With shadows,dust and mud: Activating weathering-with pedagogies in early childhood education

Abstract

In response to the perception that climate change is too abstract and its consequences too far-reaching for us to make a difference, recent feminist environmental humanities scholars have drawn attention to connections that can be forged by noticing the intermingling of bodies, relations, materials, places and movements in the world. Inspired by these ideas, Tonya Rooney has proposed that there is potential in working with child–weather relations as a pedagogical response to making climate change more connected and immediate for young children. Mindy Blaise and her colleagues have also shown how ‘matters of fact’ dominate early childhood teaching, and call for new pedagogies that attend to ‘matters of concern’, such as climate change. In this article the authors build on these ideas by drawing also on María Puig de la Bellacasa’s suggestion that we extend our concern to ‘matters of care’ as an ‘ethically and politically charged practice’. The authors report on their work with educators and children in an Australian-based preschool where they have started to engage with matters of concern and matters of care to create new types of pedagogies that they call ‘weathering-with pedagogies’. These are situated, experimental, embodied, relational and ethical, and, the authors suggest, reflect a practice of care, thus providing young children with new ways of responding to climate change. The authors take as their starting point Donna Haraway’s invitation to ‘muddy the waters’ as a way to stir up the possibilities, tensions and challenges in doing such work.

Introduction

Exposed dry dirt is trampled, forming soft patches of dust. Small earthy particles are picked up by wind, sweeping towards the lake’s edge.

Clumps of sticking-together earth catch our eye. Children pry these gently from the ground, lifting small chunks, and then dropping them into the water.

Fizzing . . . dissolving . . . spreading . . . and finally falling gently to the lake’s rocky bottom.

Then, prodding at what remains, children quicken the muddling-together of earth, sand, water and stones under the lake’s surface.

A blurred and dusty shadow clouds over the once shiny stones on the lake floor. Sun glints through the water, highlighting the last of the dust particles as they float gently downward.

Donna Haraway (2016: 1) makes the following observation: ‘“Trouble” is an interesting word. It derives from a thirteenth-century French verb meaning “to stir up”, “to make cloudy”, “to disturb”’. For Haraway and others (Åsberg, 2017; Gibson et al., 2015; Instone, 2015; Rose, 2015; Stengers, 2013), the challenges posed by Anthropogenic climate change require us to respond. In these ‘mixed-up’ times, Haraway (2016) continues, one of our tasks is to ‘make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places’ (1). Haraway talks of her approach as a kind of ‘material-semiotic composting, as theory in the mud, as muddle’ (31). Expanding on this, she explains that ‘[m]uddle, Old Dutch for muddying the waters’, can be understood as a way to ‘trouble the trope of visual clarity as the only sense and affect for mortal thinking’ (174). In our research, as part of our exploration towards new weathering pedagogies, we go on regular walks with children in entangled more-than-human worlds that include bodies, clouds, dust and mud. As we walk, we find ourselves drawn along by Haraway’s invitation to ‘muddy the [conceptual] waters’ as this mingles with the more immediate sensory exchange between (human) feet and shifting forms of earth, air and water. We find connections between everyday weather-walking and the framing that, with Haraway, we come to think of as a kind of ‘muddling along’ with children and the more-than-human others we encounter. We seek out ways to ‘muddy the waters’, not because we want to deliberately confuse the ideas we are working and playing with, nor because we want to make things less intelligible, but rather to resist the urge to seek out clarity, linearity and certainty, which are so often embedded in the aims of education. We look to the learning potential in curious, open, situated and multispecies collaborations by attending to children’s relations with weather. Through this practice, we aim to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016), learning with the muddied waters that we and the children muddle along with, or muddy as we go. As we walk, we reflect on the pedagogical potential of this way of engaging with weather, and come to understand the practice of weather-walking as a way of attending to matters of concern (Blaise, Hamm and Iorio, 2017) and matters of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011) in the climate times in which we live.

