Our lives depend on worms and ants

Article

 Taylor, A. & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2015). Learning with children, ants, and worms in the Anthropocene: towards a common world pedagogy of multispecies vulnerability. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, May 2015, DOI: 10.1080/14681366.2015.1039050

"our human lives are totally dependent on the lives of other, much smaller, often overlooked, and sometimes invisible creatures, such as worms and ants" (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015). 

- "to decentre the human as the sole learning subject and explore the possibilities of interspecies learning" 
- from individual, child-centered pedagogies to collective learnings
- Bruno Latour  -distribute or collected agencies
- learning emerges from the relations taking place between all actors - human and more-than-human
- perspectives: feminist environmental humanities
- pedagogical affordances of our relationships with species
- learn with, rather than about, other animals
- interspecies and intergenerational injustice
- take this opportunity (of chaos!) to implement transformative opportunities from the very early years - radically imagining what it means to be human

 3 key interventions in ECEC:
1. reimagine our agency and place in the world, learn from other species
2. re-situate humans within ecological systems --> explore how our lives are entangled to others
3. develop multi-species ethics (cockroaches included!)

- beyond nature vs culture
- children to sense (not just cognitively but bodily) that it is never only about us
- methodology: multispecies ethnographies  
"paying attention not only to what the children are saying and doing, not only to how the children’s bodies are being moved, affected and enlivened by the animals they encounter, but also paying attention to the movements and actions of the worms, ants, water, rain boots, fingers, sticks, rocks, mud, pebbles and dust." 

"humans are not the only ones exercising agency and not the only animals noticing, observing, acting, knowing, affecting and being affected"MULTISPECIES PEDAGOGIES

 - interspecies reciprocities and co-shapings




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