Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education

Summary

This book draws attention to the urgent need for early childhood education to critically encounter and pedagogically respond to the entanglements of environmentally damaged places, anti-blackness, and settler colonial legacies. Drawing from the author’s multi-year participatory action research with educators and children in suburban settings, the book highlights Indigenous presences and land relations within ongoing settler colonialism as necessary, yet often ignored, aspects of environmental education. Chapters discuss topics such as: geotheorizing in a capitalist society, absences of Black place relations, and unsettling unquestioned Western assumptions about nature education. Rather than offer prescriptive solutions, this book works to broaden possibilities and bolster the conversation among teachers and scholars concerned with early years environmental education.

Table of Contents

Series Editors’ Introduction

[Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang]

1.Situating orientations

2.Storying practices of witnessing: Refiguring quality in everyday encounters

3.Refiguring presences

4.Unsettling forest encounters

5.Restorying garden relations

6.Geotheorizing place relations

7.Living with bee death

8.Inhabiting a Black Anthropocene

Moving forward: Toward decolonial place encounters in early childhood education

Author(s) Bio

Fikile Nxumalo is Assistant Professor of Diversity and Place in Teaching and Teacher Education in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada.