Toward Common Worlds Pedagogies in Early Childhood Education: A Response to the Challenges of the Anthropocene
Abstract
In response to the realities of living with global ecological challenges and climate-related risks in the Anthropocene, I draw on the arts of slowing down, noticing, and paying attention to worldly realities in the work of early childhood education as a response to this geological time. Through an inquiry with charcoal and cardboard as part of a common worlding ethnographical project in a childcare centre in London, Ontario, I questioned what it might look like to change the child-centered/humancentric position so prevalent in early childhood education to a more inclusive perspective that includes more-than-humans. As we made this shift I wondered, too, what it might look like to learn with, rather than about, our world. Through my imperfect, experimental path toward a pedagogy of indeterminacy that attunes to onto-epistemologies, I offer a glimpse into how early childhood education might trouble its entrenched humancentric approach.