About us
We research early childhood pedagogies and experiment with pedagogical methods to notice and document what is going on around us.
We are committed to rendering relations between the human and the more than human world (which are too often obscured in educational contexts) visible, audible, comprehensible, even tangible for children. In doing so, we promote a collective, multitudinous engagement with, and appreciation of, the precarious complexity that characterizes the delicate balance of our ecosystem.
Led by Dr. Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, the collaboratory (collaboration + laboratory) is part of the Common Worlds Research Collective, an interdisciplinary network of researchers concerned with our relations with the more-than-human world. Members work across the fields of childhood studies, early childhood education, children’s and more-than-human geographies, environmental education, feminist new materialisms, and Indigenous and environmental humanities.
The collaboratory works as part of the Climate Action Childhood Network, an international collaborative partnership created by members from the Common Worlds Research Collective to generate insights about how young children, early childhood educators, and researchers learn together to engage with a complex array of collective challenges related to climate change
Research Team
Dr. Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw
Veronica is a Professor of Early Childhood Education in the Faculty of Education at Western University in Ontario, Canada, and the co-director of the Pedagogist Network of Ontario and the British Columbia Early Childhood Pedagogies Network. Author/co-author of more than 40 peer reviewed articles, and six books, Veronica co-founded the Common Worlds Research Collective and is currently the principal investigator of the SSHRC Insight Grant Transforming Waste Pedagogies in Early Childhood Education, and the SSHRC Partnership Development Grant Exploring Climate Change Pedagogies with Children.
Adrianne Bacelar de Castro
Adrianne de Castro is a Brazilian educator with years of experience working in elementary and secondary schools in Brazil. Her MA Thesis is inspired by common worlds pedagogies and thinking with, rather than mastering concepts, materials and others of shared worlds. She believes in an approach to early childhood education that is collectivist and inclusive of more-than-humans. Her research is a humble response toward more livable worlds in the present human-modified geological epoch of the Anthropocene.
Maureen is a Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Education, Western University. With MA in Curriculum Studies and RECE designation, Maureen also teaches at Fanshawe College (London, Ontario).
Kelly-Ann MacAlpine
Kelly-Ann’s area of study in early childhood environmental education supports children’s sensitivities to, and relations with more-than-human others in environmentally precarious times. As a member of the Common Worlds Collective, her research focuses on alternative and generative pedagogies that story the particular and peculiar moments between children and the more-than-human. Kelly is most curious about how emerging relations within these everyday encounters stories a different understanding of ethical response(ability) and what it means to live and learn well alongside others.
Sarah Hennessy
Using research-creation methodology, Sarah works at the intersection of early childhood education and the arts to address climate change. Through the creation of a place-based uncommon field guide with children and educators, Sarah imagines interconnected political lives with, not separate from, nature.
Malvika Agarwal
Malvika’s research, catalyzed from resisting the burgeoning visual artifacts within the field of early childhood education research, intents to propose an alternative sensorial re-imagining of early childhood assemblages within the climate action discourse. Through posthuman and new-materialist theories, Malvika is currently engaged with ecological sound art as methodology.
John Drew
John’s research focuses on how animals are situated in literary education. Animal stories are typically filtered through anthropomorphic/allegorical interpretive lenses across all educational levels. John examines the various curricular dimensions informing the paradigmatic pedagogical approaches to animal representations to selected animal themed texts and to propose new possibilities.
Rocio Sara Raeesi Gujani
The sacred, yet, ecological distressed Lands endowed to children and evoked by Anthropocene calls early childhood education to (re)invent, (re)create and (re)respond to it; how might Land pedagogy opens up thresholds of possibility to children and educators to co-create pedagogical ethos ensamblages responsive to Indigenous Land’s reciprocal relations and ontologies in daily pedagogical practice?
Tatiana Zakharova
Tatiana’s research focuses on the entanglement of pedagogy and design (of outdoor spaces for children). In her multidisciplinary work, Tatiana thinks with feminist post-human scholars to trouble the notion of play as a means of progress, and playgrounds as institutionalized spaces devoid of ethical encounters, imagining instead (as Loveless (2019) imagines universities) relationship-attuned ways of inhabiting playgrounds as vibrant locations of worlding and “pedagogical mattering”. Tatiana’s work is a collaborative experimentation, as it wishes to reimagine play/grounding potentialities with educators, children, human and more than human communities.
This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
