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“Surely, this is the hardest work we must do, this work of being willing to think differently.” (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 478)

 

February-March Inquiry Schedule:

Thursday, March 12th

Acorn Place 9:30a.m. - 10:30a.m. 
Cedar Place 10:40a.m. - 11:40a.m.

Friday, March 13th

Sitka Place 9:30a.m. - 10:30a.m.
Juniper Place 10:40a.m. - 11:40a.m.

Tuesday, March 17th

Arbutus Place 9:30a.m. - 10:30a.m.
Salal Place 10:40a.m. - 11:40a.m.

Wednesday, March 18th

Cedar Place 9:30a.m. - 10:30a.m.
Acorn Place 10:40a.m. - 11:40a.m.

Tuesday, March 24th

Juniper Place 9:30a.m. - 10:30a.m.
Sitka Place 10:40a.m. - 11:40a.m.

March 25th

Salal Place 9:30a.m. - 10:30a.m.
Arbutus Place 10:40a.m. - 11:40a.m.

March 31st

Acorn Place 9:30a.m. - 10:30a.m.
Cedar Place 10:40a.m. - 11:40a.m.

Pre-Exhibit Schedule:

Tuesday, February 12th

Sitka Place TBD
Cedar Place 10:40a.m.-11:40a.m.

Tuesday, February 18th

Juniper Place 9:30a.m.- 10:30a.m.
Arbutus Place 10:40a.m. - 11:40a.m.

Wednesday, February 19th

Salal Place 9:30a.m. - 10:30a.m.
Willow Tree Place 10:40a.m. - 11:40a.m.

Monday, February 24th- Friday, March 6, 2020*

Sensorial Becomings: Climate Pedagogies with Children exhibit in the UVic A. Wilfrid Johns Gallery

*Inquiry time will take place in the exhibit during this time.

Call to Participate:

Denise and I would like to invite anyone interested in working in a focused way in the lead up to our exhibit to participate in the process of curation for our exhibit installation on January 28^th.  This will be a small committee (4 educators max) and require the ability to participate in a bit of an intensive burst over the next couple of weeks to:

• brainstorm,
• review documentation, and
• make decisions about which images and text to include in the first ‘incarnation’ of our Sensorial Becomings: Climate Pedagogies  With Children at the Cedar Hill Recreation Gallery.

Let us know by the end of Thursday, January 9th if you are interested in joining us for this part of the exhibit curation process.  We will be emailing more information out to those interested on Friday and be scheduling a time to meet soon after.  Of course, there will be opportunities to engage with the exhibit in other ways down the line but for those of you interested in helping out in this final push in getting it ready for the public, we welcome your input and assistance! 🙂

Traces of our CAN Inquiry documentation will also be on display at the Western University Colloquium exhibit at the end of this month as well as  in the London Children’s Museum in a larger exhibit, along with the other CAN collaboratories.  With so many CAN Collaboratory sites coming together from around the world, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and the CAN Colloquium exhibit organizing committee have created ‘site groupings’ to work together to create ‘collaborative CAN inquiry moments’ for the gallery space there.  Our documentation will be put to work with Weathering Wanderings (Mindy Blaise, Tonya Rooney) and Conversations with Rain (Jo Pollitt, Mindy Blaise, Vanessa Wintoneak) to create a ‘sensing, noticing, breathing, wondering’ moment that highlights trees-rain-weather-walking-with pedagogies.

Nicole Land and her Ryerson University grad students are exploring ways to create a short video of the entire exhibit to share back with us all, including children and families!  We’ll keep you updated on that as things continue to unfold.  Excited to see what happens with our CAN inquiry documentation when it comes together with the others in Ontario!

The Conversations with Rain creative team has also published ‘response journals’ in connection with their project, to engage deeper with the concepts.  These response journals are open-ended and might invite some interesting engagement within our own contexts, which they will be sending our way for you all to see, experiment with, and share with families as well.  Link to the Conversations With Rain state exhibit currently on exhibition in Perth Australia: https://artgallery.wa.gov.au/learn/artist-activation/conversations-with-rain

Look fwd to hearing from those of you who are interested!

