Iris Duhn

Making ‘place’ for ecological sustainability in early childhood education

Culturally, childhood is often understood as a time of innocence which can mean that issues such as ecological sustainability are considered too problematic for early childhood practice. By drawing on findings from a research project that focused on issues of ecological sustainability in early childhood centres in New Zealand from Western and indigenous perspectives, this article contributes a critical perspective of ecological sustainability as an educational issue in early childhood education (ECE). The article falls into two parts: the first section gives an overview of some of the conceptual and theoretical issues that underpin critical perspectives of childhood, and provides a context for current global ECE discourse, while the second section introduces the research project and discusses the intersections of ‘local’ and ‘global’ in light of teachers’ emerging ‘pedagogies of place’. The intent is to demonstrate that critical engagement with such complex global issues as ecological sustainability generates spaces for new understandings of how ECE can contribute to theory and practice of education for sustainability.

The Making of Global Citizens: Traces of Cosmopolitanism in the New Zealand Early Childhood Curriculum, Te Whāriki

The first New Zealand early childhood curriculum framework, Te Whāriki, was published in 1996. Te Whāriki presents quality in early childhood education as productive of a particular type of child. In this article the author argues that Te Whāriki is not about ‘best practice’ but about producing the ideal child. This child emerged at a time when New Zealand was deeply entangled in neo-liberal visions of globalisation. The type of child embedded in New Zealands early childhood curriculum has the potential to affirm neo-liberal visions of the future global subject.

Making agency matter: rethinking infant and toddler agency in educational discourse

This article engages critically with the concept of agency in infant and toddler educational discourse. It is argued that agency, when conceptualised with emphasis on individuality and the autonomous self, poses a conceptual ‘dead end’ for those who are not-yet-in-language, such as babies and toddlers. In considering agency as an aspect of becoming that is inherent in all matter, the article seeks to explore new pathways for conceptualising agency in infant and toddler education. Methodologically, the article aims to generate complex questions and, following Nigel Thrifts call, ‘wild ideas’, rather than solutions by addressing the relationship between discourse and matter to open up new spaces for thinking and doing ‘agency’ in education, for babies and toddlers and beyond.

Cosmopolitics of Place: Towards Urban Multispecies Living in Precarious Times

The chapter considers place-making as cosmopolitical issues in urban environments. An emerging emphasis on the ethics and politics of sharing spaces with others, including other species, in a globalised world, with finite resources, requires a re-thinking of what place is, and who and what makes places. Much of the work on place in education focuses on ‘place-based’ learning which takes the local as its site of enquiry. I suggest to conceptualise place as a complex and messy network, loosely bound by (local) histories, politics, and cultures as well as by (global) mobilities, flows, and uneasy alliances. The chapter introduces a Berlin multispecies art project to suggest that imagining place-making as an open-ended practice which involves a commitment to cosmopolitics may well generate new possibilities for living sustainably, especially in urban multispecies environments.

Imagining otherwise: A (brief) Darwinian encounter with quality standards

The prevailing discourse of quality in early childhood education in Australia and internationally supports the idea that everyone, from families to educators, policymakers, researchers and politicians, wants high-quality early childhood education programs for all young children. This dominance is so pervasive that it becomes difficult to think about quality in any other terms, putting limitations on ‘what it is possible to think’ when it comes to quality early childhood education. In an attempt to suspend the habitual and contested assumptions associated with the mission for quality, this article aims to move beyond what these discourses make it possible to think and imagine by traversing some of the territory as it exists currently in Australia. As part of this, we adopt an exploratory approach where we try and imagine otherwise. We do this by presenting a vignette, a rich description of a child/pipe/sand event, which we work through using the National Quality Standard in Australia and a brief Darwinian encounter. The intention is to use what is familiar (observation, quality measurement) and make the familiar less familiar in order to create niches for variations and alternative imaginings of ‘quality’.

Troubling the intersections of urban/nature/childhood in environmental education

Abstract This collection examines why urban environments are key sites for reimagining and reconfiguring human-nature encounters in times and spaces of planetary crisis. Cities constitute powerful and troubling spaces for human-nature intersections. They typically represent the effects of human dominance over nature: humans in control, taming and managing the wildness of ‘nature’ by domesticating it. Children existing in these mostly adult designed and orchestrated creations are often ignored as city dwellers, along with animals who increasingly migrate into urban areas. Yet cities are also sites of innovation and ‘greening’, of critical democracy and renewal, with the most innovative cities including those where children co-create urban environments, and where animals and plants are valued as co-city dwellers. As this collection shows, troubling and reimagining these sites for diverse forms and ways of living, including of encounter with the other, and thus what can be learnt and taught through urban nature childhoods, is one possible pathway for working out different modes of being human with the earth.

