Month: April 2024

Since attending Juniper and Salal’s seminar earlier this week (sorry I had to leave early) I’ve been thinking about some of the questions I was presented with at the Rematriation workshop regarding the construction of a land acknowledgement.

Yahlnaaw, the workshop’s facilitator, emphasized the importance of first locating ourselves.  Yahlnaaw emphasized that who we are is where we come from and offered us several reflective questions (the ones I remember are added below for your own reflective purposes).

To properly orient to and acknowledge these lands on which we currently live, we must first acknowledge where/who we came from (geographically, culturally, linguistically etc).

Thank you, Meredith, for offering a beautiful example of locating oneself as you shared Juniper and Salal’s acknowledgement.  Not only does this practice help create a rich land acknowledgment, but when shared, it also creates and strengthens our connections to one another – deepening understanding.

• Who are you?
• Why do you do the work you do?
• Where do you come from?
• Who are your ancestors?  What language(s) did they speak?
• Where do you hope to go and why?
• Who supports you?
• What brought you to this land?
• What are your intersecting identities?  (consider race, class, gender identity, sexual identity, ethnicity, religion)

Here’s what I’ve personally put together so far.

I am Kelcie Lee Yaromy.  My middle name was inspired by my Irish maternal grandmother, Rosemary Leona.  My paternal grandparents are Dorothy and Stanley who gifted me with Polish, Greek, and Ukrainian heritage.  I was born on the traditional lands of Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, Haudenosaunee and the Mississaugas of the Credit River.  After my grandmother and several of my mom’s siblings moved to this island my family followed.  I received the bulk of my education on the traditional lands of the Snuneymuxw peoples.  While studying psychology at VIU I learned how the first seven years of life set the stage for lifelong mental health. After graduation, I moved to W̱SÁNEĆ and Lekwungen land (drawn by the opportunity to live with my sister – my favourite person – once again) and shifted my focus to early childhood education.

I look forward to sharing more and using this excercise to help inform Acorn Place’s land acknowledgement.

We embrace a Pedagogy of Care as foundational in our approach to everyday practice with children and families.  We work in alignment with the BC Early Learning Framework to create a warm and nurturing environment to support all aspect of children’s growth. Understanding pedagogy as a collective, life-making project that responds to the conditions of our times (Vintimilla, 2020), we ask ourselves how thinking differently about children can open our eyes to new ways of being with children in everyday moments?

 Pedagogical decisions at Cedar Place are based on anti-colonial, anti-racist principles of inclusion that recognize all children as co-participants in shaping their world(s).  Our educational philosophy places great value on taking a gentle approach to care. We emphasize relationship building that honours children’s connections with families, educators, the environment, and more-than-human-others.

We make time for planned and spontaneous moments throughout the ebbs and flows of a Cedar Place day.  As we nurture space for subtle moments of experimentations, we are committed to thinking and being alongside children with their unique gifts and curiosities.  We create curriculum-making processes that involve time outdoors (with its offering of bigger spaces, weather and meeting with creatures and their families) and indoors (with the daily journey of meeting with children’s families, toilet learning, eating, sleeping and being together in the world with our bodies). In both indoors and outdoors we are committed to creating experiences that  help connect us to the territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən, Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ peoples. This includes engaging with gardening, stories/story-telling and dancing while always recognizing children as members of a family, culture and community with their own ways of doing and being in the world.

Integral to Cedar Place, we believe in reciprocity within communication and the exchange of ideas and experience between families, children and educators.

Hay’sxw’qa si’em!   (hy-sh-kwa sea-em)!

We say this in honour of now and future Songhees and Esquimalt peoples, for whom Hay’sxw’qa si’em (hy-sh-kwa sea-em)! means, “Thank you, respected or honourable one.”

2023-2024

I’ve been having some conversations about how we can share our work with families outside of a newsletter, so I wanted to share what Salal Place has set up in their yard using the back of a white board.

What they are sharing now is the work they presented at our first Pedagogical Seminar night.

Salal Place: Slowing Down

__________________

Salal Place has been thinking with the question, What conditions
are needed to share perspective on matters of care, concern and curiosity
that demand otherwise of Salal Place? We considered resisting the push to
be somewhere else other than this time. How do we slow in this moment and
stay with the movements and relationships that are underway in Salal? What
happens when we see time as not something to be consumed, but as
something to stay with?