According to Haraway (2016), while hope, on the one hand, and despair, on the other, might be common responses to the challenges of our times, neither on its own is helpful in shaping the kind of ‘caring and thinking’ that matters (37). Rather, the practice of becoming-with others ‘for a habitable, flourishing world’ (168) involves staying with the messiness and uncertainties of the world situated in a rich, thick present. Children are often invoked as cause for particular concern in thinking about a bleak future (with worry commonly expressed, for example, through discussion about the damaged planet children will inherit). At the same time, children are often looked to as the hope for our future (as evidenced, for example, through the growing optimism arising from the school climate strike movement). Yet, thinking with Haraway, to position children singularly as either the bearers of hope or the subjects of despair does little to tell us about how to work with children in the uncertainties of a present towards futures that may be better for all. Ironically perhaps, working with children is one of the most powerful ways that our (adult) attention might be drawn away from unknown futures into the richness of the present, and it is therefore significant that the pedagogical practices discussed in this article have emerged from fleeting present moments with children, weather and the entangled more-than-human worlds we inhabit. In this article, we share stories from our research of young children’s situated and playful encounters with shadows, dust and mud. From these we ask: What can the practice of ‘muddying’ or being in a ‘muddle’ offer as a pedagogical approach in early years environmental education, and how can we recognise this in children’s everyday weather encounters? How might we promote the practice of walking and weathering-with as a kind of learning that enacts an ethical and political imperative to care and ‘become-with’ others as a response to future climate challenges?

This article draws on an ongoing three-year ethnographic early childhood education research project taking place at a childcare centre in Canberra, Australia, on land that we acknowledge as Ngunnawal Country. The project is part of a wider international collaboration to develop climate change pedagogies with young children across eight research sites in Canada, Australia, the UK and Peru. ¹ Ethics approval for the project has been given by the university ethics committees for both the international project and the Canberra-based project. Our Australian-based site is conceptualised as a ‘weathering collaboratory’ – a hybrid between a laboratory and collaboration – and thus is an interdisciplinary site of collaboration between weather, educators, children and researchers. It is one of a number of collaboratories established under the wider project. ² The weathering collaboratory works to counter the notion that children come to learn about the weather as simply the sunshine or rain that we can see ‘out there’ or that we can somehow separate ourselves from by shutting the windows and doors (Rooney, 2018). Rather, we open up possibilities for learning with weather. Methodologically, we employ a walking ethnography as a way of attuning to the sensory and affective experience of moving within more-than-human worlds (Rooney, 2019; Pink, 2015; Springgay and Truman, 2018). We document fragments of our walks through a mix of listening, storytelling, photographs, audio and drawings, capturing some of our noticings in ways that we recognise as minor, partial and perspective-laden (Haraway, 1988; Tsing, 2015). Key to our approach is that we try to notice what is happening with weather and, as we elaborate on later in this article, seek out ways of observing that deliberately unsettle the human-centred perspectives we inevitably bring to our experience. The three micro-events that we share in this article are only small fragments from our longer-term project. They have been selected not so much as exemplars of particular child–weather encounters, nor to reflect children’s experiences across the project, but rather as an illustration of the methods we use to notice and think with children’s learning with weather. Within these small moments, we might witness an accumulation of histories, times, relations and curiosities.

In this article, we first explain the conceptual influences that suggest a move is needed towards new types of pedagogical thinking if the field of early childhood education is to prepare children for the complexities and uncertainties posed by chaotic climate futures. We then consider the ways that young children most likely learn and are taught about ‘the weather’ in early childhood education settings. Finally, we share stories from our research, which we call ‘Shadowing-with’, ‘Dusting-with’ and ‘Muddying’, through which we aim to convey some of what we notice in children’s learning with weather. In telling these stories, we illustrate the pedagogical potential of ‘weathering-with’ the elements as a way forward – or a ‘muddling along’ – towards more responsive and caring forms of environmental learning in early childhood. In doing so, we take up María Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017: 7) invitation to ask ‘what happens to our work when we pay attention to moments where the question of “how to care?” is insistent but not easily answerable?’

Responding to climate change: a matter of care

The conceptual influences that run through this article bring together work from feminist environmental humanities scholars that challenges human-centred and progress-oriented approaches as appropriate modes of response to climate change (Åsberg, 2017; Haraway, 2016; Rose, 2015; Stengers, 2013; Taylor, 2019a), recent work on human entanglements with weather as a way of forging connections with wider climatic change (Neimanis and Walker, 2014; Rooney, 2018, 2019), and consideration of matters of concern and matters of care (Blaise et al, 2017; Latour, 2004; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011, 2017) in developing ethical pedagogies in early childhood education.

