Shifting temporal frames in children’s common worlds in the Anthropocene

Abstract

In this article, the authors bring the new temporal theorizations of the Anthropocene into the pedagogical realm by grappling with the shifting time relationships the Anthropocene makes one aware of within the context of children’s common worlds. Using an actively inclusive more-than-human common worlds framework that reassembles worlds by countering the divisive distinction that is often drawn between sociocultural contexts (mostly dominated by clock time) and natural environments, the authors resist the epistemological division between society and/or culture as distinct from nature that underpins post-Enlightenment western thinking in early childhood pedagogies. The authors’ common world pedagogies are primarily interested in the real-life worlds that 21st-century children inherit, inhabit and share with human and more-than-human others. They acknowledge that these lifeworlds are imperfect and complex, and that they come with multiple legacies. In this article, the authors focus on the temporal legacies young children inherit and inhabit in their common worlds.

Temporal frames in the Anthropocene

The science of the Anthropocene has prompted a rush of conceptual retheorizations, including new understandings of time and temporality. Environmental philosophers (Bastian, 2012; Metcalf and Van Dooren, 2012; Rose, 2012; Van Dooren, 2014) tell us that the dangers of escalating waste, rampant and increasingly dirty fossil fuel extraction, devastating species extinctions, and everywhere the tragic fallout of climate change precipitate new questions about the consequences of decalibrating human time with geologic time and other temporal frames. What might it mean that toxic plastics will circulate on our planet for hundreds of years? How do we apprehend the actuality of melting glaciers and polar ice caps that are at least five million years old? How do we respond to our planet’s threatened, uncertain future? Cultural geographers (Chakrabarty, 2009; Clark, 2012; Yusoff, 2013) are also considering these questions and providing new insights regarding the immersion of humanity into geologic time. Specifically, they are redefining time for the Anthropocene – that is, the contested proposed term of the current geological period, in which human activity has been the dominant factor in creating irrevocable disturbances to the earth’s ecological system. Yusoff (2013), for example, argues that ‘the Anthropocene defines a new temporality for the human as a being situated in geologic time’ (781). As the Anthropocene ‘folds geologic time into human corporeality’ (781), she asserts, we are to engage with conversations about ‘geologic life – a mineralogical dimension of human composition’ (779).

Inspired by what Deborah Bird Rose (2012) calls ‘temporal diversity’, this article explores shifting temporal frames and possibilities in early childhood education in the context of the Anthropocene. We not only expand critical analyses of time-telling that interrupt the absolute time of early childhood clocking practices (Kummen, 2010; Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2012, 2013; Rose and Whitty, 2010; Wien, 1996; Wien and Kirby-Smith, 1998), but also seek temporalities that might help us to respond to the challenges and possibilities of the Anthropocene, and to reinvent our futures. In this article, we bring these temporal theorizations of the Anthropocene into the pedagogical realm by grappling with the shifting time relationships that the Anthropocene makes us aware of within the context of early childhood education.

Several questions animate this article: How might the way early childhood education engages with children’s lifeworlds require new approaches to creativity, imagination and responsibility during this time of climate change, species extinction and loss of biodiversity? How might we attend more closely to the multiplicity of temporal frames that shape relationality in children’s lifeworlds? What kinds of temporalities enliven children’s lifeworlds? How might we think with crow time, forest time, deer time, and other critical and complex approaches to time as a way to break down the homogeneity of early childhood education clocking practices?

