S1 E5: Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education Ft. Dr. Fikile Nxumalo
Hello. I am Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw.
Welcome to the fifth episode of Rethinking Childhoods. You are all for a treat this week! In this episode I am having a conversation with my colleague and dear friend Dr. Fikile Nxumalo.
Fikile is a faculty member in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, where she directs the Childhood Place Pedagogy Lab . Fikile’s scholarship focuses on reconceptualizing place-based and environmental education within current times of ecological precarity. Her work is rooted in perspectives from indigenous knowledges, black feminist geographies and critical post-humanist theories. Her research and pedagogical interests are informed by her experiences growing up in Swaziland and working as a pathologist with children and educators in North American settler-colonial context. Her research and practice collaborations include that he Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab, the Common Worlds Research Collective (which you’ve heard about on the last episode), the Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory and Planet Texas 2050. Her latest book is Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education (Routledge, 2019). The book examines the entanglements of place, environmental education, childhood, race, and settler-colonialism in early learning context.
VPK: Fikile, welcome to Rethinking Childhoods.
FN: Thank you, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
VPK: Fikile, let’s start with an introduction to your amazing and important work. Can you please tell us about your scholarship in early childhood education? What interests you? What ideas, theories, concepts are important for you right now?
FN: Sure. Perhaps I’d like to start by just saying that I come into the conversation through multiple geographies that include, but are not limited to, my own experiences of encountering anti-black racism while growing up in close proximity to the apartheid regime in South Africa, to multiple experiences of then adult and in Canadian context, and most recently working in Central Texas. And perhaps most relevant to our conversation is in my field, when I was working in early childhood education as a family childcare provider taking care of children, including my own children, and trying to make sense of young children’s encounters with racialized identities. And then also in my work as a pedagogista, having different experiences with the ways in which young black children encountered my blackness inpredominantly white spaces. So my work has come from both personal embodied and emotional experiences with anti-blackness and racialization, as well as a desire to make sense of, or theorize, the complex ways in which young children navigate their racialized subjectivities. One of the first pieces of writing that I did was actually with you, Veronica, was about my young daughter trying on the identity of a blonde, long-haired Rapunzel and the multiple emotions that stood up for me. So that’s one way that I would say I kind of come into the conversation. And I have come to think with black feminist perspectives to think about the ways in which blackness emerges and comes to matter, not only in its structural effects, but also in these everyday encounters in early childhood education. So black feminist perspectives have helped me to pay close attention, for instance, to the ways in which black place matters to anti-blackness. And so in my recent work, for instance, I’ve been thinking with black feminist geographies as a way of refusing the deficits and erasures that abound with respect to black children and families’ relations with the environment, particularly in urban spaces. So I also come into the work, in relation to my most recent work, with wanting to think with black feminist geographies about what it can mean to affirm black childhoods in place-based and environmental education.
VPK: You have been an outspoken critic of anti-black racism within the context of early childhood education. Can you speak more about what anti-black racism entails? What are the premises and assumptions? And of course, what are the implications of racism for children and their families?
FN: That’s a good question. I find it really useful to think <and> work with the term anti-blackness and so my friend kihana ross defines anti-blackness as one way that some black scholars have articulated what it means to be marked as black in an anti-black world. So, in helping to think about it as more than just racism against black people. But also a way of thinking, or a conceptual framework that really illuminates society’s inability to recognize black humanity, and so the kind of disregard for black lives. And so it captures, I think, in a stronger way the reality of the kind of violence that saturates black life that is not based on something who has been racialized as black has done. So, and it’s kind of the ways in which unrelenting kind of everyday anti-blackness pervasive in society. And I would say this definition also applies to early childhood education, where I think there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence for the everydayness of anti-black dehumanization for young black children, including in the Canadian context. And so there’s been a lot of work done around the ways in which preschool teachers, for instance, observe and over discipline young black children, especially young black boys, who are subject to surveillance and punitive discipline beginning in the early childhood years. And this, as expected, has devastating implications and effects, including effects captured, but by what to me is a really heartbreaking descriptor called the preschool to prison pipeline, referring to the early years as the beginnings of, you know, the carceral experience of schooling and push out and criminalization of black children. And I do want to underline that while much of the research has been done in the US, this is very much relevant to the Canadian context as well. And so I think it’s really important in our context in Canada to not be seduced by the rhetoric of Canadian multiculturalism, but to really think about the ways in which anti-blackness is pervasive in Canadian early childhood and schooling contexts as well. And I think it’s important to emphasize that there are these kind of explicit instances of anti-blackness in early childhood, but also many disturbingly mundane ways that young black students are constructed in deficit ways. So in my work I’m interested in responding to anti-blackness in environmental and place-based education for young children, which for me means responding to the whiteness and coloniality that underpins dominant understandings of nature, wilderness and environmental education, which yourself, Veronica, and Affrica [Taylor] and others have also done important work in this area. And for me, this whiteness manifests in constructions of nature as a fixative, so as a way to improve individual developmental and academic outcomes for black children. And there’s a surprisingly large amount of work that constructs, for instance, schools, gardens, or nature education in this way, for racially marginalized children who are always seen, already viewed as lacking or out of place or out of touch with the so-called natural world. And so I’m interested in taking apart the ways in which nature education comes to be positioned as a form of rescue for so-called at-risk, racially-marginalized children, while for privileged white children, such as those attending white kindergartens, predominantly white kindergartens and preschools, the nature ones, nature is seen as a space of, you know, play and discovery. And so, the wonderful Affrica Taylor writes so well about the coupling of innocence and nature. And to that I would add white childhood innocence in nature. So this is just one way in which anti-blackness matters in early childhood, that perhaps is maybe not so prevalently known about it and maybe not paid as much attention to, but I think really matters a lot.
