Doing pedagogical intentions with Facetiming Common Worlds (and Donna Haraway)

Abstract

Working with stories of children’s relationships with place and technologies from an early childhood education pedagogical inquiry research project in Melbourne, Australia and Victoria, Canada, this article takes up the concept of “pedagogical intentions” to consider how educators and researchers might cultivate intentional teaching practices relevant to the complex worlds we inherit with children. We think with a common worlds pedagogies approach to extend conceptualizations of intentional teaching held in dominant Euro-Western early learning frameworks in Melbourne and Victoria. After situating our understanding of pedagogical intentionality as an ongoing, purposeful, answerable practice of shaping and caring with everyday pedagogical relationships, we share three stories of how we activate our Donna Haraway–inspired intentions with children. By questioning how our pedagogical intentions inform our work, we assert that sharing and putting at risk our intentions is a necessary practice for thinking collectively with children, more-than-human others, and technologies within early childhood education.

As researchers and early childhood educators who collaborate on a multi-year, international early childhood education pedagogical inquiry project, we grapple with how we might articulate, answer to, and make visible our situated pedagogical intentions. In our Facetiming Common Worlds inquiry, where we think with children’s entanglements with place with digital technologies in Canada and Australia, we engage in constant dialogue about how we might form intentional relationships with place, iPhones, collaborators, and more-than-human others. We have begun to notice how “being intentional” and holding tight to our “pedagogical intentions” knits us together with precise accountabilities in our learning and teaching while anchoring our collaborations. Being intentional in early childhood education, for us, denotes an imperfect, layered, and complex practice of navigating and co-constructing our worlds in purposeful yet tentative ways. Concurrently, we find ourselves curious about, and sometimes struggling with, how the concept of “pedagogical intentions” is described within the scholarly conversations, professional dialogues, and governmental education frameworks entangled with our work.

Following the ethics set forward by educators, children, and communities who mobilize a Reggio-provoked pedagogical approach (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015a; Parnell and Iorio, 2018; Rinaldi, 2001, 2006; Vecchi, 2010), we emphasize that making visible—articulating, sharing, putting at risk—our precise image of the child and our situated approaches to understanding children’s learning is a necessary project for researchers and educators living in settler colonial spaces. As settler researchers and educators living and working on unceded Wurundjeri Country and Lekwungen territory, we recognize that our pedagogical intentions are not innocent nor inert and that these intentions are always threaded through our everyday engagements with children with our common worlds. That is, our partial, personal, and political conceptualizations of childhood, children’s learning, and education have consequences, are always present, and guide how we form relationships with children and more-than-human worlds (Dahlberg et al., 2013; Hodgins et al., 2017; MacNaughton, 2003; Moss, 2014; Olsson, 2009; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2016a). Importantly, we believe that our pedagogical intentions need to be shared because their situatedness, tentativeness, and non-universalizability implicate us within specific (and imperfect) accountabilities.

In this article, we share three knotted threads of our understanding of pedagogical intentionality by working to (1) articulate what we mean by “pedagogical intentions” while sharing our guiding pedagogical inquiry ethos, (2) extend this central pedagogical intention by offering three stories of how we mobilize our intentions through our work with children, and (3) make visible, put at risk, and return to these pedagogical intentions to complexify, question, and extend how they inform our work. We begin by detailing the international collaborative early childhood education inquiry project, Facetiming Common Worlds, that informs this article. We situate our work within a common worlds pedagogies approach (Taylor and Guigni, 2012) before turning to how the early childhood education frameworks that guide practices in the two sites where this inquiry work unfolds define pedagogical intentionality or intentional teaching. After articulating conceptual understandings of “pedagogical intentions” within a common worlds ethic, we share our Facetiming Common Worlds stories of thinking with pedagogical intentions inspired by Donna Haraway’s (2016) concepts of staying with the trouble, stories of urgency, and giving and receiving. Throughout these narratives, we foreground how thinking with these concepts as tentative pedagogical intentions pulls us into specific and necessary relations of accountability with more-than-human others, technologies, environmental precarities, and politics. We conclude by returning to why it matters that we make visible our partial, careful, and collective pedagogical intentions in the complex settler colonial contexts of contemporary early childhood education in Australia and Canada.