We engage with these questions by narrating a series of events drawn from our multispecies ethnographic research on children’s common worlds (Common World Childhoods Research Collective, 2015; Taylor, 2013), which we are currently conducting in two early childhood centres in western Canada. This research employs Latour’s (2005) concept of ‘common worlds’ to refer to a fundamentally expanded understanding of the social, requiring the reconvening of all of the constituents of our worlds, including non-human life forms, forces and entities. Working with a common worlds framework, our multispecies ethnography is ‘characterized by an attempt to move beyond research practices that confine themselves to exclusively human (or social) concerns and interests’ (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2016: 151). This common world research responds to the paradoxes and profound challenges the Anthropocene portends for the future of life on earth as we know it – in other words, for the common worlds we bequeath to children. Using an actively inclusive more-than-human framework that reassembles worlds by countering the divisive distinction that is often drawn between sociocultural contexts and natural environments, our research resists the epistemological division between society and/or culture as distinct from nature that underpins post-Enlightenment western thinking in early childhood education. Our common world research is not only primarily interested in the real-life worlds of 21st-century children, but it also acknowledges that these lifeworlds are imperfect and complex, and that they come with multiple legacies. Here, we focus on the temporal legacies young children inherit and inhabit in early childhood spaces (mostly dominated by clock time).

The events we narrate below (presented in italics) highlight the entanglement of children’s lifeworlds with mycological time, forest time(s), termite time, metallic time, moss time and crow time. Drawing on the work of environmental humanities scholars, we suggest that time, in these events, is ‘produced, constructed, maintained, lived, multiple, and a more than human concern within particular environments’ (Metcalf and Van Dooren, 2012: vi). Rather than privileging clock time, which dominates early childhood education, we narrate temporalities that do not necessarily view time as a container. More specifically, the temporalities we highlight are not anthropocentric understandings of time, which, as the narrative of the Anthropocene tells us, privilege unsustainable forms of life (Metcalf and Van Dooren, 2012). Time, in these multispecies narratives, is embodied time. Embodied time extends the concept of time beyond a human-centred representation to acknowledge temporal diversities such as the generations of living beings, ecological times, synchronicities, intervals, patterns and rhythms (Rose, 2012: 128). Thinking through time as such allows us to ask serious questions of early childhood education as we return, in the concluding section, to early childhood education practices.

The flows of forest times in children’s common worlds

It’s Wednesday morning and, just as we do every Wednesday morning, a group of children, educators and researchers visit the forest adjacent to the early childhood centre. The forest has been here for centuries, although not necessarily in the same form we find it in now. Hundreds of years of colonization, displacements and violence have changed this forest forever.

The western redcedar trees always catch the children’s attention. The height of their thick, ridged trunks provides us with a sense of time that is unfamiliar to us short-lived humans. Western redcedars can live 1000 years and contribute over their majestic lifespan to house planks, bentwood boxes, arrow shafts, rope, clothing, baskets, masks and more (Parish and Thomson, 1994), as they continue to thrive and grow. Narrating our guessed (human) stories of redcedar time, we quickly lose our sense of clock time.

Times intersect in the forest. The children notice that while redcedars rise tall and straight toward the sky, arbutus trees tell time differently. A broadleaf evergreen that sometimes reaches 30 metres tall, the arbutus, which also goes by the name Madrona, grows slowly, ‘with a crooked or leaning trunk that divides into several twisting branches and an irregularly rounded crown’ (Parish and Thomson, 1994: 121). Arbutus bark is smooth and red, and in the fall it marks the passage of another year of arbutus time by lifting and peeling off in strips, exposing younger, glossy bark that is greenish to cinnamon red in colour (Parish and Thomson, 1994). Separated from their source of moisture in the arbutus tree’s trunk, the strips turn crisp and flutter in the breeze until a strong enough wind blows them off the tree.

The children find it strange – and humorous – that these trees shed their bark. As we carefully select strips to use in our fabric-dying inquiry, the children become more and more curious about this ‘quirk’, as botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger (2010) refers to it, that arbutus trees have developed over time.

We pick up on this curiosity and focus on the changes that take place on the forest floor. Plants’ eccentric synchrony with the seasons resonates with the children. The shrubs and vines and trees stop growing when ice crystals attach to them on January mornings. From our human perspectives, time seems to stop in the forest in winter, but when spring arrives, everything starts growing again, and we can notice changes every time we visit the forest. Each and every plant is clocked in to the warmer temperatures, and the children take off their coats, hats and mittens at the same time as the trees send out new bud tips and the blue camas flowers shoot through the earth. Each plant responds a little differently to the abundant spring rain. To the children it seems as if the plants take turns showing their buds and flowers, and supporting many different ways of life through the process. Then, in summer, the rains stop and the forest turns dry – so dry that the ground transforms, from bright green to dusty brown. In the autumn, the trees change colour, too. The leaves of the deciduous Garry oaks turn brown and fall to the forest floor, while the coniferous cedars protect themselves against moisture loss through a process called flagging, where old and dying branchlets turn vivid red or bronze. As we pay attention to these lively processes, we become more and more in tune with lives beyond our own.