Narda

Thanks to everyone who made it out mid-week to join us for a cozy, reflective gathering to hear more about Vanessa’s research in Perth and multiple voices engaging in the room!  Delicious food as well (thx Kim!)  And huge thanks to Vanessa for leading us in a choral reading of Blaise, Rooney & Pollitt’s ‘Weather Wanderings’ and sharing insights and reflections from her ongoing walking-with research in Perth yesterday evening.  Among other things, she challenged us to break with habitual ways of ‘walking to’ and open ourselves up to new considerations by ‘walking-with’:

But look what happens when we take another approach. When we shift our focus. Instead of assuming that children are the protagonists and are the centre of our walks, what happens when we position water and wind as the main players? How might this make room for different kinds of noticings? How might water and wind bring together relations with children, animals, and the world? What kinds of relations emerge?

The Weather Wandering reading (animated by so many lovely voices) offered other considerations:

We think of our walks as wanderings; this means that bodies flow and meander with weather and generate new wanderings.  Weather wanderings expand on Tonya Rooney’s (2018; 2019) weather worlding inquiries with children.  Weather wanderings interfere with the developmental child because they shift our thinking beyond focusing exclusively on the human child body, and what they are learning or sensing, to witness the intermingling of weather with place, animals and plants across time and space. (pp. 166-167)

Notes from educator voices in the room:

Things that stood out from reading/tweaked curiosity for further considerations from educators in the room:

• Connections to the land
• Weathering relationships
• Walking to vs. walking with
• Worlds shaped by care and carelessness
• Slowing down
• We are all weather bodies
• What is a good life?
• Developmentally ‘appropriate’ practices
• Noticing, intending, speculating (see Vanessa’s slides)

We ran out of time to get into the other two stories, but Vanessa has added links in the attached notes for those interested.

Kim stayed extra late putting away food, dishes so I’m not sure where this intention was left, but we chatted about the possibility of leaving some paper and pen out in the staff room for folks to jot down after-thoughts, larval ideas (Nxumalo et. al, 2019) somehow weaving our time together into a CW microblog post.  We welcome any thoughts you may have on this and will keep you updated as progress is made.

Best,

Narda

AGENDA for the Day

• 8:00 – Room Open, Set-up
• 8:30-8:45 – Welcome
• 8:45-9:45 – Jim Forbes Update
• 9:45-10:15 – Ethos and Goals
• 10:15-10:30 – Break
• 10:30-12:00 – Curriculum Making Part 1 – Images we hold and how they shape our work
• 12:00-1:00 – Lunch
• 1:00 – 2:15 – Curriculum Making Part 2 – The ripple effects of project work
• 2:15-2:30 – Break
• 2:30-3:30 – Curriculum Making Part 3 – Pedagogical narrations
• 3:30 – 3:45 – Closing Round
• 3:45 – 4:30 – Ethos and Goals Team Discussions

BEFORE the Pro-D Day on Dec 20^th

A) We invite you to continue to read and think about your Place’s ethos statements. Kim shared an email with an invitation to work with your ethos and have them made into large posters for your Place. There will be some opportunities to consider ethos statements individually and in teams on the 20^th.

B) We invite you to review some quotes from the ELF shared below, read one article (an FYI article is also provided) and some ELF pages on pedagogical narration, watch one video of a keynote address, and listen to one radio program. Below you will find the quotes and resources listed as they connect to different parts of our day. The readings can be found as PDFs in the Resources section of this CCS website.

Curriculum Making Part 1 – Images we hold and how they shape our work

REVIEW – ELF Notes:

