Jane Merewether

This article explores young children’s relations with soil, drawing on research that positioned soil as animate, lively and interconnected. The paper investigates how animist approaches offered a mode of encounter for children and their teachers, encouraging them to see themselves as part of a larger ecological community. The research began with a “soil biome immersion” experience where teachers engaged with soil through sensory and arts-based experiences. These initial encounters led to further exploration of child-soil relations through experiential learning and storytelling. Children, as active meaning-makers, co-constructed the inquiry through imaginative and sensory engagements. Findings suggest animism cultivates soil relations, challenging traditional notions of soil as inert and promoting a dynamic understanding of soil ecosystems. Through practices such as storying, drawing and listening, educators supported children’s animist perspectives, deepening their attunement to the more-than-human world. This article contributes to environmental education by demonstrating how animism can enrich children’s ecological awareness and their sense of connectedness to the world.

As the extent of planetary unraveling becomes increasingly apparent, scholars are beginning to document responses to the loss of ecological systems, mass extinctions, and climate change. However, there are few studies documenting children’s eco-anxiety responses. In this study, children’s eco-anxiety and grief became apparent when they expressed dismay at the imminent demolition of a derelict building. Children were concerned for the fate of the building, the land on which it stood, and the myriad others it sheltered. Using participatory and creative methodologies including dance, this project worked with children to tell a more-than-human story of becoming-with children-building-weeds-graffiti-dust-researchers-unhoused-bacteria-rats-and unloved others, which culminated in a video work. In this article Butler’s concept of “grievability” is extended to include those not typically thought to be “grievable.” The article concludes with a discussion about how dance improvisation allowed children to express feelings of loss and move through their eco-anxiety and grief.

This essay invites readers to consider new ways of approaching ecological decline and species extinction pedagogically. We document five visits to the Lake Clifton-Yalgorup Noorook thrombolites by researchers and 51 two-to twelve-year old children and their caregivers. Taking a ‘curious practice’ approach, the children storied themselves into the lives of the thrombolites through conversation, drawing, taking photos and speculating. We suggest that holding open space for children to story themselves into the world of the thrombolites cultivates the ability to respond to ecologically precarious worlds.

This article engages with discard studies scholarship to interrogate findings from a study that set out to deliberately follow wastepaper in an early childhood setting. The study, which used participatory methods positioning teachers and children as research partners, began with purposeful noticing and attunement to paper's movements and materiality. This attentiveness defamiliarized paper and the ways in which it is known and experienced. It led to questions about the wider systems in which paper is entangled. In this article, thinking with discard studies provokes us to consider the relational systems that involve paper in early learning settings and leads us to question the reduce-reuse-recycle maxim which allows some systems to flourish by diverting attention away from them. The article concludes by suggesting that if we are to discard well, we must become aware of systems that are maintained by taken-for-granted waste practices such as reducing, reusing, and recycling.

Jean Piaget, whose work continues to be very influential in early childhood education, associated young children's animism with their 'primitive thought' claiming children remain animists until they reach a more advanced and rational stage of development. This article proposes a rethinking of the Piagetian view of animism, suggesting instead that children's animism be conceived as a 'matter of care' which may then offer possibilities for living more responsively and attentively with non human others. Drawing on two recent research projects involving two-to-eight-year-old children, the article contends that children's playful and speculative 'enchanted animism' can create a spaces for curiosity, wonder and immersion in and of the world. The author argues that enchanted animism has the potential to open children to their worldly embeddedness and can ignite possibilities for more responsive and attentive ways of living with an increasingly damaged Earth.

This paper explores how 'caring collaboratories' advance new possibilities for imagining and enlivening early childhood education and research. Thinking with María Puig de la Bellacasa's (2017) feminist materialist theory of care the authors bring a retrospective analysis to their research experiences within three different climate change focused collaboratories. The paper begins with an overview of their research sites, anlaysis method for this paper, and common worlds orientation. This is followed by a brief introduction to Puig de la Bellacasa's conceptualization of care and an offering of three research stories to examine what carrying her triptych of care into the collaboratory proposes to researchers and educators committed to human and more-than-human living well together. The paper concludes with speculative considerations for what such caring collaboratories might offer childhood studies with/in the conditions of our times.

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.

This article explores how pedagogical documentation, as the refusal of method, can be aligned with post qualitative inquiry, opening up possibilities for refuting dogmas and methods in early childhood pedagogy, theory, practice, and research. It delineates understandings of pedagogical documentation in the educational project of Reggio Emilia, and describes dogmatic (or unthought) practices which influence perceptions and uses of pedagogical documentation elsewhere: the dogma of children's interests; the dogma of implementation; and the dogma of method. The article draws on the experience of a collective of academic-researchers and teacher-researchers working with pedagogical documentation in the context of an investigation into children's relations with waste. Excerpts from interviews illuminate 'voices troubling dogmas', proposing an invitation to move forward from dogmas to imagining our collective obligations. Pedagogical documentation is thus conceived as a catalyst for helping us think collectively with the hope of making the dogmatic impossible.