New questions emerge. The children wonder, in their own words, how these changes take place. Educators become ever more aware of the need to reposition children within their pedagogical work. How is it that each leaf of a tree or plant has a time of its own, and its own synchrony with the earth and sun? What is the micro-temporality of photosynthesis? How has the forest been able to create sustainability for itself through time, finding adequate food and water to thrive?

The children start to notice that life extends beyond death. Every time we walk to the forest, they ask to visit the long, thick trunk of a spruce that fell during a fierce wind storm. A large coniferous tree with a narrow crown, the white spruce has needles that are ‘four-sided, sharp, and stiff, and are arranged spirally on the twigs’ (Parish and Thomson, 1994: 61). When a white spruce is young, its needles smell foul, but this particular tree is old and its odour is pleasing. This dead spruce supports so much life! What Barad (2012) calls the ‘queer performativity’ of nature draws our attention, and we find ourselves questioning our ethical obligations to these lively temporal entanglements that abound in the forest. Now a decomposing ‘nurse’ tree, the fallen spruce we like to visit nurtures oak fern, horsetail, gooseberry and even invasive species such as English ivy. We have to look closely to determine whether these are separate entities. The children quickly conclude that ‘the wind helped the spruce fall so it could be a home for someone else. That’s what trees do: they live and die and give life’.

This thick log is also home to a myriad of larvae at different stages of development. The larvae help to break the tree down into its component elements, which will nurture other lives; including the herd of deer that graze in the forest and visit the children through the fence around their playground, which is adjacent to the forest, in the early mornings or at sunset on short winter days.

Like trees, plants, bulbs and ferns, deer give us a different sense of time. After observing deer so often on the other side of the fence, the children have become attuned to deer time. They know, for example, that bucks with sprouting antlers tell us fall is approaching. They know to stay away from female deer in the spring when their young are born. They have learned that after a rain is a good time to search for deer tracks near the creek; that when the berries are ripe, the deer are more abundant; and that at the end of the day, when the children leave the centre, they are more likely to encounter a deer in the parking lot.

The children encounter another time in the forest that is neither human nor animal: the vastness of geologic time (Raffles, 2012a). There is a boulder we think has been there for millions of years (a span that is incomprehensible to our human timescale), connecting us to this forest’s past and present. Hugh Raffles (2012b) reminds us that because stones are objects of long duration, they tell us a lot about life and deep time, and can generate fascinating inquiries. These are ‘situated’ inquiries: ‘particular stones in particular situations provoke particular considerations for particular people’ (Raffles, 2012b). The children add to the myriad of stories this rock already holds – many games, many movements, many laughs, many tears. Perhaps, as Alphonso Lingis (2000) poetically notes, the children’s passions have already sunk into this volcanic rock that will endure beyond them.

The children’s favourite activity is to clamber up the huge rock, as do spiders, ants and moss. The mosses that blanket the huge rock fascinate the children, in part because, like the other inhabitants of the forest, the mosses change with the seasons. Bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer (2003: 35) writes that acceptance is mosses’ way of being: mosses ‘surrender to the ways of rain’. When the spring rains come, the moss is spongy, shaggy, fresh green and luxurious to our touch. For the children, this is the optimum time to slide down the slippery boulder. Summer’s end is the time to run on the rock because their shoes can get a good grip on the parched brown moss.

