Beyond stewardship: common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene

Abstract

Interdisciplinary Anthropocene debates are prompting calls for a paradigm shift in thinking about what it means to be human and about our place and agency in the world. Within environmental education, sustainability remains centre stage and oddly disconnected from these Anthropocene debates. Framed by humanist principles, most sustainability education promotes humans as the primary change agents and environmental stewards. Although well-meaning, stewardship pedagogies do not provide the paradigm shift that is needed to respond to the implications of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene-attuned ‘common worlds’ pedagogies move beyond the limits of humanist stewardship framings. Based upon a more-than-human relational ontology, common world pedagogies reposition childhood and learning within inextricably entangled life-worlds, and seek to learn from what is already going on in these worlds. This article illustrates how a common worlds approach to learning ‘with’ nonhuman others rather than ‘about’ them and ‘on their behalf’ offers an alternative to stewardship pedagogies.

Keywords:

• Anthropocene
• environmental stewardship
• early childhood
• common worlds
• pedagogies

Notes

1. Liberalist discourses that promote young children as environmental stewards often reiterate developmentalism’s essentialist and totalising assumptions about childhood. Blind to their own normative white middle-class centrisms, they posit (all) children’s nature experiences as the developmental route towards good environmental citizenship. They rarely acknowledge that childhoods are highly differentiated, as are children’s experiences of and cultural meaning making about the nonhuman world.

2. For a detailed explanation of this multispecies ethnographic method, its specific challenges and affordances, see Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor, and Blaise 2016.

3. For a detailed account of the children’s responses to the dead kangaroo, see Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw (2016).