-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
You May Also Like
Disturbance
-
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…
-
Encounters with the Bunnies
he group is familiar with the fallen tree trunk that lies on the forest floor. Over the last few months, they have returned to it repeatedly in search of the bunnies, or at least the tracks they leave behind. Some children decide to follow that log again and begin to tell me about that particular day they spotted the bunnies. We walk through the same path they had followed many times before. As we walk along, many narratives unfold; some of them about rabbit tracks and rabbit poop. They wonder why today we do not see any tracks or poop. As we move, they decide to uncover some ice and…
-
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…
-
Encountering the Transformed Forest and the “Lakes” Within
As we left the center for our walk in the forest, we could already see, looking from the distance, it would be a new and transformed forest. The temperatures have risen, a 15 degrees increase since our last forest visit. As we arrived at the slope, our challenge was not to move across the snow but to keep our feet away from the mud as Laura, the educator, requested we keep our steps on the grass. When we got up there, we saw this time we had to choose our way to get into the forest as large puddles covered the usual path. We passed one such puddle in our…
-
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…
-
Paying Attention to the Sounds of Water: A Simple Encounter with a Storm Drain
listening on a simple walk around the parking lot We can’t stop too long in this frigid weather but even a brief listen and look at the run-off drain provokes a range of meanings and possible thoughts. It is loud. We peer down and look and listen. Where is it going? What is down there? What is happening? Are there fish? Where does the ladder go? We discuss this simple, often overlooked feature so prevalent in urban worlds. It prompts us to look at the road and wonder what’s underneath us? A storm drain is an innocuous item yet part of our system of living. It connects surface to soil,…
You May Also Like
Disturbance
-
Tensions and Possibilities in Our Encounters with Charcoal
October 31, 2018 There was much enthusiasm about the possible interactions with paper and charcoal. Charcoal has been used by artists for a very long time, dating back to 15,000 BC. The children at St. John Early Learning Centre are invited to join these long artistic traditions within many cultures around the world. To set the scene and foreground the importance of charcoal as an art material, we placed large pieces of white paper on the floor and offered children thin willow charcoal sticks. In this initial exploration in the classroom, the children begin to understand some of the properties of charcoal. Charcoal is brittle, fragile, and easily breaks when…
