ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book investigates the potential for place-attuned pedagogies to expand and unsettle what typically counts as quality in early childhood education. It focuses on the theme of resisting simplistic and colonizing couplings of children and nature. The book considers the generative possibilities of refusing pedagogies-as-usual that naturalize settler colonialism’s extractive structuring. It examines children’s encounters with dead and dying bumblebees in their everyday entangled lives. The book offers imaginings of what it might look like to foreground Black nature–place relations in early childhood education in settler colonial contexts. It discusses the significance of politicizing place relations within children’s inheritances of settler colonial and anti-Black relations amid increasing environmental precarity. The book describes children’s entangled, messy, and geopolitical relations with a mountain on unceded Coast Salish territories in British Columbia.
