ABSTRACT

This book draws attention to the urgent need for early childhood education to critically encounter and pedagogically respond to the entanglements of environmentally damaged places, anti-blackness, and settler colonial legacies. Drawing from the author’s multi-year participatory action research with educators and children in suburban settings, the book highlights Indigenous presences and land relations within ongoing settler colonialism as necessary, yet often ignored, aspects of environmental education. Chapters discuss topics such as: geotheorizing in a capitalist society, absences of Black place relations, and unsettling unquestioned Western assumptions about nature education. Rather than offer prescriptive solutions, this book works to broaden possibilities and bolster the conversation among teachers and scholars concerned with early years environmental education.

chapter 1|22 pages

Situating Orientations

chapter 2|15 pages

Storying Practices of Witnessing

Refiguring Quality in Everyday Encounters

chapter 3|16 pages

Refiguring Presences

chapter 4|17 pages

Unsettling Forest Encounters

chapter 5|18 pages

Restorying Garden Relations

chapter 6|14 pages

Geotheorizing Place Relations

chapter 7|13 pages

Living with Bee Death

chapter 8|16 pages

Inhabiting a Black Anthropocene

chapter |3 pages

Moving Forward

Toward Decolonial Place Encounters in Early Childhood Education