Tracks & Tracings
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Playing with playing
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Shadows and Tracings: thinking through poetry
Shadows and Tracings snow reveals tracks tracks reveal possibilities possibilities reveal stories shadowy stories of humans and nonhumans that have crossed time and space wonderings and wanderings moments fleeting what tracks go unnoticed when snow no longer reveals shadowy presence remembering and forgetting stories untold erasing, rooting following, leading, walking, crawling, slithering, running, leaping away from and towards paths converging and pulling apart snow reveals tracks who/what walk(ed) these places? waiting watching listening what might the presence and absence of tracks reveal being neither (a)lone nor lone(ly) Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) reminds us that speculative inquiry “pushes the boundary of acceptable” (p. 73), while Val Plumwood (2002) writes…
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The Avocado Seed
The tiniest of moments happened today and I almost missed it. I was waving goodbye and I’ll see you next time when I noticed the small commotion. The children were sitting in their seats for lunch while their chili was being served. Ryan, the wonderful cook, provided all the necessary toppings: sour cream, shredded cheese and some whole avocado to slice up. Once the avocado was sliced open the children were excited to see the pit, they called it the ‘avocado seed’. It was passed around, so each child had a chance to look at it and observe its special markings. How easy it would have been to just throw…
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Simplicity: Simple and Slow
Thinking a lot about simplicity lately and was inspired to be poetic… Simple. Slow… Static? NO! Everchanging. Ebb and flow. Search for answers. Knowledge grows. Simple. Slow… Static? NO! Transformations. Shifts and change. Thoughts and feelings rearranged. Simple. Slow… Static? NO! Reconstruct, revise, redo. Discover what works best for you. Simple. Slow… Static? NO! Seeing things through different eyes. Understandings realized. Simple. Slow… Static? NO!
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Living on the “edge”: Bridging the gap between inside and outside experiences
As we walk through the forest, we stop every now and then to think about how we can continue to live deeply in our forest experiences when we are not physically there. In our minds and hearts, we search for meaningful experiences and materials that would satisfy our curiosities, nudge at our comforts a little, and maybe even pull at our heartstrings. Passions, connectedness, meaningful, exciting… all the words and concepts make their way into our discussions. I think about what inspires me to come to work each day—what excites me, what drives my curiosities, where I find joy. Some days it’s easier than others to realize these things. Thankfully,…
