ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book explores the necessity of politicizing place relations within children’s inheritances of neocolonial relations and ecologically damaged places. It highlights how refiguring presences, as an onto-epistemologically situated approach, might disrupt, destabilize, and subvert taken-for-granted master narratives and settler colonial logics of knowing particular places in environmental education for young children. The book examines need to reconceptualize environmental and place-based education by crafting and enacting a situated methodological and research approach of refiguring presences that brings into conversation, seeks intersections, and highlights tensions between child–educator “natural” place encounters, Indigenous knowledges, and anti-blackness. It shows that the ways in which specific more-than-human others as active witnesses might interrupt obscurances and omissions of settler colonialism and anti-blackness. The book suggests that educators might consider ethical practices as situated “doings,” enacted through specific pedagogies, such as those emerging from situated practices of testifying-witnessing and presencing.