Facetiming Common Worlds

For the past 16 months, the Koala Group in Melbourne, Australia, and Arbutus Place in Victoria, Canada, have been connecting via Facetime on iPhone to share everyday stories that complexify our common and uncommon engagements with the places we learn with—Cruickshank Park in Melbourne and Haro Woods in Victoria. We began our project with a shared pedagogical intention to think with digital technologies with children to exchange children’s place-specific encounters while crafting practices that deepen and complexify how we learn and think collectively with settler colonial lifeworlds. As such, our engagement with digital technologies is laced together with two actionable pedagogical commitments: we work to experiment with digital technologies with children while valuing and complexifying children’s relations with place and more-than-human others in early childhood education, and we are interested in unsettling our habitual practices of learning and thinking collectively within education spaces influenced by ongoing settler colonialisms.

Facetime is a live web-conferencing program in our iPhones. From the park and forest, the children gather around iPhones while we walk together with rain and sun, slugs and snakes, and polluted creeks. As we weather time changes and unseasonably hot or snowy days, we also integrate video, sound, and photography into our exchanges. Picking up on the first impulse of our central pedagogical intention, our practices of Facetiming are grounded in our intention to share our connections with colonized places in ways that contest any readily shared investment in the future between children continents apart. Importantly, as we mobilize this central intention, we are not interested in “easy” collaborations or in sharing “perfect” digital videos. Rather, we consider how we can create a Facetiming ethic that refuses neoliberal conceptions of a “global citizen” and orients instead toward a collective thinking with place, politics, and pedagogical intentions that is concerned with inheriting the complex politics of contemporary common worlds. Throughout our inquiry, we work to share stories that make public, and force us to grapple with, the tensions of living and working with place.

At the heart of our central pedagogical intention is a commitment to becoming answerable, as stakeholders in early childhood education milieus informed primarily by dominant Euro-Western knowledge, to how we are complicit in, and can destabilize, ongoing settler colonialism politics in Australia and Canada (Clark et al., 2014; Nxumalo, 2016a; Nxumalo and Cedillo, 2017; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2014; Pacini-Ketchabaw and Taylor, 2015; Taylor, 2017). In working toward answering this pedagogical intention, we acknowledge and pay our respects to unceded Wurundjeri Country and Lekwungen territory where our inquiry work unfolds. We want to make public that the researchers and educators, and the majority of children, who participate in this inquiry are settlers to these places. We emphasize that becoming accountable for our presence in Cruickshank Park and Haro Woods is not complete by acknowledging territory, especially as we continue to inhabit and think with stolen land in our Facetiming inquiry. We hope that, as we Facetime with children, we might collectively work toward becoming accountable to the complexities, demands, and ethical and political responsibilities of living with settler colonial spaces.

We Facetime with Cruickshank Park and Haro Woods. The ways that we describe, share, and form relationships with these places are deeply knotted with our central pedagogical intention to attend to the complexities of children’s relationships with place. Cruickshank Park is located on Wurundjeri Country, on the land of the Marin Balluk clan, in what is currently known as Melbourne in Victoria, Australia. An off-leash dog park and reclaimed community green space, Cruickshank Park is home to possums, frogs, yabbies, and many birds. Stony Creek, which runs through the park, is often clouded with pollution and mud and hosts an unstable population of pobblebonk frogs. Haro Woods is located on the ancestral homelands of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples, specifically the Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSÁNEĆ people, in what is currently known as Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. A community and university-owned urban second growth forest, Haro Woods, is home to black-tailed deer, chestnut-backed chickadees, barred owls, and banana slugs. Finnerty Creek, colloquially known as Worm River, runs through the forest, carrying polluted drainage water toward the Pacific shoreline while traversing human-caused soil and root disruption.

As we develop and make visible our central shared pedagogical intention—to think with digital technologies with children to exchange children’s place-specific encounters while crafting practices that deepen and complexify how we learn and think collectively with settler colonial lifeworlds—we notice the way our practice of intentionality draws upon the specific bundles of scholarship, conversation, and interdisciplinary lived knowledge exchanges that we participate in. We turn now to articulating the common worlds theoretical framework that we use to guide our understanding of why creating pedagogical intentions matters and detail how we craft pedagogical intentions that are grounded in specific ethical and political orientations to learning with our common worlds.