Things inhabit the forest that speak to the children about another kind of time – our waste futures are foretold by discarded plastic bags and cleaning rags, glass jars, an old plastic toy truck and many cigarette butts. These waste futures, sociologist Myra Hird (2015) tells us, are ‘the signifier of the Anthropocene’. Hird writes that ‘we are not so much leaving behind our waste for some imagined future humanity to decipher our history, as we are bequeathing a particular futurity through a projected responsibility for the toxicity, contamination, and resource depletion our epoch created’. The toxicity to many life forms of the waste we encounter becomes a topic of conversation among the children. Not wanting to waste these challenging conversations, educators invite the children into a dialogue with what Hird calls ‘waste flows’ – the proclivity of waste ‘to move, to transform’ and to disrupt the neo-liberal management approach to waste that includes recycling. In collaboration with the children, we curate the exhibit ‘A Walk in the Park’ (Nelson et al., 2016). The exhibit invites us to stay with the trouble of waste, rather than putting waste out of sight and mind in a recycling bin.

Other waste flows slowly through the forest. A large piece of well-rusted sheet metal hints of a life as a barrel of a type no longer discernible. A lone fence post wrapped in rusty barbed wire speaks of borders no living farmer patrols. In our waste present, days and drums and fences out of time yield to mosses and termites and smooth white fungi.

The rhythms and flows of the forest invite the children, educators and researchers to inhabit it in different, new ways. In other words, we add to our clock time and sequence-focused pedagogies; we attend to the synchronicities in our sequence-focused pedagogies. Deborah Bird Rose speaks beautifully about synchronicity as a multispecies project:

Lives are nourished by others, not only members of one’s own group, but by others as well. All living things owe their lives not only to their forebears but also to all the others that have nourished them again and again, that nourish each living creature during the duration of its life. (Rose, 2012: 131)

We are interested in how noticing a diversity of temporal frames might ‘orient us into a different ecological accountability’ (Loveless, 2013: 130). Natalie Loveless (2013) draws on Donna Haraway’s (1997) work to propose the idea of becoming a modest witness. Our walks in the forest and our noticing of cedar times, arbutus times, plastic times, rock times and so on are ‘an invitation into a differently oriented attentiveness that has implications for how we do our ecological thinking’ (Loveless, 2013: 130) – whether that thinking takes place in the forest or in the classroom. Becoming a modest witness in this forest requires a different temporal frame than the pedagogical clock time that drives most western early childhood centres. As Loveless (2013: 131) reminds us, the only way to experience the forest’s (or the world’s) multiple times is ‘to sit, extensively, with [the forest or the world], allowing the almost imperceptible movements of matter – human and non-human – to become worthy of attention’.

Loveless describes how artist Marilyn Arsem experiments with the idea of becoming a modest witness: ¹

Arsem’s Marking Time I and Marking Time II invite viewer-witness-participants to sit with the artist over extended periods of time (eight hours and six hours, respectively) during which little, in fact, seems to happen. Marking Time I, performed on 10 November, 2012, at Salt Lake City’s Nox Contemporary Gallery, consisted of Arsem working responsively, minimally, and slowly, between 10am and 6pm without break, with four objects: two chairs and two bags of raw flour. The performance consisted of Arsem, over the course of the eight hours, moving both the chairs and her body in a diagonal through approximately 20 feet of gallery floor covered in white flour. Nothing more; nothing less. (Loveless, 2013: 131)

When we visit the forest, we have to remind ourselves and the children that our walk is not just about humans enjoying/consuming nature (just as Arsem’s work is not only about enjoying the performance). Instead, we think of visiting the forest as a way to notice ‘the subtle transformation of bodies and materials over time’. This is a slow transformation that demands ‘quiet attention and presence for an invested length of time during which [it seems] there is little happening’ (Loveless, 2013: 132).

Yet there is more to the ethical practice of ‘becoming-witness’, as Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose (forthcoming) refer to it. In practices of becoming-witnesses, we seek ‘to explore and respond to others in the fullness of their particular “ethos,” or way of life’ (Van Dooren and Rose, forthcoming: 1). This response, however, exceeds what van Dooren and Rose term ‘rational calculation’. Instead, it arrives ‘through encounter, recognition, and an ongoing curiosity’ (5); ‘we are called to witness; we are called not to abandon others and, more positively, we are called to engage others in the meaningfulness of their lives’ (6). For instance, in our common world pedagogies, our acts of witness involve turning toward rather than away from the rusty metal, the discarded plastic bags and cleaning rags, the old plastic toy truck and the cigarette butts that do not fit easily into a romantic notion of a forest. We stay with the trouble.

