Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Thesis Format

Integrated Article

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Education

Supervisor

Heydon, Rachel

2nd Supervisor

Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica

Affiliation

Western University

Co-Supervisor

Abstract

As a society, we must prepare children for unknown futures—to live well amid the ruinous effects of ongoing human-induced climate change and the growing waste crisis. Given these enormous challenges, early childhood education for the 21st century requires a significant shift in pedagogical and curricular approaches that are both creative enough and receptive enough to meet them. This integrated thesis is based on a project that engages with the problematics that surround educating future generations faced by ecological devastation. I do this by engaging with common worlding pedagogies in early childhood education, in two different classrooms in two different locations. In the first classroom, an educator, young children, and I focused on noticing and responding to the liveliness of seen and unseen more-than-human others that live(d) in the nearby forest we visited regularly. In the second classroom, the researchers, educators, and children focused on plastic waste, and how keeping plastics “in sight and in mind” allowed us to notice plastic’s liveliness. In this dissertation that comprises three articles, I offer complex, creative, and situated pedagogies together with speculative storying of entangled and embodied encounters to rethink the pedagogical and curricular processes that took place. In article 1, I introduce ghosting pedagogies and speculative stories to reveal how stories of the shadowy and mythical disrupted child-centered approaches to early childhood environmental education. In article 2, I describe how inundating an early childhood classroom with excess plastic waste provoked a kind of governance that troubled the roles of educator and child, as well as the very materiality of the classroom. Article 3 stories how plastic’s excess challenged the management approach to waste and created otherwise possibilities for responding to the overwhelming plastics crisis. The research presented in each of the three articles is not intended to provide a prescriptive curricular blueprint for early childhood education but rather to provide context-specific snippets of how common worlding pedagogies offer enduring approaches that respond to the situated messy and damaged common worlds in which children, educators, and more-than-human others live.

Summary for Lay Audience

As a society, we must prepare children for unknown futures—to live well amid the ruinous effects of ongoing human-induced climate change and the growing waste crisis. Given these enormous challenges, early childhood education for the 21st century requires a significant shift in pedagogical and curricular approaches that are both creative enough and receptive enough to meet them. This integrated thesis is based on a project that engages with the problematics that surround educating future generations faced by ecological devastation. I do this by engaging with common worlding pedagogies in early childhood education, in two different classrooms in two different locations. In the first classroom, an educator, young children, and I focused on noticing and responding to the liveliness of seen and unseen more-than-human others that live(d) in the nearby forest we visited regularly. In the second classroom, the researchers, educators, and children focused on plastic waste, and how keeping plastics “in sight and in mind” allowed us to notice plastic’s liveliness. In this dissertation that comprises three articles, I offer complex, creative, and situated pedagogies together with speculative storying of entangled and embodied encounters to rethink the pedagogical and curricular processes that took place. In article 1, I introduce ghosting pedagogies and speculative stories to reveal how stories of the shadowy and mythical disrupted child-centered approaches to early childhood environmental education. In article 2, I describe how inundating an early childhood classroom with excess plastic waste provoked a kind of governance that troubled the roles of educator and child, as well as the very materiality of the classroom. Article 3 stories how plastic’s excess challenged the management approach to waste and created otherwise possibilities for responding to the overwhelming plastics crisis. The research presented in each of the three articles is not intended to provide a prescriptive curricular blueprint for early childhood education but rather to provide context-specific snippets of how common worlding pedagogies offer enduring approaches that respond to the situated messy and damaged common worlds in which children, educators, and more-than-human others live.

Download

Share

COinS