S1 E4: Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood Ft. Dr. Affrica Taylor
Hello.
I am Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and this is the fourth episode of Rethinking Childhoods. Today, I will be having a conversation with my colleague and dear friend Dr. Affrica Taylor.
Affrica is an adjunct professor at the University of Canberra in Australia, and she is the founding member of the Common Worlds Research Collective. The collective is an international network of childhood and feminist scholars and educators whose work refuses the divide between social and natural worlds. The collective focuses on the productive entanglements of worldly relations, and experiments with methodologies and pedagogies that exceed an exclusively human focus. Affrica has a long-standing interest in the interdependant and mutually-constitutive relations between people, places and other species. Her work is informed by her cultural geography background as well as nearly two decades of teaching in remote desert and urban Australian Aboriginal communities. She has a keen interest in the current environmental humanities’ responses to the Anthropocene and in establishing a dialogue between Indigenous ontologies and the more-than-human term within the social Sciences and humanities. She has played a key leading role in bringing these debates into the fields of education and childhood studies.
Today, Affrica is going to be talking with me about her book Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood . In this book, she uses reconstructive feminist methods to re-theorize childhood and nature and to explore the pedagogical affordances of children’s real life common relations, including indigenous and non indigenous children’s relations with places and other animals.
Affrica has also published a second book that I had the privilege to co-edit with her and the title is Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education . In this book Affrica contributes to the project of decolonizing early childhood pedagogies by interrogating the colonialist tensions that inhere in the physical spaces, epistemological spaces, and in the indigenous-settler relations of early childhood education.
I will also mention that Affrica has conducted multi species ethnographic research with young children. Many of you listening have been questioning what to do after the critique on child development, and I encourage all of you to take a look at Affrica’s work with young children where she thinks about childhood beyond developmental psychology. Her most recent iteration of multispecies ethnographies is recorded in a blog that is called Walking with Wildlife in Wild Weather Times, and in this project she worked with preschool children at the Australian National University. You can access this blog through the Common Worlds Research Collective website. In this research, she challenges anthropogenic climate change and species extinctions, and seeks multi species and inter-generational environmental justice. With young children she investigates and promotes a relational and decolonizing ethics for multi species living and learning in ecologically volatile times.
And finally, I want to mention her most recent book titled The Common Worlds of Children and Animals, that again I had the privilege to co-author with Affrica. This book addresses issues of Inter species and inter-generational environmental justice through examining the entanglement of children’s and animals’ lives and common worlds. The book explores everyday encounters and unfolding relations between children and urban world life. As many of Affrica’s books and writings, this particular one is inspired by feminist environmental philosophies and indigenous cosmologies. The book poses a new relational ethics based upon the small achievements of child-animal interactions. It also provides an analysis of animal narratives in children’s popular culture, and it traces the geo-historical trajectories and convergences of these narratives and of the lives of children and animals in settler colonial lands.
VPK: Now, following this introduction, I want to welcome Dr. Affrica Taylor. Thank you, Affrica, for joining us in this episode of Rethinking Childhoods!
AT: Thanks very much, Veronica, for asking me to talk about my book Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood.
VPK: Affrica, as you know your text Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood has been a very important book for my own scholarship and my own work with young children in early childhood education spaces. And I also want to note for all of our listeners that the book Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood really changes the conversation in childhood studies. It is a very important book that provides us knew venues for how we might view early childhood education and particularly how we might view the concept of childhood. I want to begin our conversation by asking you if you can speak a little bit about what motivated you to reconfigure the natures of childhood.