Always we walk through and inhabit the forest with a question: How might we see the forest as inviting us humans into new temporal frames that ‘open up different sets of relations, accountabilities and attentions than those of the everyday spectatorial’ (Loveless, 2013: 133)? How might we become modest witnesses? ‘Being in question’ loosens our bodies from clock time and invites us to notice, and reckon with, other times.

Reckoning with crow time

With tears streaming down his cheeks after kissing his mother goodbye, Jack runs to the glass door that leads from the infant room of the early childhood centre to the outdoor play deck. He stops short at the door, his crying silenced by the harsh call of a crow from a tree in the forest across the street. ‘Caw! Caw! Caw!’ Jack looks up and points to the trees where Crow is perched. Kathleen opens the door so that she and Jack can meet Crow. ‘Caw! Caw! Caw!’ They scan the trees, searching for Crow. ‘Caw! Caw! Caw!’ Crow is perched in the highest branches. Ornithologists theorize that bursts of one to nine caws followed by silence are companion calls that a crow will use to attract the attention of another bird (Marzluff and Angell, 2005, 2013). Jack does not possess this piece of knowledge as he waves his arm (a human-companion act) in Crow’s direction. ‘Caw! Caw! Caw!’ says Crow.

This encounter occurred when the human construct ‘clock’ moved between 8.00 and 8.30 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. At the university where the early childhood centre is located, this time of the day is performed in actions, such as the human bodies we see from our classroom moving between campus buildings. The encounters we narrate below occurred in the same Cartesian time, yet in the infant room these encounters were invitations made available when we acknowledged crow time – not a new time, but one we were unaware of before (Haraway, 1997) – in which Crow invited us into new ways of being with/in the world.

Crows, along with nutcrackers, jays and ravens, are members of the avian family Corvidae (McKibben, 2003), which existed long before humans did. They have their own rhythm and flow to their days. In the evenings, they gather in large flocks to roost for the night; in the mornings, they leave the roost in search of food. Highly attuned to predictable routes and schedules, crows will return to particular locations at the times they know food will be plentiful there, such as lunchtime at the university when humans scurry between buildings, often dropping food scraps as they eat on the go, or in the early morning when maintenance staff collect garbage containers.

Bastian (2012) asserts that the Cartesian view of time creates an illusion of inclusive time, when, in truth, the clock makes particular relationships possible at the expense of others. In response to this problem, Bastian (2012: 31) puts forth a broader definition of the clock which views it as ‘a device that signals change in order for its users to maintain an awareness of, and thus be able to coordinate themselves with, what is significant to them’. But what is significant to crows is different from what is significant to humans.

Marzluff and Angell (2013: n. pag.) write that the ‘gifts of the crow are physical, metaphorical and far-reaching’. They describe the long, close relationship between humans and crows that has inspired art, tales and myths. For example, the First Peoples of the lands on which these crow–child encounters occurred have for millennia shared stories of the crow’s adventures as teachings and legends. In responding to Crow’s companion call, Jack entered a relationship that would invite the other infants and the educators into a world of crow time. The three encounters we narrate below are not shared so that we might consider how Crow invited us to appreciate the beauty of nature. Rather, they weave a tale of how crows and humans share a common world in which crow time creates possibilities for both species through their entangled relationship – a reciprocal relationship that honours species diversity, rather than one in which the crow is anthropomorphized to serve a human purpose.