Drawing influence from feminist environmental humanities

The devastating consequences of Anthropogenic climate change on the earth’s ecological systems continue to be the subject of a growing body of research. In responding to these challenges, Affrica Taylor (2019a: 341) highlights the ways that contemporary feminist scholars are wary of ‘grandiose responses’ to fixing climate change because these perpetuate a sense of human exceptionalism – a conceit that lies at the heart of the ecological challenges we face. Scholars such as Anna Tsing (2015) and Isabelle Stengers (2015), while not ignoring the urgency of the problems, draw attention to noticing things that may be neglected in our rush to attend to what seems important. As Tsing (2015: 21–22) observes, progress is so embedded ‘in widely accepted assumptions about what it means to be human’ that we tend to neglect stories and lives that are ‘not part of progress’. And for Stengers (2015: 62), too, paying attention means looking beyond what might be defined ‘as a priori worthy of attention’ to seek out what obliges us to ‘imagine, to check, to envisage, consequences that bring into play connections between what we are in the habit of keeping separate’. The weather scholarship of Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker (2014) draws attention to the significance of bodies as ‘weather bodies’, noting that if humans are attending to wider concerns about the changing climate, we need to find ways to bring these abstract concerns closer to home, and one way to achieve this is through attuning to the more immediate encounters between bodies and weather. As noted elsewhere (Blaise, Rooney and Pollitt, 2019), from this we take up the idea that not only are humans weather bodies, but all materials, creatures, rocks, dirt, mud and clouds are also weather bodies. Paying attention to weather-with-bodies, rather than separating these as discrete entities, is a conceptual framing that highlights the connection between weather and climate change.

If we are not to perpetuate the risks associated with human-centred approaches to climate change, and if we are to make more visible the connections between humans and climate, then it seems important to activate practices that engage with what lies outside the imagined certainties of progress, and rather engage with the uncertainties of entangled lives, times and world-makings that may otherwise lie neglected or unseen. In seeking out responses to climate change that resist human-centred and progress framings, Taylor (2019a: 354) reminds us that the field of childhood studies is well placed to cultivate more collective responses. This is because children’s world-making, and its messy entanglements with more-than-human others, provides an ‘unlikely alliance between unruly minor players who do not conform to the rules of the main game’. For us, this collective and unlikely more-than-human alliance includes weather as an irregular, shifting and often understated player in everyday world-making. In early childhood education, adopting such an approach requires a paradigm shift away from both child-centred learning and the dominant discourse of developmentalism that is grounded in a linear progress imperative (Rautio and Jokinen, 2016; Taylor et al., 2012; Blaise, 2005). Such a shift in early childhood education has been happening in various ways for well over 25 years through reconceptualist scholarship (i.e. Bloch et al., 2014; Dahlberg and Moss, 2005; Grieshaber and Cannella, 2001; Kessler and Swadener, 1992).

In our work, we further trouble the nature–culture binary that has been typically applied within early childhood pedagogies (Taylor, 2013) by directly attending to children’s relations with more-than-human worlds, noting the responsiveness and interconnectivity in these worlding endeavours. This article activates such a shift by recognising the significance of a pedagogical approach that decentres the human by positioning children as inseparable from more-than-human lives. In this way, the article contributes to a growing movement of early childhood scholars who critique existing human-centric approaches as a means of practising arts of care for our changing world. For example, with Hodgins et al. (2019), we think with notions of care that extend beyond the traditional, romanticised notions of care often associated with early childhood education, and instead focus on how we might ‘do care’ by attending to the complexities and tensions in children’s more-than-human relations. Our approach remains open to everyday uncertainties in the encounters and relations between children’s bodies, weather bodies, animal bodies, plant bodies and movements – events that might otherwise be neglected in more rigid or progress-driven learning plans. As a foundation for a response to climate change, weathering-with pedagogies do not deny our human positioning in enacting practices of care, but rather, as Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 2) suggests, they aim to draw attention to the ‘absurdity of disentangling human and nonhuman relations of care’ and reveal the possibilities in ‘decentring human agencies, as well as remaining close to the predicaments and inheritances of situated human doings’.

Thinking with human-weather entanglements

Research on how the topic of ‘weather’ is taught in early childhood education is relatively limited. Where it is mentioned, this is often in passing, with a focus on weather as either a curriculum area or scientific concept, or alternatively as an assumed but unspoken aspect of wider environmental learning. As outlined in an earlier article (Rooney, 2018) there are a number of papers that delve more deeply into the learning potential in children’s multisensory engagement with weather (e.g. MacQuarrie et al., 2015) and the importance of children having diverse outdoor weather experiences (e.g. Sandseter and Hagen, 2016). The discussion in this article offers an extension of a more recent interest in experimental pedagogies that place an emphasis on children’s entangled more-than-human relations. This emerging body of work stems from a desire to find new ways of working with young children that are responsive to the climate challenges of our time. For example, Margaret Somerville and Sarah Powell (2019) explore different modes of writing and inquiry via an experimental discourse on the challenges of writing about children playing with mud in ways that do not centre the human child. Kathleen Kummen (2019) shows how stories of crow–human encounters in an early childhood setting help researchers and educators pay attention to the relational and co-shaping events taking place in children’s common worlds, and from this produce alternative pedagogies that respond to the waste legacies faced by 21st-century children. And Rooney (2018), in her conceptual work on child–weather relations, works towards the idea that ‘pedagogies and practices that foster an appreciation of the intermingling of humans and the weather can act as a strategy to counter our often habitual belief in some form of human/weather divide’. These foundations provide an opening into thinking about climate change that is less abstract and reliant on human-centric ways of coming to know weather, taking its lead from the wider scholarship on weather bodies (Neimanis and Walker, 2014) and weather worlds (Ingold, 2010, 2015) that continues to be influential in the development of the ideas presented here.