Supporting multidisciplinary networks through relationality and a critical sense of belonging: three ‘gardening tools’ and the Relational Agency Framework

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the Relational Agency Framework (RAF), an analytical tool developed for an Australian review and evaluation study of an early years’ policy initiative. We explore Anne Edward’s concepts of relational expertise, building common knowledge and relational agency to explore how Edwards’ concepts, which she refers to as ‘gardening tools’, and the RAF work together to support early years multidisciplinary networks. We argue that early childhood professionals who come together in a multidisciplinary network develop their collective capabilities through relationality and a focus on belonging. The RAF embeds Edwards’ relational concepts and enables the exploration and articulation of how network participants’ individual, discipline-specific knowledge and expertise augments to support collectively transformative practice within their network, their place and wider community. We conclude that a sense of belonging is foundational to the emergence of such relational agency in networks. Tools such as the ‘gardening tools’ and the RAF offer possibilities for addressing the challenges of how to support collaboration between government, early years professionals and communities to work holistically in the best interest of all children and their families.

Speculating on childhood and time, with Michael Ende’s Momo (1973)

Childhood and time are closely linked concepts in education. Childhood as a modern domain is a cornerstone of the human narrative of being in time, with birth as the beginning and death as the end. A newborn child marks new beginnings and hope for the future, and geopolitically early childhood education is now seen as a cornerstone for building the economic wealth of nations. This perception of childhood and time as leading to better futures has come under scrutiny at a time when futures seem less and less predictable due to increasing economic, environmental, social, political and cultural pressures and tensions. This article explores childhood and time as concepts to speculatively imagine time as rhythm that creates differentiations with the aim of cutting time loose from linearity and causality. Michael Ende’s fairy-tale novel Momo (1973) offers possibilities for imagining time in its materiality and assists in speculative imaginings of time as rhythm that generates spaces for another, less causal and linear sense of time in early childhood education.

Ko koe ki tēna, ko ahau ki tēnei kīwai o te kete: Exploring Collaboration across a Range of Recent Early Childhood Studies

The concept of relationality inherent in researching teaching and learning in early education is complex and multifaceted. It is well noted that relationships that make any kind of researching, teaching, and learning possible, let alone effective, are reliant on building collaborative partnerships between teachers, academic researchers, and others with an invested interest in the educational project (e.g., tamariki [children] and whānau [parents])—as well as striving to make (deep and meaningful) connections between knowledge, practice, and research (Nuttall, 2010). Developing possibilities for these relationships to be transformative (i.e., for teachers and researchers to view themselves/each other and the relationships developed as having agency to bring about social, cultural, educational change) relies on an understanding of the complexities and multifaceted nature of these relationships—in relation to experiences encountered in the wider (local/global) world we live in; an approach Taylor (2008) refers to as “a planetary view” (p. 9). From this perspective, transformation demands that those involved develop a critical and reflexive understanding of teaching, learning, early childhood care, and education, and of research. This chapter explores the complexities and possibilities of these intersecting relationships in response to our engagement in a number of Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI)1 research projects (Dalli, Rockel, Duhn, Craw, & Doyle, 2011; Haynes, Cardno, & Craw, 2007; Ritchie, Duhn, Rau, & Craw, 2010; Ritchie & Rau, 2006, 2008).

Greedy bags of childhoodnature theories

The purpose of this chapter is to assemble a theoretical toolkit, a greedy bag of possibilities, that can enable childhood-nature encounters to flourish in the Anthropocene and beyond. In this undertaking, our aim is not to put diverse theoretical perspectives into competition with each other but rather to assemble theories as tools which can produce sparks when knocked together. These are theories that can be packed up and taken for a walk. Theories that can help us to get out of sticky situations. And theories which children themselves can use to address the crises which they will inevitably inherit (and already are). As such, this theory-infused section seeks to put multiple philosophical perspectives into K. Malone (*) Department of Education, Faculty of Health, Arts and Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: kmalone@swin.edu.au I. Duhn Faculty of Education, Peninsula Campus, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: iris.duhn@monash.edu M. Tesar Faculty of Education and Social Work, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: m.tesar@auckland.ac.nz # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Cutter-Mackenzie et al. (eds.), Research Handbook on Childhoodnature, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_3-2 1 consequential relations such that they can become productive in their directions and differences. In this chapter we take stock of theories that have been productive in the field childhood-nature up to this point, while at the same time seeking new theories, which are emerging in direct response to the contemporary planetary turn.