Abstract
Fikele Nxumalo’s ambitious and provocative work sets out to reimagine the relationships with place which early childhood educators foster with children under their care. Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education draws effectively and powerfully on Nxumalo’s work as a pedagogista in the traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples in so-called British Columbia, Canada. Nxumalo, who was born and raised in Swaziland (eSwatini), brings a critical eye to the early childhood environmental education practices common in the Pacific Northwest. As she puts it, she follows ‘the decolonial potentials of disrupting the normalization of the exclusions that occur when predominantly white middle- and upper-class children participate in North American nature or forest schools and become positioned as future earth saviors and stewards’ (1). To deeply examine place in North America is to consider the legacies of interrelated histories of capitalist resource extraction, settler colonialism and racism. In this sense, it is irresponsible to cast being in nature as a return to innocence for children, as too many nature schools do. Rather, Nxumalo argues, effective decolonial educational practice should enable and encourage children – even and especially very young children – to dwell with and inhabit the legacies and ongoing realities of these systems, rather than to indulge in escapism à la Rousseau. Her critique is based on the perspectives of Indigenous thinkers such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Eve Tuck, and Black feminists including Katherine McKittrick. Posthumanist theory, perhaps most profoundly that of Donna Haraway, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, complements these perspectives. While its intellectual roots are far-ranging, the book offers a coherent critique of anthropocentrism in contemporary Western models of education.
Building on this theoretical background, Nxumalo’s pedagogista work over a four-year span with about 200 children and 23 educators provided the raw material for this book. Prominent in this study are educators’, parents’ and children’s pedagogical narrations of classroom experiences, and monthly ‘learning circle’ discussions of critical pedagogical issues with the teaching staff. This context and the book’s theoretical footings are established in the first chapter. As Nxumalo writes, the purpose of the book is dual. First, it aims to critique and ‘unsettle undifferentiated colonizing views of the world’ – and of places within it – and, second, building on these critiques, it sets out ‘to provide examples of and highlight the generative ethical possibilities of politicized, contingent, and place-attuned responses to settler colonial and anti-Black anthropogenic inheritances in early childhood education’ (19). This early chapter also introduces much of the interrelated vocabulary of the book. ‘Restorying’, for instance, is a key term used to describe the process of reviving the relations between places and human, animal and plant life. The latter category might better be described in the phrase ‘more than human’, which Nxumalo uses to describe non-human life as a unified, interrelated and systemic whole, situated firmly in a specific and storied place, and certainly greater than its constituent parts. While the use of this terminology can be disorienting – dare I even say unsettling – at first, it is a testimony to the book’s success that its arguments are challenging to recapitulate in any but the book’s own terms.
The remaining seven chapters are revised versions of articles previously published by Nxumalo. Despite this, the material flows reasonably well, owing to its common origin in Nxumalo’s work as a pedagogista. The second chapter interrogates conventional developmentalist quality assessment practices in early childhood education, and proposes decentring individual-based progressive development frameworks in favour of non-linear and ‘ongoing grapplings’ with the ongoing lives of human and more-than-human creatures of the forest. The educational techniques described in this chapter include forest painting exercises, forest walks and children’s encounters with forest wildlife. The third chapter focuses on ‘refiguring presences’ or challenging the normative patterns of settler-colonial ways of seeing and of being in place. Rather than seeing place as a physical location made up of inert material, Nxumalo suggests that it be ‘conceptualized as a gathering of things, human and nonhuman bodies, and stories that require attention beyond the individual child’s experiences’ (43). Educators’ approaches to place must therefore be drawn from the specific social contexts in which they are situated, rather than from universal prescriptions or standards.
The remaining chapters, following from these broader introductions, discuss specific places and subjects which Nxumalo foregrounds as ripe for disruption. Chapters 4 through 6 problematize latent settler-colonial attitudes in education towards forests, community gardens and mountains as sites of ‘wild’ and ‘tame’ nature, and contrast Indigenous perspectives towards the same places. The seventh chapter, ‘Living with bee death’, draws powerfully on children’s direct encounters with the markers of bee extinction: nearby trees that failed to pollinate, and sick or dying bees found in the playground. Their direct encounters with the consequences of bee extinction and their affective touch and efforts to heal sickly bees, Nxumalo writes, develop relationships with the more-than-human world, which are left fallow under traditional educational paradigms. The final chapter, ‘Inhabiting a Black Anthropocene’, addresses the racial undercurrents of the book directly. The flip side of the widespread conflation of whiteness with ‘wild nature’ and childhood innocence, Nxumalo points out, is the widespread assumption that Black childhood is marked chiefly by environmental deficit. While the costs of environmental degradation are certainly borne chiefly by people of colour, Nxumalo draws on Black and Indigenous cultures to point towards ways of being amongst increasing environmental degradation.
The book’s strengths are in the ways it refuses to force children’s everyday perspectives into a pre-existing (colonial) mould. Children’s speculations as to whether rocks are alive, for instance, become generative points of departure for discussions steeped in Indigenous and posthuman perspectives. Even so, the theory does not unduly burden the actual situations which it is drawn from; rather, it effectively unsettles the just-so assumptions that underpin conventional assumptions. In a certain sense, of course, rocks are not alive, and it is foolish to even pose the question; at the same time, saying as much understates the complex and more-than-human ecologies in which even rocks play varied roles (see chapter 6). The book refuses to prescribe and to generalize. Rather, situated firmly within the specificities of place and the population of the Pacific Northwest, it asks that its readers follow similar models of inquiry and foster relationships with place suited to distinct social and environmental contexts – not that the two are readily separable. The work occasionally struggles to follow a clear line of argument, being based largely on material previously published as separate articles. Each chapter follows a distinct path based on specific educational situations, and the breadth of the theoretical material which Nxumalo engages with can be a challenge to follow, given that this format denies us a continuous line of reasoning. That said, the material is challenging to cover in that Nxumalo deliberately resists allegiance to any single metanarrative – a totalizing impulse that would certainly mark a colonial sensibility. Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education provides much for readers to work through and consider, and is deeply generative for those interested in themes of decolonization in education. Although its subject matter will be especially relevant for those interested in the Pacific Northwest, its insights remain relevant for the general reader. The book is highly recommended.
