Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Affrica Taylor, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Affrica Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317675105
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education uncovers and interrogates some of the inherent colonialist tensions that are rarely acknowledged and often unwittingly rehearsed within contemporary early childhood education. Through building upon the prior postcolonial interventions of prominent early childhood scholars, Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education reveals how early childhood education is implicated in the colonialist project of predominantly immigrant (post)colonial settler societies. By politicizing the silences around these specifically settler colonialist tensions, it seeks to further unsettle the innocence presumptions of early childhood education and to offer some decolonizing strategies for early childhood practitioners and scholars. Grounding their inquiries in early childhood education, the authors variously engage with postcolonial theory, place theory, feminist philosophy, the ecological humanities and indigenous onto-epistemologies.

SECTION 1

Unsettling Places

1

FOREST STORIES

Restorying Encounters with “Natural” Places in Early Childhood Education

Fikile Nxumalo

We often walk to the forest close by to the child care center with the children. Each encounter with the forest invites different curiosities – hollowed out tree stumps … shiny green moss clinging to the trees and tree stumps … mushrooms … sticks … looking down to the ocean inlet and across it to snow-capped mountains, salmonberries in the summer, fallen leaves in the fall – these are just some of the “things” that might come together to create particular wonderings and curiosities in encounters with this place. One morning, before our walk, the educator tells the children “Today, we will use our senses to discover the forest”, and asks them, “What will we hear? What will we see? What will we touch? What will we discover today?” The children answer: “lions”; “bears”; “tigers”; “trees and clouds”; “flowers, sticks and berries”.

Recent work in childhood studies has considered the inherent vibrancy of place as part of human and more-than-human relations filled with tensions and contested belongings (Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2012; Taylor, 2013; Taylor and Giugni, 2012). This body of work has used post-human and post-colonial theorizations to foreground the anthropocentric viewpoints that underpin the linking of the innocent child and “pure” nature in early childhood education. Inspired by this work, I seek to unsettle taken for granted familiarities of nature as a site to enhance children’s learning experiences (Taylor, 2013). This is a pertinent area of inquiry, given the current high interest in nature early childhood pedagogies in British Columbia (BC), Canada, where my work is located. Recent calls for children to spend time in nature are marked by several normative assumptions and omissions. For instance, past–present colonial histories, assumptions of nature–culture separation, discourses of childhood innocence, privileging of a “scientific” approach to nature education, and classed and racialized assumptions of what constitutes “normal” childhood experiences of nature remain, for the most part, unquestioned (see Dickinson, 2013; Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2013; Taylor, 2013, for work that engages critically with some of these gaps in nature education). As the opening story illustrates, unquestioned assumptions of nature education are apparent in easy moves to representations of a static nature in everyday pedagogies and conceptualizations of nature as separate from children and simply awaiting their discoveries.

In this chapter, my specific focus is on our (myself, children, and educators) everyday encounters with particular things (the forest trail, tree stumps, and tree hollows) in a specific socially, materially, and historically situated mountain forest. An intrinsic part of situating this place is attending to the ever-present threads of empire (Tsing, 2012). The mountain forest that early childhood educators, children, and I visit lies on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, Stó:lō, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations territories (Squamish Nation, 2008; Tsleil-Waututh Nation, 2013; Musquem Band, 2011; Stó:lō Nation, 2009). Settler colonial conditions in what is now Canada are ongoing and include material and discursive erasures, as well as dispossessions, displacements, and appropriations that shape everyday relations, often in taken for granted ways by the dominant settler society (Barker, 2009). These erasures and displacements include the underpinning of understandings and encounters with nature, where dominant tropes of BC’s untouched wild landscapes are intimately entangled with ongoing colonial legacies (Braun, 2002; Oliver, 2010). Settler colonialism is deeply entangled within taken for granted banalities of everyday early childhood nature pedagogies in BC (Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2013). At the same time, colonialisms are shifting, malleable, and articulated differently in different places at different times – often in contradictory and contingent ways (Alfred and Corntassel, 2005; Kothari and Wilkinson, 2010). Colonialisms have been and continue to be enacted through “greatly varied forms of engagement and encounter, political purposes, local complexities and distinct geographies” (Kothari and Wilkinson, 2010, p. 1398). Colonialism is implicated in ruptures to Indigenous relationalities with place. Colonial encounters imposed hierarchical humanisms; racializing and dichotomizing the human/non-human, wild nature/civilized culture, and placing the colonized along a linear trajectory to “civility” and “humanity”, albeit with contextually contingent intents, effects, and affects in differently situated colonial encounters (Anderson, 2007). In this way, colonial authority attempts to bind the colonized within the “limits of their presupposed ontological difference” (Mbembe, 2002, p. 246), figured in hierarchical order to the colonizers.

