Interrupting Purity in Andean Early Childhood Education: Documenting the Impurities of a River

ABSTRACT

In an inquiry with young children at a small river beside a school in Cuenca, Ecuador, romanticizations of harmonious childhoods and pristine, even magical, river natures are in abundance. Using common worlds framings, this article interrupts purity in child-nature pedagogies. We argue that encountering the river as a site of contradiction, and as an inherently pedagogical contact zone, requires disrupting discourses of “purity” that separate humans from their vulnerabilities with/in mutual, already contaminated worlds. To do so, we revisit pedagogical documentation from our walks at the river, and put them in conversation with persistent anthropocentric logics and the vibrant life of plastics at this river. We also gesture toward the pedagogical dispositions that might be required to cultivate educational experiences that are situated in the midst of the problems and impurities that the world proposes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Nogales—a pseudonym used for anonymity—is part of this international, interdisciplinary research project.

2. We arrive on these lands as visitors from Argentina, Ecuador, and Turtle Island (also known as Canada), all now living in the North.

3. This article shares our collective work alongside educators in the “Nivel Inicial” (early years) program at Nogales. All names used in this article are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This project was generously funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [453-2017-0688]. This project aimed to rethink children’s relations with waste in early childhood spaces through inventive, arts-based pedagogies.

Notes on contributors

Alex Berry

Alex Berry is a PhD candidate with the Faculty of Education at Western University in Ontario, Canada and pedagogical coordinator in Cuenca, Ecuador. Her research is interested in how collective artistic processes may propose new ways of relating with plastic waste materials in Andean early childhood spaces.

Cristina Delgado Vintimilla

Cristina Delgado Vintimilla is an assistant professor of Early Childhood in the Faculty of Education at York University. Her research interest addresses the ethical question of living well with others within pedagogical gatherings. She engages with this question by problematizing issues of subjectivity in relation to prescribed practices in education.

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw is a professor of Early Childhood Education in the Faculty of Education at Western University in Ontario, Canada, and the co-director of the Early Childhood Pedagogy Network in British Columbia. Her current research traces the common world relations of children with places, materials, and other species.