Matters of concern and matters of care: implications for early childhood education

Engaging with Bruno Latour’s social critique of empiricism, Blaise et al (2017) examine how ‘matters of fact’ and ‘matters of concern’ play out in early childhood settings. They explain that matters of fact are often found in traditional early childhood practices of observation which set out to compare children to universal standards and norms. Matters of concern are different in that these practices are found when educators engage with broader relational contexts which children inhabit as integral parts of the world. Blaise et al (2017) argue that extending pedagogical approaches to encompass matters of concern is necessary for paying attention to the ethics and politics that young children are already a part of. Building on this further, in this article we consider Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2011, 2017) suggestion that attending to ‘matters of care’ can also act as an important foundation for ethical practice and action. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) argues that, although concern invites us to be troubled or to worry, it does not necessarily follow from this that we will act. Concern draws our attention to the ‘practice of care as something we can do as thinkers and knowledge creators’ (41). Care as doing, Puig de la Bellacasa argues, ‘adds a strong sense of attachment and commitment to something’ and, as something we do, ‘materializes . . . as an ethically and politically charged practice’ (42).

‘Caring’, for Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 1), therefore offers a practice that is driven by the critical ethical and political work of becoming involved with – work that acknowledges ‘care’ as a contested and yet common notion that can feel good or bad, do good or oppress. This approach shares some similarities with Haraway’s (2016) ‘muddying the waters’, as Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) sets out on the ‘elusive task of reclaiming care not from its impurities but rather from tendencies to smooth out its asperities – whether by idealizing or denigrating it’ (11). Through tracing the potential of care, we are invited to do the work of ‘recuperating previously neglected grounds’ and seeking out the ‘disruptive potential’ of care as well as its possibility (11–12). A key influence we take from Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) work is an emphasis on the interdependence of human and more-than-human relations, where the practice of care is non-innocent and rich with tension and mutual obligations – and yet somehow lies at the heart of living together. Also important is the way that Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 95) draws out the ‘affective, ethical and practical’ dimensions of caring, and the promise of thinking with the sensorial intensity of touch. In some of the touching exchanges between children, weather and world, we witness desire for connection, understanding and speculative involvement in shared more-than-human worlds – a point we return to below.

Weather lessons in an early childhood classroom

The lack of research on how the topic of ‘weather’ is taught in early childhood classrooms does not mean that such teaching is absent from early childhood education. To the contrary, weather features in many ways and across many areas of children’s learning. Informal classroom discussions on whether certain conditions are suitable (or not) for a particular learning activity can act as a source of insight for children into human–weather relations, and when, for example, the weather on a particular day calls for clothing such as jackets or added protection such as sunscreen, children make connections between these actions, bodies and weather. In addition, weather themes are found in a variety of children’s songs, storybooks and games, which provide opportunities for both intentional and spontaneous learning. While we see potential in these creative ways that children engage with weather themes, many of the structured learning activities in early childhood settings tend to position both child and weather in ways that promote an artificial separation between humans and nature (Taylor, 2013), and it is these practices that reveal some limitations in current pedagogical approaches to weather learning. One such example is the weather-chart routine.

Weather charts or wheels are used as part of a daily routine in many early childhood education settings (and early school years as well) to identify, categorise and describe weather events happening outside the classroom. While the use of the weather chart in many early childhood settings is known anecdotally, there is a lack of quantifiable research and data on the prevalence and pedagogical use of such tools. In order to capture this practice of teaching here, we share vignettes provided by one of the authors based on experience as a former preschool teacher in a long-day-care setting:

Around 9 a.m., most of the children have arrived. The formal structure of the day begins with a group time. We mark the roll, sing a couple of ‘good morning’ songs and discuss plans for the day – a conversation prefaced by looking at a weather chart. Together we note the day of the week, month, season and observable weather conditions (cold or hot, sunny or cloudy, wind or rain). This practice helps to establish a routine. Recording the details of the day provides a sense of familiarity and predictability.