AT: Well, the main thing I wanted to do was to tackle the unscrutinized relationship between popular Western concepts of childhood and closely associated popular Western concepts of nature. And that’s because most of us in the West just take the idea of nature for granted. It’s sort of seen as something that’s self-evidently real. We don’t actually often see nature as an idea, or in other words, as a cultural concept, and this is because in Western knowledge traditions nature just is. It stands apart from culture. And in fact, nature and culture are regarded as quite separate, if not polar opposites. So before I could work on reconfiguring childhoods, I needed to pay close attention to how certain taken-for-granted Western understandings of nature shape existing Western understandings about childhood. And I wanted to tease apart what happens when we think about childhood as something that’s self-evidently natural or a stage of life that is self-evidently close to nature. One of the things that prompted me to do this relates to Donna Haraway’s work and she’s always been a muse for me. She reminds us quite regularly that it really matters what ideas we used to think other ideas with. So back to, you know, these ideas of nature and ideas of childhood, I wanted to put the spotlight on how these certain taken-for-granted ideas about nature and natural matter to the ways that we understand childhood in the West, that is. And by doing so I wanted to open up a space for reconfiguring childhood in ways that aren’t premised upon the separation of nature and culture. But you know, it’s a two step process and step one is to understand what ideas about nature do to ideas about childhood, and how this shapes the practices of early childhood education.
VPK: Affrica, I might even say that you have been an outspoken critic of romantic notions of childhood and nature, and, throughout all of your work, you have been working to denaturalize childhood. Can you speak to us a little bit more about what this romantic notions entail? What are their premises? What are some of their assumptions?
AT: Even though nature is always cast as separate from culture, in Western knowledge traditions, there are very different ways of valuing it. Early childhood education has been profoundly influenced by the Romantic philosophical movement associated with Jean Jacques Rousseau which sanctify’s nature is pure and perfect. But there of course there are other Western philosophical traditions that cost nature as in need of improving by cultivation. But, ever since Rousseau wrote his 18th century romantic treatise called Emile on the merits of educating young children in nature, highly romanticized conceptualizations of childhood and nature have been closely coupled. So Rousseau’s ideas have had an enduring influence on the trajectory of early childhood education and ways of thinking about childhood, much more in the early childhood sector than in any other sector of education.
Rousseau’s romantic philosophies are premised on the belief in nature as the epitome of goodness of purity, of morality, of innocence. And as the opposite and and also the antidote to the corrupting evils of culture and urban society. He promoted a very binary good nature vs. bad culture framework, and he also assumed childhood to be a naturally good, pure and innocent time of life because he saw it as a time before the evil influences of corrupting society can take hold. He argued that nature is the child’s best teacher, and that an education in nature will ensure that childhood and children remain pure and innocent. So following on from Rousseau’s philosophy’s Froebel, who was you know often referred to as the so called “father of early Childhood education”, he picked up on Rousseau’s romantic philosophies when he designed the first kindergarten, which is literally, you know, the children’s garden in the first half of the 19th century. So Froebel likened the cultivation of young children’s growth and development to the practice of cultivating plants. These kinds of romantic associations still prevail in contemporary discourses. And one that really stands out is Richard Louv’s writings about returning children to nature in order to save them from the psychological damage of techno society. He wrote a book called Last Child in the Woods, Saving Children from Nature Deficit Disorder. It had a big influence. So, what I’ve kind of noticed is that in recent times this romantic association of nature in childhood has really intensified with the upsurge of interest in nature-based early childhood educations. And some of that is due to Louv’s work and his influence, but not entirely. The all-weather-outdoor kindergartens in Scandinavian countries have been happening, you know, for the second half of the 20th century. They’ve spawned an interest in forest schools in Germany and in the UK, and then of course this new wave of nature kindergartens springing up across the anglophone Western world, often picking up on Louv’s ideas. So in all of these circles nature is celebrated as the best teacher for young children and is seen as best for their moral education, their physical development, and their emotional development.
So in order to pave the way for reconceptualizing childhood beyond the nature-culture divide, even a divide that positions children on the side of nature, I wanted to trouble this romantic association of nature in childhood that’s so foundational to early childhood education and seems to be, you know, just gaining more and more traction in contemporary times. So my first step in the book was to interrogate what romantic understandings about nature do to these associated romantic understandings of childhood, and the whole point of the work that I was doing in this first part of the book, in this first step, was to trouble trouble the limits of this coupling.