• This framework puts forward an image of every child being capable and promotes inclusive pedagogies through discovery and inquiry, as well as through attending to place and history. (p. 28)
• Early care and learning for children aged birth to eight is based on an image of the child as capable and full of potential. All children are celebrated as strong, competent in their uniqueness, and having a secure sense of belonging.Children can experiment, investigate, and inquire in ways that are relevant and meaningful to them. They are provided with opportunities to enrich and deepen their relationships with place, land, and community. Within the contexts of their individual and cultural identities, children are listened to and valued for their ideas and knowledge.Learning and education is envisioned as a continuum as children transition between early care and learning programs, schools, and other services. (p. 12)
• Everyone has images of children and childhood from their cultures, knowledge, personal histories, and aspirations for the future.A person’s images of children reflect their beliefs and ideas about children, as well as ideas about what is possible and desirable for human life at the individual, social, and global level. (p. 15)
• Images of the child and childhood strongly influence how adults engage with children, and what intentions inform the choices they make in all they do with and for children. Engaging with differing views of children and childhood is essential to education in a socially and culturally diverse society. (p. 16)
• The vision of this framework is to generate dialogue in early years settings and beyond about images of children and childhood.This will help create conditions where every child and family can participate and contribute to common or shared worlds. (p. 16)
• Children begin learning from the moment they are born in a continuum that is not linear or universal, but collective and complex. (p. 16)
• Educators collaborate with children and their families as partners in research. This means educators are continually observing, listening, and experimenting with an openness to the unexpected. The role of the educator has shifted away from being a transmitter of knowledge toward being a collaborator who creates conditions so that children can invent, investigate, build theories, and learn. Educators work in relationship with children, and strive to ensure children feel safe, confident, motivated, and listened to. (p. 18)
• Educators foster a curiosity that leads them to seek ways to extend not only children’s learning but also their own.They examine their practices and expectations to consider their biases and expectations and how these may perpetuate racism or prejudices. (p. 18)
• Educators do not see themselves as holding the “right” knowledge of pedagogy and practice. Rather, they are learners as well as educators, continually reflecting. This is not to say that “anything goes” in practice; instead educators make intentional choices inspired by the pedagogical approaches in this framework. (p. 18)

LISTEN [24 minutes]: Taig, J. (2019, February 18). Parenting throughout history could be weird, and downright dangerous. In CBC’s The Current with Anna Maria Tremonti. Retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-february-18-2019-1.5021628/parenting-throughout-history-could-be-weird-and-downright-dangerous-author-1.5021677

FYI READING:

Hodgins, B.D. (2019). Mattering threads, knots and black holes. In Gender and care with young children: A feminist material approach to early childhood education(pp. 58-111). New York, NY: Routledge.

• This is offered For Your Information for those interested to read about the Euro-Western historical threads entangled in our ECE work today. The first part of the chapter (pp. 58-71) focuses on “A Tale of Development”. You might consider looking at this section as a FYI resource, though the other two sections of the chapter, “A Tale of Resistance” and “A Tale of Materialization” may be of interest as well.

Curriculum Making Part 2 – The ripple effects of project work

REVIEW – ELF Notes:

• Living inquiries are rooted in the belief that children learn by doing when they are engaged in projects and inquiries that extend their interests. (p. 65)
• Play is vital to children’s learning, growing, and making meaning. This framework uses many terms related to play, such as “engagement,” “experimentation,” “inquiry,” “building theories,” “participating,” “making meaning,” and “investigating.” By broadening the vocabulary around play, educators may begin to see play in different ways, which in turn can enrich conversations. (p. 24)
• Play is an approach to inquiry, a way to research the world. By providing diverse materials and experiences, educators create spaces for experimentation and transformation. (p. 24)
• Inquiry: a framework that allows educators to think with and to bring focus to pedagogies. An inquiry may emerge for educators while they are paying attention to the theories children build, or when they are working with their own questions, or a combination of both.An inquiry should provoke educators to challenge themselves to see and do differently without having clear answers. It becomes a focal point for discussion among colleagues, parents, and children. Inquiries have no preset outcomes but emerge organically as children and adults think alongside one another. For example, an educator may pose an inquiry question such as, How might I think about time differently? What might emerge if I thought about time as flow, rather than in schedules? (p. 103)

READ: Motegi, N. (2019). Reconciliation as relationship: Exploring Indigenous cultures and perspectives through stories. Journal of Childhood Studies, 44(4), 82-97.

WATCH [50 minutes]: Taylor, A. (2018, April 11). Following and narrating children’s common world relations. Keynote address ECEBC Conference, Vancouver, Canada. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6IW1yyH_1k

• Many of you will know Affrica’s work and will likely remember that we have read (parts of) her book Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. She is one of the co-founders of the Common Worlds Research Collective, along with Mindy Blaise and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw. Leaning particularly on the work of Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, Affrica was integral to the crafting of “common worlds” (as an approach, philosophy, orientation) and with Veronica and Mindy it has grown as a concept for thinking within early childhood. You may have noticed that it’s named regularly within the revised BC Early Learning Framework. Unfortunately, citing Affrica’s work and the work of the Collective as to where this concept comes from was not well done (and in some places not done at all) within the revised ELF. We note it here because we believe it matters who we acknowledge and who we do not, when we acknowledge and when we do not, what we acknowledge and what we do not; what Sarah Ahmed calls the “politics of citation”.