Discrepancies can arise between the symbols on the chart and the seasons or conditions of individual places or settings, as illustrated through the following anecdote:

Despite an unusually long Australian summer one year that stretched into late April, we began ‘Autumn’-themed activities in March; focusing learning experiences on the changing colours of leaves on deciduous European trees, and pointing the arrow on the weather chart to Autumn, where a cartoon character wore a scarf and long pants.

Tensions such as these can arise in part because the activities and resources used tend to be based on simplified and separable weather concepts that are presented as widespread or universal, sometimes bearing little resemblance to local conditions. While such tools and practices have pedagogical potential across some areas of learning, and add a helpful structure to the morning routine, they have limits when it comes to fostering children’s understanding of the shifts in weather in ways that are attuned to the interdependencies between humans, weather and more-than-human others. Where there is a disconnect between a learning activity and local weather conditions, there is also a risk this might perpetuate an understanding of weather as somehow distant, abstract and removed from situated knowledges and relations. Further, this privileges some knowledge systems (such as Western and Northern Hemisphere knowledges) over others (such as Indigenous knowledges and Southern Hemisphere seasons). Indigenous Australian weather knowledges are more nuanced, situated and attuned to the complexities of seasonal change than their imposed western counterparts. Depending on the place and community, seasons may be described in terms of two, three or six seasonal periods across a year, and referred to in ways that reflect the expected weather patterns, such as ‘cyclone time’ or ‘windy time’ (Bureau of Meteorology, 2016). Drawing on these types of local knowledges in children’s learning with weather may provide an important strategy to resist the misplaced yet powerful frameworks that tend to dominate early childhood education.

Weather charts, when used in ways that are not flexible or responsive to local conditions, provide one example of how early childhood education can become focused on reducing weather concepts to those that are singular, separable and readily explainable, smoothing over inconsistencies, entanglements and uncertainties that are very real. Creating experiences that invite children to see, touch, hear and know weather and human–weather relations differently, with all the richness of unresolved tensions and neglected knowledges, seems an important way for children to learn and live with weather in the uncertain climate times ahead. Furthermore, unlike charts and wheels, which tend to focus only on weather and climatic events as ‘matters of fact’, the weathering-with pedagogies that we start to articulate below show how, without putting facts aside, we can extend weather learning to also encompass ‘matters of concern’ (Blaise et al, 2017) and ‘matters of care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). This, we contend, is necessary if we are to respond to the ethical entanglement of human–climate relations, despite the discomfort, uncertainty and trouble this may bring. We want to develop pedagogies where becoming-with weather can be understood as a practice of care, while at the same time resisting the idea that there might only be one way to practise care. Rather, with Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 70), we want to come to understand care as a ‘manifold range of doings needed to create, hold together and sustain life in its diverseness’. To get started on this endeavour, we attune to the affective interdependencies and relational practices and, through the stories presented below, draw out the pedagogical potential of learning with-weather.

Learning with shadows, dust and mud: stories from a weathering collaboratory

During the course of our research, we continue to listen to and tell weathering-with stories – mostly in our conversations with children and educators, and at other times through sharing observations via our blog (Rooney, Royds and Blaise, 2018). These stories are not just about ‘the wind’ or ‘the sun’ or ‘the snow’, but rather are more entangled, relational, incomplete and ever-moving. The small selection of stories below offers an illustration of a pedagogical approach that emphasises learning with weather rather than ‘about’ weather as a separate entity or force. In recounting these, we do not seek to package understandings about the weather as discrete, knowable, educational and ‘scientific’ truths to present to children. And, at the same time, we do not want to shy away from or separate out the science learning about weather and its elements. From our wider collection of observations, we have selected these particular stories to show how, thinking with Haraway (2016), we notice what it might mean to ‘make cloudy’ (with shadows), to ‘stir up’ (with dust) and, finally, to ‘disturb’ (with mud) – or ‘muddy the waters’ of – the ways we come to know our (human) connections with weather, climate, earth, time and space. We seek out ways to be with the uncertainties in these connections and to try to understand the learning that comes from this. Our observations shed light on parts of the picture and the more we observe, the more we recognise that the stories we tell are only one of many possible ways of knowing. With children and weather, we walk along, we notice, we pause, we splash in puddles and we try to figure out how and in what ways we might all be thinking-with, learning-with and becoming-with weather. These are tangled times, sometimes slow and sometimes stretching to histories and futures beyond the moments of our noticing (Rooney, 2019). We want to learn with weather to muddle along, recognising that perhaps this is what it is to be ‘truly present . . . as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters and meanings’ (Haraway, 2016: 1).