VPK: Affrica, these forest schools or outdoor programs that you trouble are right now in fashion in early childhood education, at least in Canada or even within the Western world. What is so troubling about romantic notions of nature and childhood for you? And how did you go about troubling it?
AT: Well, for me, the biggest trouble is that romantic Western notions of nature as somehow pure transcendent and set apart from corrupting culture simultaneously feed off and reinforce the deluded hyper-separation between humans and the rest of the world. Or what is often referred to as the nature-culture divide. And they pull notions of childhood with them in quite nuanced and complex ways. Also very problematic is the fact that unexamined and essentialist kind of Western notions of nature have long been mobilized in very sort of dangerous ways to justify unjust hierarchical orders as natural and normal. To say: you know it’s, it’s just like that, is just naturally like that, that’s the order of things. And nature is being used in such ways to identify certain groups of people as unnatural, or naturally inferior. Here think about racist, misogynist and homophobic oppression and modes of persecution. Now I know this isn’t exactly what’s happened in the case of children, but within early childhood education there is a strong element of justifying white middle class measures of childhood development as self-evidently natural and therefore universally normal. And this, in turn, renders all non-white/Western/middle-class ways of knowing about and responding to young children in deficit terms, and this is a problem.
The other obvious problem is that, and it’s related to the last one, is that not all people everywhere and in all times maintain this kind of hyper separation of nature and culture. It’s actually a very modern Western kind of thing to do, and it’s quite blind to its own cultures of nature and leads us into lots of delusional, dangerous ways of relating to the wider world, which we are actually not separate separate from at all, l but an integral part of it. Anyway, back to early childhood education. What struck me was that even though childhood had been thoroughly theorized, mostly by developmental psychologists as a series of natural life stages, but also more recently by post-structuralists as a cultural not a natural phenomenon, neither side of this theoretical divide, you know, the natural developmentalists or the the cultural poststructuralists within the early childhood field had attempted to theorize nature. It was just, you know, a taken for granted concept for both camps. And in my mind this was a problematic oversight and a missing link in identifying the underlining cultural premises structuring our understandings of childhood.
Now, because of my geography background, I’d already been exposed to a plethora of work that troubles Western notions of nature. It hasn’t been happening in education, but it’s been happening in lots of other fields. In fact, nature as a notion as being subject to close scrutiny in a whole heap of fields that straddle the humanities, the post humanities, and the natural and social sciences: fields like more than human geography, environmental humanities and science, and environmental philosophy. So because I’m an interdisciplinary scholar, because I straddle more than human geography and education, I wanted to use the troubling theorizations of nature that I’m already familiar with from my geography background to throw further light on the theorizations of childhood and nature. In particular on the popularity of nature-based early childhood education.
I wanted to explore how certain ways of understanding childhood as natural, and children as having a natural affinity with nature, had long been bolstered and justified by taking for granted Euro/Western-centric and universalized notions of nature.
VPK: Thank you Affrica for outlining the problems with these romantic notions of nature and childhood. And it’s interesting to hear how you have gone about troubling some of these notions, given the importance of this problems, right? Affrica, my last question: can you speak about why is the reconfiguring of the natures of childhood important, particularly now in the 21st century?
AT: Ok, I’ll answer the question of importance in a minute, but first I want to note that the second half of the book is my attempt to reconfigure childhood beyond the nature-culture divide. In this part I wanted to show what childhood might look like if it’s not coupled with purist notions of nature, or seen as a purely cultural construct. So, in order to reconfigure childhood, I reposition it within what Donna Haraway calls “natureculture”, or the inextricable entanglement of the natural, cultural, technological, semiotic, material, etc, etc worlds.
This kind of indivisible world and this natureculture world is also what Bruno Latour refers to as “common worlds”, worlds which are constituted through the comings together of all of their actors and the shaping and the reshaping, the making and the remaking of those worlds collectively. And when he talks about this sort of action of common worlding of all these different actors, he’s speaking about not just human beings and beings other-than-humans, but also all the forces on Earth, and, you know, the geological forces shifting tectonic plates, seismic eruptions, winds, ocean currents, and also entities, geological entities: landforms, rivers, mountains, deserts. So he’s talking about common world is being all of that. If we re-position childhoods in these naturecultures, or these common worlds, these full, very full inclusive worlds, rather than in the either/or of separated-off human culture and society or some externalized romantic notion of nature, we can’t help but simultaneously reconfigure childhoods.
