• Forest Tensions,  Play

    Playing with playing

    Understanding play as a field of messy, uneven relationships suggests a kind of awkward dynamic tactile/imaginary shape that may be hard to capture but is attractive to think with. I imagine playing coming of Barad’s (2015) queer self-birth: “out of chaos and void, tohu v’vohu [tohu vavohu], an echo, a diffracted/differentiating/différancing murmuring, <a…> repetition without sameness” (p. 393). Play is not unknown, but neither is it striving for my definition. It is a relationship that binds bodies, things and moments. It is shaped by us, and shapes us. Play produces materiality and meaning simultaneously. It’s not a means of producing healthier bodies, stronger arms or better social skills. It’s a…

  • Tracks & Tracings

    Walking, Storying, Tracing

    We walk and meet a dead squirrel and a one-footed goose. We add Banana Tree, and traces of stolen bananas. We add their stories and photographs to our map of fabulations. A story of a spider trickles from home or maybe from another classroom. Spider comes to live on the map. We walk, and pumpkin-eaters come back into the classroom with us. We learn that moving with stories requires a particular pace: slower, punctuated by longer pauses to give pencil and hand enough time to move with the character. More layers, papers torn, prints of small running shoes. We walk, tell stories and map them.  If we take seriously Doreen Massey’s…

  • Tracks & Tracings

    Mapping

    This classroom is found of their walks. The two educators and their preschool students walk regularly, several times a week and often twice daily, throughout the neighborhood. In the classroom there is a printout of a satellite map, with a blue path weaving through, marking streets. The map is accompanied by photos of locations known to children: paths, pond, puddle, fallen tree; these fit onto the larger map. All rectangles are plastic-wrapped for longevity.  How might we move, pedagogically, past the regulatory technologies that view place from cosmo-colonial position of a satellite, condensing its depth into a layer of pixels? What materials might we invite to evoke (and to keep) the…

  • Forest Tensions,  Tracks & Tracings

    Muddling the chronology

    Freedom is here not linked to human volition, nor is it allied to internationality or agency. Freedom is instead allied to the in-act, to the decisional force of movement-moving, to the agencement that opens the event to the fullness of its potential. Freedom is how the event expresses its complexity, in the event. Manning, 2016, p.23 The dock in Woodchip Forest offers precisely the kind of vantage point that lends itself to beautiful nature photography. It is also entirely ignored by children, who lay on their bellies at the edge of the dock to poke at the iced-over wooden planks. After a few minutes, the children move from the dock…

  • Tracks & Tracings

    Ghosting Pedagogies

    Anna Tsing (2015) reminds us that there are lives and worlds that somehow persevere within the precarity of capitalist ruins and whose stories need to be heard.  By storying the particular and peculiar as well as the shadowy and the mythical, ghosting pedagogies trouble the anthropocentric notion of dead spaces by pushing past “the deceptive comforts of human exceptionalism” (Haraway, 2016, p. 212). Ghosting pedagogies focus instead on complex entanglements of both the seen and unseen, the living and the dead, the imaginary and the real. It supports the possibility of telling different kinds of lively, vibrant, and precarious stories of living alongside the more-than-human in times of climate change…

  • Markings,  Tracks & Tracings

    Disturbance

    Researchers join educators and children on walks in a nearby urban forest. Toddlers negotiate jackets, snow pants and boots, and then move, as fast as layers of winter clothing would allow, across a sports field. On the other side of a chain-link fence is the forest. The group moves along its edge to a small clearing they’ve come to regard as the entrance. It’s marked with a fallen tree and, on rainy days, a large puddle at the edge of the path. The entrance is different today. Smaller shrubs and trees have been cut down, and a wave of orange markings – bright flags and smears on tree trunks leads…

  • Tracks & Tracings

    From Death Springs Life

    The following piece was inspired by an encounter with a partially fallen tree in our forest. From death springs life. We gather around a large fallen tree- half fallen actually; the top is supported by the limbs of a neighbouring one.  It is suspended at an angle; its root base lifted from the soil and exposed.  The tree is lifeless; no new growth is evident on its upper limbs.  Its greyish hue is washed out, colourless.  The tree is dead. Or is it? We begin to explore this tree with fervour- poking, picking, kicking, scraping, knocking- trying to scare up any sign of life.  Maybe deep down I hope that…

  • Forest Tensions

    Cardboard Marks On The World

    We revisit cardboard in considering how we personally engage with cardboard in the community. Outside of these moments in program what does cardboard look like in our lives? “It comes out every Tuesday to be collected. It’s recycled.” “it comes into my home carrying everything, food, materials, furniture.” “It is a universal shipping material.” “It holds my milk, my eggs, my new TV.” We discussed the complicated, and sometimes troubling nature of cardboard. It led us to ask how we could include community in this dialogue? The constant sounds of development around us remind us that our immediate neighbourhood is changing as new pavements, building and human urban sprawl engulf…

  • Markings

    Noticing With Cardboard and Engaging the Artistry Within

    Today we shared our curiosities around cardboard – questions we’ve considered and continue to think about. We are curious about… How do we construct and deconstruct knowledge with cardboard? What are we learning? What are the children learning? How can we engage or connect the research with the community? What happens when we stop verbal communication in the classroom? What drew us to the silence? Is the cardboard still valuable to us when it is falling apart, broken, tattered? What do we shy away from the “less strong” cardboard? How do we connect our experiences with cardboard to the forest or vice versa? We are noticing… We are paying more…

  • Forest Tensions

    Witnesses to a Diminished Forest

    During the transitory space between winter and spring, we (two educators and myself), wandered toward the forest with a small group of seven children, only to realize that the forest had been disconcertingly diminished, seemingly overnight. Slowly the realization of the destruction of a patch of trees dawned on the children as they starred quizzically at the barren space of filled with only jagged stumps where the tall trees once stood. Many of the children moved around to examine the tree stumps seemingly awestruck by this radical transformation of a once familiar space. There were questions of where the trees went and what happened to them. It was quickly understood…