Thank you Salal Place educators!

Hello everyone,

I came across a passage from Deborah Bird Rose (2022), in her last book Shimmer, that might be helpful as many of you continue to draft, refine, re-create ethos statements for your centres. Shimmer focuses on “the majestic worlds of flying fox bats (with wingspans of over 2 meters/6 feet wide!)” [who have persecuted and face extinction after being] declared enemies of settler expansion” in Australia. But the book is equally about love, care, ethics, connectivity, responsibilities, and interspecies mutualism that make life possible – many of the same considerations going into the crafting of your ethos statements.

Writing an ethos statement can be especially difficult if we lose sight of what the word ‘ethos’ means (specifically, within the context of UVic CCS:)). In the most basic of terms, writing an ethos statement involves writing a clear, concise statement about what you – as a team – stand for and what makes your room distinct (commitments, guiding philosophy, approach). It will not be perfect (nothing is). It does not have to encompass EVERYTHING. But it does have to be understandable. Something you can see yourselves in and be able to speak to with families and others who visit your space. Simply put, an ethos statement is ‘aspirational’, something to aspire and point to that describes the pedagogical approach taken within your rooms, as Nina said yesterday in conversation with Crystal in Willow Tree Place. Our ethos statement has to say: “Here we believe (or are committed to)  ______.  And this is how we do it.”

With a focus on bats, love, ethics, life, death, and multispecies worlding, Deborah Bird Rose defines the word ‘ethos’ below.

Ethos: In the context of care, I will be using the term ‘world’ while focusing primarily on individual flying-foxes. The idea that nothing comes without its world defines the term world as a lifeway drawn from the conjunction of body, self and environment, along with the subjectivity that holds it all together. When creatures share their type of body, mode of selfhood, environments and cultures patterns of a biocultural matrix. Such a matrix can be understood as an ‘ethos’ (plural éthea). (Rose, 2022, p. 9)

Bringing this back to what ‘ethos’ means within early childhood education at UVic CCS, we might say…

In the context of child care, we use the word ‘worlding’ while focusing on the way children meet with others (plants, animals, insects, weather, materials, technologies, land forms) within the broader question of what it means to learn to live well together, in each unique centre’s setting. The idea that ‘nothing comes without its world’ defines the term world as a lifeway created through the confluence (entanglement or interdepencies) of bodies, selves, environments, and subjects or citizens who are capable of holding it all together. When children learn to share space through their own types of bodies, modes of selfhood, family and cultural connections, environments – as part of a CCS centre – we can see patterns of each centre’s ‘biocultural matrix’ emerge. For example, “at Cedar Place we value _________, and because of that we do ________ in practice.” Such a matrix – or interweave between educators and children, pedagogy and practice – can be understood as a centre’s ‘ethos in action’.

The term (ethos) comes from old Greek, where it meant things like character or way of life, but also custom, and customary practices and places. Although not widely used today, the term retains a place in anthropology where the focus is on humans: ‘A people’s ethos is the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood; it is the underlying attitude toward themselves and their world that life reflects. An ethos is what makes a group of ‘kind’ distinct, and this distinctiveness takes many different, but interwoven, bio-cultural forms…An ethos is an embodied way of life; a way of reproducing, of forming social groups. It is everything that together constitutes a distinctive ‘way of being’. (my emphasis, Rose, 2022, pp. 9-10)

Best,

Narda

ps

For those interested, here’s a link to short (17 min) podcast for those interested in hearing more on ‘shimmer’ and flying foxes…

Deborah Bird Rose, Shimmer:

https://soundcloud.com/user-965353504/shimmer

You just have to pay attention and then know that you are privileged to have a glimpse of something that takes you to the heart of reality. That’s what shimmer is. And that’s what I want to say multispecies relationships – in their mutualism, in their beauty, in their commitment, in their intergenerational work – offer us. These flashes, these glimpses into a shimmering world because power flows through it. Deborah Bird Rose (in conversation with Thom van Dooren, September 26, 2018 )