Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Degree

Master of Arts

Program

Education

Supervisor

Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica

2nd Supervisor

Heydon, Rachel

Co-Supervisor

Abstract

Foregrounding moments from an early child care centre, this thesis employs a multispecies ethnography methodology to explore the opportunities children from a preschool class have to encounter the more-than-human in the ecological epoch of the Anthropocene. Drawing on a posthuman and common worlds theoretical framework, this thesis works to explore children/more-than-human entanglements that occur in a local, urban cemetery space while challenging practices of human exceptionalism in the field of early childhood education. Participants in the study included one preschool class of 16 three to four-year-old children and the diverse nonhuman residents of the cemetery space. Using a diffractive method of analysis, five data-stories tracing distinct multispecies encounters explore how the radical more-than-human turn is present and impactful at a local level, reshaping approaches to early childhood education in a community in Southern Ontario. This thesis concludes that the children express collective being and thinking within non-innocent, local, multispecies assemblages in unpredictable ways. It is through these complex entanglements children are experimenting with learning to live amid the inescapable relations within their common worlds.

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