Shadowing-with

Children are running and moving around while pointing at the shifting shadows. A child exclaims, ‘Hey look, shadows are following us!’ Glancing in the distance, another child shouts, ‘Look, look, that one is coming from the tree’. Someone else sees a shadow flittering across the ground and says, ‘I think that is a bee, because I can hear a buzzing sound’.

In a conversation that shadowed children’s thinking-with the ever-changing forms around them, one child explained, ‘At night time there are no shadows’. Almost simultaneously, someone spies a cocoon shell lying on the ground and points: ‘Look, now it’s in my shadow. I’m making it all dark’.

Moving and learning with shadows seems to be about much more than simply identifying shadows and thinking what the shadow looks like (e.g. size, length, shape or focus) or understanding how shadows are made (such as through the positioning of the body relative to the sun). Rather, it seems to be a way of coming to know with-shadows through a series of interactions between children’s bodies and light that was emitted by the sun (some 8 minutes and 20 seconds earlier). Identifying what shadows are and how they are made is important, but our interest is to move away from just identifying the what to examining the with. Through shadows, children seem to play with their own fleeting entanglements in a series of relations between sunlight, body and place. Nothing stays still. It is all moving along. The overlapping times and scales of the sunlight are situated within the vast timescale of a multitude of stars from other galaxies and, at the same time, are present in the children’s small movements through a sun–time–place moment on earth. As children play with shadows and shadows play with children, they are immersed in layers of diverse temporalities and scales that are different to our (human) lived experience and yet cannot be disentangled from everyday weather experiences (Rooney, 2019).

Whether or not the children are consciously aware of the complexities of time and scale in these playful interchanges is not the point. Rather, shadows seem to offer a different way for children to witness other features of the landscape, such as when shadows take away the glare of sunlight on a shiny water surface and allow the children to see into the murky depths of a lake. As Tim Ingold (2015: 70) reminds us, shadows are just as likely to reveal ‘composition and textures on the ground surface’ as they are to tell us something about the ‘shape of objects’. Shadowing-with can shape children’s growing understanding of themselves as somehow intimately connected to, and part of, the ever-changing ongoingness of light, time and place that they move through. In one moment, a child might sense a fleeting mastery or control over the moving shapes on the ground; in the next, a cloud moving across the sky can make all the shadows disappear, leaving nothing. In these movements, we wonder if the child might sense something of what Deborah Bird Rose calls the illusion of human exceptionalism:

The most profound insight from ecology is that humans are not hyperseparated. We are part of the biosphere. The illusion of mastery and control is exactly that: an illusion . . . Ecological thinking takes us away from certainty and into probability. (Rose, 2017: 495)

In these shadowing encounters between children, sun and earth, we witness new, fleeting connections forged across times, lives and places. We notice children puzzling over whether they are master of worldly events (such as when they cast shadows over other beings) or part of a more entangled worlding where uncertainty and vulnerability prevail (such as when shadows unexpectedly disappear). These playful more-than-human exchanges ‘suggest a desire for tangible engagements’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 112) and, in this way, we come to recognise shadowing-with as a practice of care that opens up a way for children to learn with the complexities in human–weather relations, rather than smoothing these over to something more certain and straightforward.

Dusting-with

While walking, walking, walking across the dry, cracked earth, feet begin kicking, kicking, kicking the dry, dry dirt. Dusty tracks are made.

A few children stop. Suddenly.

Reaching down towards the dry, cracked earth, they run their fingers through fine, dusty dirt.

Scratch, scratch, scratch, over and over these fingers move.

Scratch, scratch, scratch, fingers scraping at the dry, cracked earth.

A dusty rabbit burrow catches their attention. Kneeling down on the dry, cracked earth, small fingers work, adding their own scratchings to the existing traces of animal activity in the soil. To one side of the burrow, some children notice several clumps of dirt. They stomp and squash in an effort to break the dirt down, occasionally stepping back, with pride, to see the effect of their work and, at the same time, witnessing the imprint of their shoes in the dry earth. One explains, ‘See – it becomes dirt’.

With fists clenched full of dusty dirt, an excited child runs up towards us to show what happens when he releases the now crushed dirt from a standing height – a mini dust storm ensues. The child does this over and over again, noticing the changes that a gentle wind brings to the form and movement of the falling cloud of dust.

Children have been learning about the drought that is widespread across Australia. They have been told that farms have run out of water, and they have seen images of a vast, denuded landscape dotted with starving cows and crops that will not make it through to harvest. As we notice the interplay of children, dirt, imagined storms and movement, we wonder about the other stories that also need to be told – the stories that are not just human stories, but those that might reveal more about the connections between land, place, humans, weather, time, creatures, emergence and weathering. Dust storms (such as those that swept across New South Wales, Australia, in the late summer of February 2019) made visible to all the impact of longer-term climate conditions and of human practices such as land-clearing and overgrazing. What might it look like to think with drought through the formation and journey of dust, to understand its connection not just to dry weather, but also to human activity and to the presence of animals – including farm animals and those with more complex colonial legacies such as rabbits (Taylor, 2019a, 2019b)?

