ABSTRACT
Drawing on data from a multi-jurisdictional, participatory research project with children and educators, this chapter resituates prevailing early childhood education frameworks for sustainability (ECEfS) within a common worlds orientation to argue in favor of curriculum and pedagogy as lively, contingent, more-than-human entanglements. It is an exploratory attempt to engage unruly voices—those voices not so readily ruled, disciplined or managed—as guides in creating educational frameworks capable of promoting understandings of interspecies inseparability and vulnerability, rather than human supremacy, as critical for the twenty-first century. Sharing moments from practice as provocations for reimagining how we might live climate change pedagogies, it foregrounds speculative feminist theory, Indigenous knowledges, and children’s unique perspectives about the worlds they already inhabit with multiple others. With a particular focus on child–tree relations, the authors join others concerned with the double-blind of human exceptionalism and colonial management paradigms to attend to gaps in understanding children’s dynamic relations with, and creative responses to, trees and other creatures on Lkwungen territory, otherwise known as Victoria, British Columbia, on the West Coast of Canada. Further studies about outdoor early childhood education programs are shared in Chapters 11 and 16 of this volume.