The next morning, as Kathleen walks to the early childhood centre, she hears the hoarse call of Crow and stops to see the bird swoop down to pick up something off the road. It is early, and she thinks that perhaps Crow was watching for the food that often falls to the ground as humans move about the university campus. She enters the infant room to find Jack at the glass door. ‘Caw! Caw! Caw!’ calls Crow. When she opens the door so that she and Jack can go outside to look for Crow, Jack lifts up his arms for her to pick him up so that he can look into the trees to locate Crow. Suddenly, Crow swoops down, lands on a branch, and flies from one tree to another. Kathleen and Jack watch in silence, their necks stretched out so that their eyes can scan the world above. ‘Caw! Caw! Caw!’ They see dark clouds moving with the wind that brought last night’s rain. The morning sky is filled with shades of grey flowing into the greens and browns of the forest. ‘Caw! Caw! Caw!’ A flash of black appears as another crow flies across the skyline. Crow’s companion call invites Kathleen and Jack to notice the sky’s west-coast palette of colours.

Marzluff and Angell (2005) note that crows’ and humans’ entangled relationship resembles other types of mutualism found among different species. Sharks, for example, offer their bodies as foraging sites to a kind of fish called remora, and, in exchange, remoras remove parasites from the sharks’ bodies. Humans, intentionally or (more likely) unintentionally, provide crows with food and living space, and, in exchange, crows clean our environment of waste. Through their mortality, crows warn us of dangerous pathogens, such as the West Nile virus, and while alive they provide humans with ‘intellectual, emotional and aesthetic stimulation’ (Marzluff and Angell, 2005: xii). It is interesting to note that English common law protected crows during the 14th and 15th centuries because of the ‘janitorial services’ they performed on city streets (Marzluff and Angell: 88).

We are reminded of Barad’s (2007) notion of intra-action, which helps us move beyond being a consumer of nature’s wonder and beauty to recognition of its agentic force: nature exists in/with the world as more than a backdrop to human activity. Bastian (2009: 103) explains that, by recognizing nature as agentic, humans cannot ‘attempt to incorporate nature within the smooth even flow of absolute time as it was conceived by Newton’. She asserts that recognizing nature’s agency makes space for humans to be alert to the unexpected and unpredictable changes in nature as occurring in nature times, such as crow time, in which species are entangled in their pasts, presents and futures.

Crow time is an agentic force within the world that invites other species to respond to crows’ companion calls. As Jack and Kathleen are drawn out of the classroom by the call of Crow, we are witness to more-than-human agency. Crow’s flight high above the trees captures the gaze of the humans, who watch in appreciation of Crow’s aviation skills. Crow’s antics allow their eyes to be flooded with the greys and whites of a stormy sky, and the greens of the trees.

It is crow time in the infant room. Jack is at the door, and bursts of caw sequences can be heard from outside. As Kathleen opens the door for Jack to go out and greet Crow, two other infants follow him outside. ‘Caw! Caw! Caw!’ Crow’s companion call draws their eyes to the tops of the trees. Jack waves and points; Dylan repeats ‘ah’ in a high-pitched voice; and Lucy excitedly calls out ‘baad’ several times. Perhaps the three of them are responding with human-companion acts. ‘Caw! Caw! Caw!’ Another crow responds with a companion call. But the children’s attention to the crows is lost when their gaze is drawn to the ground, which is wet and littered with pine cones and branches from last night’s storm. ‘Caw! Caw! Caw!’ The companion calls continue as the children pay attention to what is under their feet. Lucy picks up a branch and waves it back and forth. Droplets of water fly from the branch onto Dylan’s face, causing him to laugh. Dylan and Jack pick up branches and wave them back and forth like Lucy. As drops of water fly from the branches, laughter flows from the children. Crow perches above. Crow time has invited the children to notice the ground after the storm.

As Deborah Bird Rose (2012) might say, the movements, rhythms and calls of the crows and the infants nourished each other’s lives. This notion of mutual nourishing between species is beautifully illustrated in the story of Gabi Mann, a young girl in Seattle who leaves nourishing gifts of food for crows which, in turn, leave sparkling trinkets for her (Sewall, 2015). When Gabi was four, she entered an accidental relationship with crows when some crows noticed that she often dropped food when she got out of her parents’ car. When she was a little older, Gabi began a daily ritual of feeding the crows from her school lunch kit and providing them with fresh water in a birdbath. Four years later, the crows were now perching on the telephone wire and waiting for her, calling loudly to her as she set out their food. Occasionally, they surprised her with small, shiny gifts, including a piece of metal with the word ‘best’ inscribed on it.