Curriculum Making Part 3 – Pedagogical narrations

REVIEW – ELF Notes:

• Educators can record moments of play using pedagogical narrations to make learning visible, to invite others (colleagues, children, families) to share their perspectives, and to consider different theoretical perspectives. (p. 24)
• Educators can use pedagogical narrations to critically reflect on children’s play and to notice when play is unfair, or when uneven relationships of power or injustices are enacted. (p. 24)
• By paying attention to play, educators can make decisions about further provocations for thinking for both adults and children. (p. 24)

READ [PAGES 51-59]: Government of British Columbia. (2019). BC early learning framework. Retrieved from https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/education-training/early-learning/teach/early-learning-framework

Methods for Speculative Pedagogies - A Research Conversation on 'Walking-with'
Wednesday, December 11, 5:30 - 7p.m.
Location: Bldg A Atrium
Guest Speaker: Vanessa Winoneok, PhD Candidate, Edith Cowan University, Perth Australia, W.A. Australia.

Vanessa is “interested in experimental and creative methodologies [and is] currently developing speculative pedagogies by walking-with Derbarl Yerrigan, educators, and young children in Perth.”  She will present to us  on her ongoing ‘walking-with’ research with Mindy Blaise, educators and children in Perth, Australia.

For those of you who are able to attend, you might find Weather Wanderings (Blaise, Rooney & Pollitt, 2019) valuable to look at prior the session.  It is a 3-page article that is grounded in walking-with weather pedagogies.

We wander: not to watch children progress to the next developmental milestone, nor to see them navigate a weather world where they are at the centre, but, rather, to wonder with unfolding, lively and, sometimes, unruly weathering-with relations. Our weather wanderings
are a type of ‘slowing down’ that Isabelle Stengers (2018) advocates. It renders us attentive (Stengers, 2015), and opens new pathways and possibilities for coming to know the world.

 

Gatherings of/with/in Collectivity Session 1
Tuesday, December 3, 5:30pm-7pm
Location: Harry Lou Poy Bldg Atrium
Potluck (please bring small item for sharing)
Reading/resources: FreshEd podcast #180; Peter Moss (2014) pages 89-91 from chpt excerpt, Sylvia Kind, Collective Improvisations

My image of the educator is similar, ‘rich’ and competent with enormous potential, and active learner co-constructing knowledge in relationship with others, not least children, with the school as ‘a place where adults and children learn together’ (Hoyuelos, 2013, p. 126)…This educator is a reflective practitioner, a theorist and critical thinker, aware that ‘when you do practice, it’s because you have a theory…[and that when you] think, it’s because there’s a practice behind it (ibid, p. 191)…She is also a researcher and experimentor, seeking new understandings, new knowledge, new ideas, these identities manifested in various ways: ‘as a way of thinking of approaching life, of negotiating, of documenting’. (Moss, 2014, p. 89)

What does it meant to de-centre the educator in ECE practice?  How do we do this in a way that honours educators as participants in the process of learning without leading us into the trap of making ourselves disappear in the process of engagement?  Is there a line between engaging children in conversation and imposing our beliefs on them?  

 

Cedar Place has been trying to come together, as a collective, to learn to tell stories together.  New stories.  It began with a discussion about a tree being cut down behind the centre.  The children were intrigued, curious, and affected by the process of the tree coming down.  It was noisy.  It required ropes but little discussion or warning that this was going to happen (my understanding is that workers came and took the tree down quite quickly).  Some of the children retold the story to their parents over many days.

We’ve been thinking with Donna Haraway’s concept of “storytelling for earthly survival”.  Johanna and Diana have been making space for Key to take the lead in storying the life of a tree.  Many trees.  But one in particular that now lives in their centre.  Its life story is unfolding on the wall (with markers and paint) while children sit in a circle to listen and engage.  Some children shout back at Key-tree as she tells stories.  Others sit silently watching.  Some squirm and try to walk away (but not as many as you might think).  Most seem interested to see what is happening.  Some try get up very close to Key-tree to watch her paint.   Some notice who goes in and out of the circle.  These moments of coming together have become somewhat of an event where Key puts on her tree hat and become ‘Key-tree-story-teller’.