In the children’s playful encounters with dirt and dust, a multitude of affective exchanges between child, earth and weather bodies emerge – touching, holding and releasing – and through this we witness a different way of coming to know the dryness, friability and fragility of earth. In the heat of the day, as children stomp on dirt, they seem to experiment with their human capacity to shift, shape and transform earth. In doing so, they become open to the ethical ambiguities that are mingled with the sheer delight in destroying, making and reshaping earth and animal habitats. As children scrape at the edge of the rabbit holes, they seem to be ‘dusting-with’ the rabbits and forging connections with the dusting work of other creatures; at the same time, they leave their own human-made weathering marks on these animal homes. To understand these actions as ways of doing care is to recognise that care is not always about enveloping creatures in warm hugs or iterating nice words of empathy, but rather to practise reaching out, touching and weathering with others (materials and creatures), and the possibilities and uncertainties this gives rise to.

Muddying

A large patch of mud and several inviting puddles immediately capture children’s attention. Soon, they are splashing, jumping and splooshing in the water. They seem to be enjoying the sounds and sensations they draw from the water-soaked earth: ‘I’m just jumping in muddy puddles. Let’s find some more muddy puddles’.

Along our walk through the watery, muddy landscape, children stop to examine a large metal sculpture. Their hands rub up, down and around the metal. Reaching out their hands, they let them run through water that lies pooled along the top of the sculpture, as if seeking a connection between body, water, metal and air. The children’s fleeting finger trails mark the surface for a short moment. And as these traces close over, our transient presence seems to enfold back into the place itself.

As we watch children enjoying the puddles, we notice a physical connection between child and rainwater that is not just the stomping down of a gumboot into damp earth, but also how water is lifting up in a kind of viscous response. And, as children run their fingers through the watery surface of the metal sculpture, we see their fascination with the temporary traces they leave on the surface before these close over. In these muddy, watery encounters, the trails that children have made with mud and water now lie invisible under the surface. Water is shifted by our presence and again by our leaving. In telling this story, we aim to surface (rather than neglect) small everyday connections between child, water and earth, and, in doing so, we are reminded of the transience of bodies of water, including human bodies. We also wonder what children carry with them from these affective encounters – body memories, perhaps, of an intermingling with place, rain, earth, metal, boots and wet socks.

While there are many unknowns in the affective exchanges we witness between children, earth and water, we can see here something of what Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 112) notes in the relationship between ‘touch’ and what she calls ‘the ambivalences of caring’, as touch invokes ‘deep attention to materiality and embodiment in ways that rethink relationality’. Touch, then, as a mode of attention or expression of interest or attachment, can be understood as a practice of care – and, in this example perhaps, as the children touch and the water responds, we can see fleeting traces of a collective and generative world-making. In noticing the way these exchanges remain unfinished, open and almost imperceptible, we give recognition to the ethical and political dimension of these small actions as practices that resist a human-centric or progress framing, and instead reveal the more-than-human relationality that might otherwise lie hidden or neglected.

The potential of weathering-with pedagogies

We tell stories of children’s encounters with shadows, dust and mud to explore the type of learning that emerges with weather. Through weather(ing) bodies (Neimanis and Walker, 2014) and weather(ing) worlds (Ingold, 2015), we attune to the elemental mingling of bodies and worlds, and notice children and weather together. We wonder at the many diverse weather–body encounters in small everyday moments and at the possibilities this might provide for living together with the uncertainties of wider climate change. With shadows, we watch children play across time and space, exploring the illusion of mastery and the complex entanglements of plant, animal, and earthly and celestial bodies. With dust, weathering talks to us of enduring tough times and resilience. We witness a sense of mutual vulnerability – for example, it is not either humans who are vulnerable to drought, fires and storms or earth systems that are vulnerable to human activities which are implicated in biodiversity loss, land degradation and rising temperatures, but rather a more entangled set of relations. With mud, we notice the mutual presences and interconnections made visible through the touch of children’s feet and hands – transient traces on the surface where our human presence is implicated but never still. It is through such stories that we recognise the pedagogical potential of learning with weather.

