Jane Merewether

Soil is crucial for earthly ongoingness, yet it is frequently overlooked or ignored by humans. This presentation will share early insights from a participatory research project exploring child-soil relations in Perth, Western Australia that is informed by the philosophy and practices of the educational project of Reggio Emilia. The study seeks to cultivate attentiveness to soil through aesthetic and speculative encounters where soil becomes an ecological imaginary for attuning to the inextricable connectedness of the world. The project is grounded in the idea that if we are to care for soil we need first need to notice it. It is hoped insights from this research will help to nourish pedagogical terrains for children and teachers in troubled times.

Drawing on several research projects that have deployed understandings of what is sometimes called ‘pedagogical documentation’ as conceptualised and practised by the educational project of Reggio Emilia, the presentation will illuminate how the doings of documentation can provoke particular ethical considerations which have social and environmental implications. Understanding documentation as performative can alert educators to what it and the tools of documentation might produce beyond human intentions, and open them up to more-than-human relations within research and educational assemblages.

Our alternative format is an interactive campfire storytelling of documentation’s doings. We set the scene as a virtual campfire with Jo, Jane and Amélie welcoming our audience to sit in a circle under an imagined starry sky. We share our experimentations with posthuman, feminist new materialisms and common worlding research inquiries and how we put them to work through and with documentation practices in three international settings (UK, Australia, Canada). As academics involved in practitioner education, we consider what we can do with documentation’s doings to illuminate urgent issues related to inequalities with our students along with our subjects and objects of research. Documentation and pedagogical documentation through written narration and imagery is common practice in education and has multiple functions including making learning processes visible. Documentation practices bring a richness of thinking with the material turn and we find our research enquiries full of lively potentialities. Yet, our methodological framing is in continual motion, as each enquiry brings fresh opportunities for experimentation and carries both risk and discomfort through ever changing efforts in reinvention. We apply these considerations to our respective areas of inquiry: 1) early childhood education, 2) post-anthropocentric pedagogies, and 3) reading and literature pedagogy. Each campfire story under the stars will share a sample of documentation from our data generation as a prompt for thinking. Our documentation stories have the characters of children and educators but also take seriously their relation to the more-than-human world. After our stories we share our challenges and questions about what documentation can do but also what we can do with documentation to amplify marginalised voices in our professional roles as practitioner educators, including a wider conceptualisation of voice that attends to the more-than-human with a commitment to feminist, ethical, political and environmental agendas. At the end of our storytelling, we extend an invitation to our audience to contribute their own campfire storytelling of listening to marginalised voices from their human and more-than-human worlds. We will virtually capture these fragments to build a virtual story book that can live beyond the life of the conference.

Pre-recorded presentation link: https://youtu.be/EsCkflF-RLIThe Earth is amidst an acceleration of extinction events caused by ecological destruction and human-induced climate crisis. Extinction is a part of Australian children’s everyday lives and futures and therefore warrants their learning. This presentation reports on a research project in which young children visited a local site of an unfolding extinction event: Noorook Yalgorup-Lake Clifton and its endangered thrombolites in south-western Australia. Adopting the biocultural view of extinction outlined by the emerging field of Extinction Studies and the related field of Multi-species Studies, this environmental humanities project implicated children in the unravelling of biocultural intergenerational inter-generativity. Our emphasis was on children learning ‘with’ extinction and ‘with’ the world rather than learning ‘about’ extinction and ‘about’ the world, the latter representing the objectifying discourse of knowing as mastery. In this presentation, we speak about: the thrombolites and their ecological community; the ‘curious practice’ approach taken in the study (as described by Donna Haraway); the visits of the researchers and children; and the possibilities for post-Anthropocene pedagogies that cultivate ethical and responsible relations with the nonhuman world.

In this presentation, Dr Stefania Giamminuti and Dr Jane Merewether convey insights into the meaning and role of the atelier in the pedagogical and cultural experience of the world-renowned municipal infant-toddler centres and schools of the city of Reggio Emilia in Italy. They outline the atelier’s potential impact on transforming teacher professional learning by sharing a recent research project, a collaboration between academic researchers and a dedicated team of teacher researchers who work with children in a variety of settings from play groups to long day care to government and independent primary school settings. This co-participated research project, the Digital Investigations Atelier, culminated in an installation hosted at Curtin University in Western Australia in July 2019 as part of the REAIE Biennial Conference.

This presentation illuminates: the varied voices of members of the research team discussing the ‘theatrical’ collaborative experience of creating the atelier; the process of installation of this experimental space and its emphasis on alliances, exchange and dialogue between teachers and academics; visitors’ perceptions of their experience interacting in the digital atelier; and the potential of ateliers for bringing experimentation into the realm of the everyday in early childhood settings. We propose that with the aid of experimentation, invention, aesthetics, and professional alliances, early childhood education can be re-made in respect of democratic values and imaginative practices.