Fabrizio Terranova (2016) created a film called ‘Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival’, whose “contributions to feminist studies of science and technology resist and even rebel against hegemonic ways of thinking and living. But what form should such stories take? What might they sound or feel like?”

 

 

It is Donna Haraway’s ideas about “storytelling for earthly survival” that came to mind when Cedar first met with me (Narda) to discussed inquiry ideas for experimenting with ‘collectivity’.  It still does.  I am fascinated by everyone’s openness to keep trying to tell new stories with the children as a collective and the way that the children ‘stick with it’, you all ‘stick with it’ and how much effort everyone is doing to ‘stick with it’ even if there have been uncomfortable moments and moments of not knowing where things are going.

In the film, Donna Haraway talks about what is required to do restorative, collective work in the process of striving to create more livable worlds.  Whatever we decide ‘it’ is (that is, whatever we decide is the focus/problem/issue we need to work on together)…She says:

"The only way to come to grips with 'it'.  To come into the presence of 'it' is to constantly keep doing positive things.  You have to keep trying to make an experiment work.  You have to constantly keep writing this particular story, not some story in general, but this story...The only possible way is to - again and again and again - engage each other in doing something."

Last week’s inquiry time took a turn…

Original intentions to go to the forest were derailed by the wind and parental concerns about safety after a large branch fell in front of a parent’s car (?).  The children were excited to go outside when I arrived, but instead of simply saying no or trying to redirect their attention away from the wind Key, Johanna and Diana decided to ‘stay with the trouble’ of the wind and invite the children to think about why we could not go to the forest.  They met the children’s desire with respect and created the conditions for them to witness the wind and listen to the story it was telling with the trees.

With the wind pushing recycling around the parking lot (part of the story too), we watched huge Douglas fir trees sway as gusts of wind wound their way through with you all on the edge.  “Not today!!” shouted one child.  Another tried to run to collect recycling that was swirling in the parking lot (stopped by Xiao who picked it up with him).

Before we left a chorus of voices shouted encouragement to the trees:

“Hold on!!!!!!”

“Be strooooong!!!!”

“Hold on!!!”

 

We walked back to the centre.  Another tree-Key story emerged.

 

 

This time the story transformed children into hungry frogs, unsuspecting educators and a pedagogist into insect-infested trees, after the tree on the wall grew and changed in the process of the new story being told.  At the end of it all: frogs were fed, trees stopped itching, the tree on the wall grew a thicker trunk with a hole so the owls had a home.  All the while, the wind-story became something other than simply a shutting down or diverting attention story.

Peter Moss mentions ‘the Dark Mountain Project’ in a book that addresses the importance of learning to tell new stories in early childhood education: :

“We believe that the roots of the converging crisis of our times lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves…We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment.  It is through stories that we weave reality.” (Dark Mountain Project, 2009a)

“The Dark Mountain Project is a network of writers, artists and thinkers ‘who have stopped believing the stories our civilization tells itself…[as the world enters] an age of ecological collapse, material contraction and social and political unravelling’.  These once potent stories but now unbelievable stories, they contend:”

Tell us that humanity is separate from all other life and destined to control it; that the ecological and economic crises we face are mere technical glitches; that anything that cannot be measured cannot matter.  But these stories are losing their power.  We see them falling apart before out eyes. (Dark Mountain Project, 2009b)

Reference:

Middleton (2019):

https://culanth.org/fieldsights/storying-otherwise-a-review-of-donna-haraway-story-telling-for-earthly-survival

 

The very notion of common worlds is an active, inclusive, more-than-human one which is borrowed from Latour (2004) but also inspired by Donna Haraway's (2008) generative and collective 'worldings'. More like an aspirational verb than a descriptive noun, common worlding or the commoning of worlds requires a persistent commitment to reaffirm the inextricable entanglement of social and natural worlds-through experimenting with worldly kinds of pedagogical practice. This means pushing past the disciplinary framing of pedagogy as an...exclusively human activity and remaining open to what it might mean to learn collectively with the more-than-human world rather than about it, acknowledging more-than-human agency and paying attention to the mutual affects of human-nonhuman relations." (Taylor, 2017, p.8)

Reference:

Taylor, A. (2017). Beyond stewardship: common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene. Environmental Education Research. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2017.1325452