I inhabit the forest encounters described herein as non-innocent “everyday worldings that matter in many ways beyond their status as representations” (Stewart, 2012, p. 519). I consider how restorying (Cameron, 2011) this particular place and the “things” in it, through material-discursive relations (Barad, 2007) and Indigenous relationalities, might be a productive move towards refiguring presences and countering the “continual colonial mapping and erasing of Indigenous presence” (Simpson, 2011, p. 96) in encounters with so-called “natural places”. Refiguring presences is inspired by Anishinaabe scholar Leanne Simpson’s (2011) call for presencing as anti-colonial acts by Indigenous peoples through which reconnections are created with colonized places in multiple ways, including stories that presence Indigenous relationships within occupied territories. Refiguring presences through stories seeks to create interruptive effects to normative assumptions of place, and to create openings towards engaging in politicized dialogues with places such as the mountain forest we (the educators and I) visit with the children. I use the concept refiguring to highlight that these are active acts of resistance that are not simply about making present that which is absent – these relationalities are “always already” there despite the erasures manifested through colonial worldings (Spivak, 1990). Refiguring gestures towards rethinking and relating differently to absent presences and the normative practices and taken for granted understandings therein. These relationalities include a consideration of not only the more-than-human – including matter, relations, meanings, and understandings – but also the wider historical geopolitics within which the more-than-human is located and entangled, most notably settler colonialism.

My intent, then, is to center refiguring presences as an anti-colonial practice aimed at provoking educators’ attention towards the “things”, practices, relations, historical, and social forces through which nature is enacted (Braun, 2002; Instone, 2004). By attending to colonial erasures, I am interested in relating differently to the question of “whose stories come to matter” (van Dooren and Rose, 2012, p. 3) in the making of this particular forest that we visit with the children. The stories I choose to tell are deliberate interruptions to (the seemingly) innocent stories of early childhood places and nature pedagogies within a settler location. What disparate gatherings might be enacted through material and figurative encounters with this forest and its particularities? What connections might be made with colonial imaginaries (Said, 1978) of other forests in BC? What possibilities might emerge for troubling the “social and spatial, material and discursive” (Instone, 2010a, p. 360) boundaries and borders enacted through nature as benign site for “discovery”? What anti-colonial possibilities might emerge from stories that unsettle “dualistic constructions and hierarchical relations with the natural world” (Instone, 1998, p. 457)? What might inhabiting the historical politics of this particular place do (Instone, 2010a, b)? With these questions, as with other questions I ask throughout the chapter, I do not necessarily provide answers, but rather pose them as invitations to early childhood educators to engage with an ethics of “responsive attentiveness” (Rose, 2004, p. 5) to everyday encounters and the complexities, relationalities, and tensions that they bring into view.

I began this chapter by locating my work within BC as a place in which representations of nature are intimately connected with ongoing colonialisms. I then introduced refiguring presences as a form of responsive, accountable attention that makes visible and creates interruptions to connections to colonialisms in everyday nature encounters that might otherwise remain unnoticed. I explored how refiguring presences might be useful as relational, situated, and non-innocent storying practices that unsettle taken for granted ways of seeing and provoke different ways of relating to everyday encounters with the forest. For the remainder of the chapter, I enact a series of interruptive stories of forest encounters. I put refiguring presences to work through the non-innocent tales of “walking the forest trail”, “lingering at tree stumps”, and “touching tree hollows”. I consider how interruptive stories, such as these, which attend to the inherent vibrancies, tensions, and contestations of place, might be put to work as an anti-colonial practice.

