Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism (original) (raw)
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This chapter offers a common worlds approach to unsettling the spaces and places of early childhood education. It draws on ongoing collaborative practitioner/researcher ethnographic research in early childhood education centres in British Columbia, Canada, and Canberra, Australia. As an alternative to the “pure and innocent” nature pedagogies that are so popular in early childhood education, this research is constructing a common worlds pedagogy that responds to children’s entanglement in messy colonialist and ecological relations in the local places they inhabit. To illustrate this unsettling pedagogy, the authors provide a selection of narrative accounts of educators’ and children’s grapplings with (post)colonial encounters with bears and kangaroos in their respective local British Columbia forests and Canberra bushlands.
Early Childhood Education as a Site of Ecocentric Counter-Colonial Endeavour in Aotearoa New Zealand
Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 2012
This article draws upon a range of theoretical domains, first to outline the historical rationale for the urgent changes needed to challenge and transform the dominator culture which has justified exploitation of Indigenous peoples and the resources of the earth. It invites educators to reconsider the narratives that are either consciously or inadvertently promoted in our work, suggesting that we can learn from Indigenous epistemologies in which humans are situated alongside earth others, as respectful, related guardians and caretakers. It finally draws on some examples from a recent qualitative study conducted with ten early childhood centres from across Aotearoa, to illuminate possibilities for enactment of counter-colonial renarrativisation within early childhood settings in service of an ethical project of enhancing relationalities, reconnecting children and their families with the more-than-human world.
Between indigenous and non-indigenous: urban/ nature/child pedagogies
Environmental Education Research, 2017
This co-authored paper offers Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal perspectives on the emergence of urban/nature/child pedagogies in a project to reclaim remnant woodlands. Set in the context of indigenous issues explored in a special edition of the journal on land based education, the paper engages critically with a claim by a group of ecologists, that as urbanisation increases globally indigenous languages and knowledges are being lost in parallel with the loss of species.1 The paper analyses children’s multimodal images and texts in the book, Because Eco-systems Matter, produced as an outcome of the project. In identifying possibilities for alternative storylines to those of loss and moral failure, the paper concludes that pedagogies incorporating contemporary hybrid Aboriginal forms of language and representation offer all children the possibility of re-imagining a traditional past into a contemporary present/future. In this present/future their learning and actions have the potential to name and change their worlds.
Indigenous Experience, Environmental Justice and Settler Colonialism
Environmental justice (EJ) commonly refers to the problem that people of color, Indigenous peoples, women and people with disabilities, among others, are more likely than privileged white populations to live in toxic environments that are bad for human health and community cohesion. The idea underlying this conception of EJ is that justice concerns how the distribution of certain environmental nuisances, such as pollution, or environmentally-related harms, such as asthma in children, burden populations who already face multiple forms of oppression, from structural racism to systemic poverty. Environmental nuisances and harms are treated as so many objects or states of affairs for which social institutions bear responsibility either to distribute equitably or to strive to lessen and, if possible, eliminate. The conception of EJ just outlined covers many important dimensions of the nature of injustice, especially the impact of social institutions on the distribution of environmental quality across different populations. Yet Indigenous peoples’ EJ movements and scholarly work focus on additional dimensions of injustice beyond the responsibility of social institutions for the distribution of nuisances, harms and goods. For many Indigenous peoples, I will argue, injustice also occurs when the social institutions of one society systematically erase certain social-ecological contexts, or horizons, that are vital for members of another society to experience themselves in the world as having responsibilities to other humans, nonhumans and the environment. Injustice, here, involves one society robbing another society of its capacities to experience the world as a place of collective life that its members feel responsible for maintaining into the future. I seek to show how this understanding of environmental injustice is highlighted in theories and research from the domain of Indigenous peoples and settler colonialism. Settler colonialism can be interpreted as a form of environmental injustice that wrongfully interferes with and erases the social-ecological contexts required for Indigenous populations to experience the world as a place infused with responsibilities to humans, nonhumans and ecosystems. Forthcoming in Nature and Experience: Phenomenology and the Environment. Edited by B. Bannon. Rowman & Littlefield.
2015
Unsettling Early Childhood Education No matter how familiar and commonsensical things seem, they never just are and they are never finally settled. This includes the everyday business-as-usual of early childhood education in settler colonial societies. To do unsettling work requires preparedness to be unsettled or disconcerted. It is risky business. It involves asking hard and provocative questions, disturbing complacency, troubling norms and interrogating conventional truths. It involves interrupting the business-as-usual of everyday life and practice. The underlying premise of this edited collection is that in settler colonial societies, the seemingly unremarkable, everyday business-as-usual of early childhood education remains inadvertently (albeit often unknowingly) entangled in the social and ecological legacies of colonialism. The contributors to this book attempt to unravel some of these entanglements in order to expose and respond to these legacies. Their intention is to unsettle the things we take for granted. They do this by applying what Carter refers to as "a postcolonial and reflexive contemporaneity" (2006, p. 684) to everyday educational practices, issues and events that they themselves have
Decoloniality and childhood: colonial heritage and children's relationship with nature
O Social em Questão, 2023
In this article we undertake a reflection on decoloniality based on the relationship between childhood and nature. The study will be guided by key questions on decolonization of educational concepts, contents and practices with children, based on respect for children's knowledge and experiences. It also incorporates experiences and perceptions about nature that foster relationships of reciprocity instead of using nature as commodity. The theoretical and methodological background includes the analysis of concepts about decoloniality and ways of implementing decolonial attitudes. We discuss terminologies and practices in relation to nature that are legacies, in part, of colonial epistemologies. We reflect on the importance of incorporating experiences and perception about nature which promote reciprocal relationships. We illustrate our arguments with various studies and experiences which critique the propositions of hegemonic colonialist approaches.
International Journal of Social Pedagogy, 2017
As a way to implicate ourselves in the politics of teaching child and youth care, we write as witnesses of the world and, in so doing, we make risky attachments by exploring a politically engaged child and youth care education that does not promote insurance, control or detachment. Rather, in this paper we critically locate child and youth care education within the political and economic realities of today’s world. We grapple with the complexities of educating child and youth care practitioners deeply embedded in neoliberal capitalism and settler colonialism, and explore the conceptual shifts that we are experimenting with in our own teaching practices to engage in human service work that responds with care to individual and family need and suffering by engaging with the very structures that perpetuate harm and violence in our society.