‘Caw! Caw! Caw!’ The short bursts of caws pull Jack, three other infants and Kathleen outside into the yard beside the children’s centre. They hear the shrill call of the crows circling above, an act that ornithologists theorize announces a predator or other being in the vicinity (Marzluff and Angell, 2013). As Kathleen and the children move into a space filled with the last remnants of a fall garden, three crows soar above their heads. The caws are shrill, perhaps alerting the inhabitants of this space to the presence of another being. Kara stops suddenly, pointing at the strings of a spider web. Her speech sounds are agitated and fearful. Short bursts of caws mix with Kara’s short bursts. She has been alerted: a spider is in the yard.

Marzluff and Angell (2013) write that crows have the ability to recognize and remember human faces. They recall a story in which a crow they had previously tagged would, on seeing them, swoop toward them, screaming a harsh call. After the encounter above, we wondered if Crow recognized us as we wandered into the yard. The morning was still young and scraps of food from the previous day’s snack may have remained on the ground, missed by the nocturnal beings, such as rats and raccoons, which share the yard. Was Crow scolding us for disrupting crow time by moving into the space before s/he could forage for food? Was s/he warning us of dangers in the yard, such as spiders – creatures that invoke both fear and awe in the inhabitants of the infant room? Just as Crow’s ancestors did to our human ancestors, Crow has lured us into the forest, creating opportunities for new encounters and relationships. The agentic force of the crow companion call changes us in ways similar to the way in which our ancestors and Crow’s developed enhanced foraging skills through mutual observation (Marzluff and Angell, 2005). Our entering into the yard was an outcome not of human agency, but of a mutual and entangled relationship. By silencing clock time and forcing us to reckon with crow time, Crow was ‘shaking up our culture, and awakening us to new and more enlivened understandings of the world, our place in it, and the situated connectivities that bind us into multi-species communities’ (Rose, 2009: 87).

‘Knots of ethical time’ in common world pedagogies

In this article, we inhabited other temporalities (rather than just clock time) as a way to articulate situated, imperfect and modest responses to the challenges of the Anthropocene. Yet, what we tried to do in our research cannot be interpreted solely as environmental activism that places children as stewards of the earth and reinforces the primacy of humans as our planet’s caretakers (Cutter-Mackenzie et al., 2014). Instead, our goal has been to experiment with common world pedagogies to gesture toward what Rose (2012: 139) speaks of as ‘knots of ethical time’ that entangle humans and non-humans in the ‘dynamic exuberance of life’. We narrated how we might coordinate ourselves and pedagogies with a complexity of temporal awareness – with multiple forest times, with the rhythms of crows and rust and moss and deer.

These common world pedagogies involve what Metcalf and Van Dooren (2012) refer to as ‘taking time seriously’. In the 21st century, and at a time of so much loss within ecologies, taking temporal frames seriously in early childhood pedagogies means learning ‘to become loose and multiple’ (Metcalf and Van Dooren, 2012: viii) in our understandings of time, rather than adhering to regulated clocking practices. It means learning to notice what and who else is there with us in the forest, in the playground and in other places we inhabit with children. It means learning to pay attention to which times are liveable and which are not – learning to synchronize ourselves across many and varied temporal horizons. ‘Knots of ethical time’ in common world pedagogies highlight human/non-human entanglements and reposition time as a situated more-than-human concern, challenging Cartesian sequential time.

In engaging with non-human times in common world pedagogies, we are not necessarily suggesting that these times should become our new tools to think with. In other words, we are not suggesting that educators replace the clock that regulates their practices with deer time or rust time or crow time. Instead, we want to highlight that these knots of time bind us together and, in doing so, become relations of obligation. Working with common world pedagogies obliges us to recognize the diversity and the entanglement of multiple times in children’s common worlds, and to make more and deeper connections and commitments to them.