Forest encounters

[F]or every one of your questions there is a story hidden in the skin of the forest.

Simpson, 2013, p. 132

The stories I tell of my encounters with the forest with children and educators emerged from my work with three child care centers located atop a mountain and surrounded by a forest. I worked as a pedagogical facilitator, supporting educators in their pedagogical practices. The forest encounters took place at different times during the academic year. I have selected particular moments that spoke to me, troubled me, and left me with questions about what remained invisible. I want to note here that I am intimately implicated and entangled in these pedagogical encounters; I situate myself alongside the educators as a non-innocent participant in these practices. My primary interest in this chapter is in complicating and interrupting these enactments of nature and children in nature, as well as in what refiguring more-than-human (Whatmore, 2006) and Indigenous presences might provide towards anti-colonial pedagogical possibilities in encounters with the forest. In other words, my intent is not to critique educators but to unsettle this mountain forest as simply a place for children’s real and imaginary discoveries.

I experiment with “modes of inquiry and analysis that do not diminish the significance of the very stuff of the more-than-human world” (Alaimo, 2010, p. 73), while simultaneously attending to material and discursive neo-colonial relations and presences within the geopolitical context of what is now BC. Throughout the chapter, I write about the settler colonial histories that are ever-present in the opening story by attending to how they are enacted through the idea of the wild and empty lands and discourses of protecting nature, while simultaneously undergoing erasure by the same imaginaries of a wild and empty forest awaiting discovery and protection (Cattelino, 2011; Willems-Braun, 1997).

Following Haraway (2008), I explore how knowledge-making, through foregrounding more-than-human worlds, might bring into view multiple stories of this particular situated mountain forest; stories that act towards relational and anti-colonial nature early childhood pedagogies. I am interested in the anti-colonial possibilities of restorying (Cameron, 2011) a particular so-called natural place and the human/more-than-human relations therein. I wish to put restorying place to work through stories of relationalities that create interferences (Haraway, 1992) in images of innocence in children’s relations with nature within the specific settler colonial context of BC. I attempt to refigure the multiple presences, tensions, and complexities that are always already entangled prior to and within these encounters.

It is important to emphasize here that foregrounding Indigenous presences through stories and histories of place cannot alone dismantle structural and systemic colonial and racial formations nor “the ‘educated ignorance’ enabled by hegemonic narratives” (Cameron, 2012, p. 190). Drawing inspiration from Indigenous knowledges as a non-Indigenous immigrant settler¹ also brings with it the serious problematics of representation, and appropriation – as disguised “settler moves to innocence” (Tuck and Yang, 2012, p. 1). For instance, the printed sources of the stories that I present (rather than consulting directly with First Nations communities) could be read as Western representations and romanticizations of Indigenous oral story-telling cultures. Furthermore, as Carlson (2009) notes, “Indigenous knowledge, as Skagitt Coast Salish Elder Vi Hilbert so often and forcefully reminded people, cannot be learned from a book. It can only be learned through long-term face-to-face human interaction” (p. 11). This work does not transcend nor neatly resolve these issues and the messy colonial relations in which I am immersed and implicated. I tell these stories to bring educators’ attention to taken for granted silences and erasures in everyday early childhood pedagogies in settler colonial spaces.

Walking the forest trail

The child care centers are built atop a mountain and are one part of several building developments surrounded by close to 600 hectares of second-growth forest that is inhabited by black bears, cougars, deer, coyote, and many other animal and plant species (City of Burnaby, 2013a). The mountain is named for a prominent settler who surveyed the area for colonial settlement and economic pursuits on behalf of the British Empire (Wolfenden, 2000). The “untouched”, “wild”, and “pristine” nature of this mountain forest is a common narrative used in its description. A brochure I came across on the city’s website reads: “As you reach the top, pause for a breath and consider how the preservation of this environment ensures that generations to come will enjoy and appreciate our natural heritage” (City of Burnaby, 201...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Introduction: Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education in Settler Colonial Societies Affrica Taylor and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw
• SECTION 1 Unsettling Places
• SECTION 2 Unsettling Spaces
• SECTION 3 Unsettling Indigenous/Settler Relations
• Notes on the Contributors
• Index