These ‘weathering-with’ pedagogies are not something that can be readily constructed or planned for in order to teach children about singular weather concepts such as sunshine, clouds, wind or rain. Rather, we think of weather learning as what emerges as children move along with light, with bodies, with plants, with animals, with earth. We suggest that this type of learning can be activated by providing children with opportunities to be with weather in all its discomforts, unpredictability and complexity, where they might recognise their own part in the weathering of earth and futures. Rather than teaching children ‘about’ weather in ways that tidy up, lock out or smooth over the irregularities and inconveniences in everyday weather encounters, and separate out humans from weather, learning with weather provides an opportunity to stay with what is uncertain – that is, to ‘muddy the waters’ of everyday learning and grapple with the implications of human–weather entanglement.

Trying to think of children’s learning about and with the weather as a form of pedagogy has not been straightforward. Just as the shifts in the weather are constantly changing, evolving and overlapping, so too is our own grappling with ways of learning with weather. We find ourselves having to resist our habitual positioning, which observes the child first and then the weather as the object of the child’s attention. For example, when we walk with children on a day that is notably windy, it is tempting to draw children’s attention to the fact that it is a windy day and then invite them to observe the effects of the wind on the landscape (e.g. through the movement in the trees or a sailboat skimming across the lake). However, such a mode of observation and learning only serves to separate out ‘wind’ as something distinct from other elements, with its own causes and effects. Further, it does not help us to see what children might be learning with the wind through sensory, relational and bodily modes of engagement with their surroundings, and we might miss some of the ways children practise ‘concern’ or ‘care’ with the places we walk through. As dust invites children to feel the flow of earth through their fingertips, or the sun casts warm rays over children’s bodies leaving shadows on the ground, or sloppy mud moves and is moved by children’s small gumboots, we continue to try to notice these moments of mutual engagement in child and more-than-human weather worlds.

The weathering-with pedagogies proposed here hold particular significance for early childhood education in the context of a changing climate. As the weather gets wilder and more unpredictable, and as humans continue to be implicated in some of the destructive changes we are witnessing, there is a need for pedagogies and practices that provide children with opportunities for connection, learning and doing with weather in ways that remain open and responsive to the uncertainties ahead. Learning about weather via clearly categorised and scientifically established explanations of weather patterns (‘matters of fact’), while important, will not be sufficient as a foundation for learning in the unpredictable times we face, nor can it fully account for the ethical and political significance of human entanglement in climate change. When learning with weather, children can ‘muddy the waters’ – stirring up, mixing, moving, being curious and learning with more-than-human worlds where messy, minor and often neglected encounters still matter and where open and attentive exchanges can be understood as ‘matters of care’. In what sense might these small, everyday attachments be considered a form of care?

Weathering-with pedagogies are sensory, situated, affective and open to the possibilities for noticing and making new modes of connection with weather and world. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 95) considers the promise of thinking with touch as a way of being ‘in touch’, and suggests that both ‘to touch’ and ‘being touched’ hold potential for how we come to think about care in more-than-human worlds. As Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 96) explains: ‘Understanding contact as touch intensifies a sense of the co-transformative, in the flesh effects of connections between beings’. Touch is not unproblematic. It is complicated and not always well meaning; we see this perhaps when children stomp on a clump of earth or throw dirt in the water to watch it dissipate and fade away. The touch of the sun’s intense rays can burn skin and wild wind can leave human bodies feeling rattled and discomforted. Yet there is a sense in which such acts are also a kind of reaching out, of shaping connections within more-than-human worlds. This mutual vulnerability and co-shaping of the world can also be understood as a form of ‘weathering-with’ others, even in the most minor encounters, and, with Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 17), brings with it the potential for new ways forward as ‘knowledge that fosters caring for neglected things enters in tension between a critical stance against neglect and the fostering of speculative commitment to think how things could be different’.

Conclusion

Taking the lead from Haraway and Puig de la Bellacasa, our approach is to open opportunities to learn with weather in ways that do not seek to shape clarity where there is none, but rather allow us to stay with the tensions and uncertainties that we stumble across with children and weather as we walk. The task of challenging our human-centric tendencies is an ongoing one, and therefore embedded in our weathering-with pedagogies are these questions: How might we observe and describe the relations shaped in child–weather encounters without positioning the human at the centre? How can we continue to think with an element such as wind while, at the same time, not disconnecting the wind from place, time and other climate conditions? What might the practice of weathering-with pedagogies open up as a response to Anthropogenic climate change? How can our (muddy) thinking become a practice of care?

Weathering-with thinking is about trying to ‘muddle through’. Muddling along reminds us that learning does not need to be about seeking or finding clarity, but rather that it can be fruitful to remain with uncertainty and learn with muddied waters, with dust, with shadows and with the multitude of encounters with weather that have yet to be described.