VPK: Fikile, I want to pick up on what you mentioned regarding settler-colonialism. How do you see settler-colonialism impacting black lives within the context of early childhood education? And a related question: how do you grapple in your own work with these complexities?
FN: Well, I would begin by saying that, while in the context of settler-colonial states such as Canada, struggles against anti-black racism and anti-indigeneity are not the same, I really believe, as many others have said and written, that our liberatory futures are intimately connected. And so it’s important for black, indigenous and black-indigenous peoples to find ways to be in relation. And so, a recent piece written by Sefanit Habtom and Dr. Megan Scribe uses a term that I like which is co-conspiring. So, they suggest that we must find ways to co-conspire for decolonial futures, including within educational context. So, building on this perspective, then, the harms of settle colonialism on black lives includes rhetoric that places responses to anti-blackness as diverting attention from or separate from responding to anti-indigenous racism. And so within early childhood, one way to think about this would be through educational practices that absorb black children into the colonial project through pedagogies and curriculum that erase or decentralise indigenous peoples and cultures. And coming back to what I said on trying to avoid the seduction of multiculturalism, these pedagogies can be harmful not only by teaching young people that indigenous people are just another group in the Canadian nation and ignoring issues of sovereignty, these are also harmful in positioning black children as well, regardless of their multi-generational relationship to Canada, as always from somewhere else to what is constructed within multiculturalism, as the original Canadian norm, which is the white settler. So in my work with grappling with these complexities, I think it means finding a way, finding ways to respond within the context of place-based and environmental education.
And two: one thing that I found useful is from black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick, who states that black matters and spacial matters, and another, Dolores Calderon who states that place is foundational to settler-colonialism. So, in my work, bringing these two ideas into dialogue means that for early childhood research and teaching, that centers race and place, and is situated in settler-colonial space such as Canada, it is always important to be thinking about how to avoid erasures of black, indigenous and black-indigenous relationships to place. So, for my work, for instance, in Central Texas, I recently written about a young black girl whom I call Simone (pseudonym), who was one of two black children in the kindergarten class that I worked with, and thought about how the ways in which, for me, subverting anti-blackness meant, without reinforcing problematic child-centered discourses, but meant for me creating space for her curiosities and being on the lookout for ways to invite her into relations with the more-than-human and pay attention to her relational place-making with indigenous perspectives of the water pedagogies that we were engaged with, and to listen to her stories of her family’s relations to Texas. And so, it was also important, as I just said, that Simone participated in the curriculum which included learning about indigenous place-relations in that particular area, which was Coahuiltecan lands. I don’t think there is one way to respond, but to think about how to be always thinking those two together, in terms of black and indigenous place relations, and always to think about how to subvert Canadian multiculturalism which, I think, gets in the way of grappling with this in complicated ways.
VPK: Thank you, Fikile! You have give us, especially those of us working with young children in early education context, a lot to think about, to consider as we continue our own work.
You have been listening to Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education: A conversation with Dr. Fikile Nxumalo in Rethinking Childhoods. If you want to learn more about Fikile’s work, you can check out her website http://www.fikilenxumalo.com. You can also follow Fikile on Twitter @Nxumalo71. I also encourage you to read Fikile’s latest book with the same title as this episode: Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education .
As usual, show notes from this episode are on our website.
Again, I am Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw. You can follow me on Twitter at @vpacinik. You’re also welcome to post the review of the episode. Thank you so much for joining me in my conversation with Fikile Nxumalo.
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.
Featuring an Interview with: Dr. Fikile Nxumalo
Created By: Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw
Edited and Produced By: Jacob Ketchabaw