutus Place in sharing some of your own early childhood memories.  Our childhood experiences continue to inform the ‘now’ of how we see ourselves as educators and the choices we make in practice everyday.  What makes a particular story feels important to share right now?  Putting memories into conversation with each other (or ‘Re-living the Pedagogical Moment’, as Ildikó calls it) sounds super-generative – what happens if we take time to get something down and put it into conversation with others’ stories?  Can we do so while reflecting on how these stories might continue to matter in everyday moments with children?  Perhaps you can share stories that connect with your centre’s inquiry thinking.  Just a thought!

Musical interlude in honour of Angie’s dancing provocations: here

Apologies for a bit of a long post here (thank you Diana for pointing out that it can feel like a lot sometimes).  Look forward to continuing the conversation!

Narda