Learning with children, ants, and worms in the Anthropocene: towards a common world pedagogy of multispecies vulnerability

Abstract

This article takes the naming of the Anthropocene as a moment of pedagogical opportunity in which we might decentre the human as the sole learning subject and explore the possibilities of interspecies learning. Picking up on current Anthropocene debates within the feminist environmental humanities, it considers how educators might pedagogically engage with the issue of intergenerational environmental justice from the earliest years of learning. Drawing on two multispecies ethnographies within the authors’ Common World Childhoods' Research Collective, the article describes some encounters among young children, worms and ants in Australia and Canada. It uses these encounters to illustrate how paying close attention to our mortal entanglements and vulnerabilities with other species, no matter how small, can help us to learn with other species and rethink our place in the world.

Keywords:

• interspecies learning
• early childhood education
• multispecies ethnography
• common world pedagogies
• Anthropocene
• ethics of vulnerability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The notion of common worlds is central to our work. It is a term we borrow from Latour (2004, 2009). He first deployed it as a strategy for resisting the Great Divide between ‘nature’ (or the nonhuman) on the one hand and ‘society’ (or a separate human world) on the other. Common worlds are thus the undivided, heterogeneous, human and more than human collectives.

2. This research is conducted with ethics approval from the University of Canberra, ACT, and the University of Victoria, BC.