With(in) the Forest: (Re)conceptualizing Pedagogies of Care

Abstract

Drawing on moments from an early learning forest inquiry located on Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSÁNEĆ territories, otherwise known as Victoria, BC, this paper engages with the messy politics of “care” that emerge when early childhood education and colonized forest ecologies meet. In it, we take up the challenge of unsettling our deeply held conceptualizations of care through a series of pedagogical stumblings with young children’s worldly forest relations. Foregrounding the question “what constitutes good care in troubling times?” this discussion explores the logics we draw on to respond to the increasing sense of urgency in contemporary calls to teach children how to care for the earth. Can we learn to inhabit pedagogies of care in early childhood educational practice beyond simply retooling the extractive settler-colonial stewardship frameworks that brought us to this era of uncertainty? And what happens if we invite a wider cast of participants into our understandings of care than those prevailing early learning approaches tend to promote?