ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some possibilities for bringing the dialogues into early childhood education with a focus on presencing anti-blackness, including its entanglements with settler colonialism. It examines engaging young Black children with living in a Black Anthropocene needs to include close attention to the particular ways in which anti-Black racism impacts particular environments and more-than-human life therein. The chapter suggests that young Black children, who are inordinately denied access to playful outdoor learning experiences, everyday embodied, experiential, and playful encounters with weather are important. It shows that attunements to the complexities are an important part of creating Black space in environmental education for young children in ways that trouble romanticized notions of nature and child–nature relationships. Brought to North American contexts of early childhood education, idea of inhabiting a Black Anthropocene underlines the necessity to transform pedagogies on ecological challenges in ways that do not ignore their underlying anti-Black and settler colonial formations, while simultaneously imagining decolonial and anti-racist possibilities.