Ok, so to get to your question, why is it important to do this now in the 21st century century? Well, it’s because along with others like Val Plumwood the Australian ecofeminist philosopher, I believe that the multiple catastrophic ecological collapses that we’re facing today are the direct consequence, a whole suite of human actions. And these actions are based on the mistaken belief that humanity is separate from the natural world and invulnerable to it; and that the natural world, presumably out there, is simply a resource for our use. So for example, I’m thinking of rapid global warming, or climate change as it’s often referred to, which is brought about by our extractive fossil fuel economies and our excessive consumption, and our carbon emissions that come from all of that. I’m also thinking of the critical loss of biodiversity and the breakdown of ecosystems that is manifesting in this cascade of mass extinctions. They are calling it the sixth mass extinction event, the first to be caused by human actions such as deforestation, land clearing, industrial scale agriculture and habitat destruction, along with pollutants in the waters and on the lands that kill creatures as well.
So this Western notion of the nature/culture divide, I see it as the driving premise of this current age of human-precipitated ecological crisis which is now referred to as the Anthropocene. I think that this divide underpins the deluded assumption that we can act upon the natural world at will and with impunity to satisfy all of our human desires which we tend to misconstrue as needs.
Any way, to bring this back to the need to reconfigure the natures of childhood: if we continue to relegate childhood to either natural or cultural worlds, instead of indivisible natural-and-cultural common worlds, will continue to enact the same divide that is the root cause of all our problems. We will continue to pretend that the idealized romantic notion of nature that we’d like young children to learn from exists in some utopian imaginary that’s totally out of touch with the realities of the Earth’s current state of ecological damage and precarity. Or we’ll continue to pretend that children grow up and learn in a hermetically-sealed human society or cultural context that’s disassociated from the more than human world around it. Either way will remain in denial. So I argue in the book that re-situating childhood in the imperfect, messy, damaged but also potentially recuperative common worlds, in which children actually grow up, will be much more realistic. Will also be better able to foster collective dispositions, and to guide children in ways of learning with others, human and more than human; in learning about how to inherit and respond to their common messy legacies. In a multi species sense, they’re all kind of inheriting this mess together. We bequeathed it to them. And I guess we’ll be helping them to learn how to live as well as possible together with all of these others with all of their differences.
But this takes us into the territory of common worlding pedagogies. And I think that’s probably best left to be the topic of another podcast, ’cause it’s a whole new discussion to be had. So thanks very much, Veronica, I hope this helps to clarify what the book’s about.
VPK: I want to thank you, Affrica, for joining us today to talk about your book Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. You have certainly given us lots to think about and to understand the key role that early childhood education has in the ongoingness of the world. And of course, we take your offer to come back, and hopefully we will be able to continue the conversation on common worlds that you began.
Before we go, I want to mention again for those who are listening today to visit to check out the Common Worlds Research Collective website. Thanks again, Affrica!
You have been listening to Reconfiguring the natures of childhood: A conversation with Affrica Taylor. If you want to learn more about Affrica’s work, you can check out the Common Worlds Research Collective website.
You can also follow Affrica on Twitter @AffricaTaylor (and that’s Affrica with two F’s). I also want to encourage all our listeners to read Affrica’s book with the same title as this episode, Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. Notes from this episode, as always, are at our website.
I am Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and you can follow me on Twitter at @vpacinik. You’re welcome to post the review of the episode in OWL. Thank you so much for joining me and Affrica.
I have recorded this episode on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak and Attawandaron peoples, where I’m grateful to live and work.
This has been Rethinking Childhoods.
Until next week.
Featuring an Interview with: Dr. Affrica Taylor
Created By: Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw
Edited and Produced By: Jacob Ketchabaw