Generating common worlds pedagogical intentions

We are members of the international Common Worlds Research Collective (2016), which is a network of researchers and practitioners who connect across disciplines to generate pedagogies relevant to the ecologically precarious and settler colonial conditions that children, adults, and more-than-human others inherit differently, together. Drawing on Latour’s (2005) articulation of common worlds as messy, and constantly unfolding entanglements of humans, technologies, more-than-human others, structures, systems, and dynamics that make up our contemporary worlds, a common worlds framework cultivates attunement to place. Through our efforts to attend to more-than-human others in our practices with young children, we contest anthropocentric Euro-Western education paradigms while creating practices for researching, learning, and living that work toward disrupting colonial and neoliberal epistemic traditions (Blaise et al., 2016; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2016b; Taylor and Guigni, 2012; Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015). Mobilizing a common worlds framework in early childhood education also requires us to take seriously how dominant Euro-Western approaches to children’s learning prioritize the human as the central “target” of education and thus delimit the relationships and pedagogies that can be valued within education spaces (Nxumalo, 2016b, 2017b; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015; Pacini-Ketchabaw and Taylor, 2015). Rather than limiting our common worlds ethic to critique, we orient toward creating tentative and situated pedagogies that pay attention to and care with the expansive more-than-human others (plants, animals, weather, technologies) that we learn with (Hamm and Boucher, 2017; Iorio et al., 2017; Nxumalo and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017; Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kummen, 2016; Pacini-Ketchabaw and Nxumalo, 2015; Rooney, 2016; Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015b).

Within our Facetiming inquiry, the work of our Common Worlds Research Collective colleagues provides us with a rigorous anchor for our pedagogical intentions. Our central pedagogical intention enacts a common worlds perspective on multiple fronts: thinking with digital technologies with children and exchanging children’s place-specific encounters draws from the methodologies of attuning to place with children shared by Blaise et al. (2016) and Pacini-Ketchabaw et al. (2016b); crafting practices that deepen and complexify how we learn and think collectively with settler colonial lifeworlds takes inspiration from Nxumalo’s (2016a, 2017b) and Pacini-Ketchabaw and Taylor’s (2015) investment in creating pedagogies that center our settler colonial accountabilities in complex worlds; and, the understandings of place, pedagogy, and ethics that nourish our pedagogical intentions are rooted in common worlds enactments of these politicized concepts (Hamm, 2017; Nxumalo and Cedillo, 2017). Importantly, thinking with a common worlds framework reminds us of the political tensions of creating unfamiliar pedagogies in early childhood education. Learning in ways that disrupt anthropocentric habits is a project that must be in constant tension with dominant educational discourses in order to infiltrate how these powerful educational paradigms hold clout in our current common worlds.

Weaving pedagogical intentions with early learning curriculum frameworks

In Melbourne and Victoria, provincial government ministries and stakeholders have created early learning curriculum frameworks that intend to shape the pedagogy and programming offered by teachers and educators. Across both sites, these early learning frameworks aim to guide practice—that is, they differ from licensing documents that regulate programming or certification and are not “enforced” by government ministries. Rather, educators are encouraged to engage with the frameworks to deepen their practice, often amid a push toward increasing the quality, inclusiveness, or developmental appropriateness of early childhood education. In Melbourne, the revised Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework (VEYLDF; Victoria Department of Education and Training, 2016) weaves local Aboriginal knowledge with developmentally informed practice principles and outcomes. In Victoria, the British Columbia Early Learning Framework (BC ELF; Government of British Columbia, 2008) details four key areas of early learning. While we hold many questions about the framing and consequences of the forms of learning, pedagogy, and relationships foregrounded in each learning framework, articulating a critique of these documents is beyond the scope of this article. Instead, in this article, we are interested in how both documents speak differently of intentional practice, and how our approach to pedagogical intentionality is both woven with and an extension of these early learning frameworks.

The VEYLDF combines developmental (Euro-Western scientific conceptions of age and stage-based growth and learning) with reconceptualist and postdevelopmental perspectives (approaches to learning that integrate diverse, non-linear, non-instrumental perspectives of childhood and learning). This framework uses the phrase “intentional teaching” to denote a strategy for “purposeful and … pre-planned or spontaneous [learning], to support achievement of well-considered and identified goals” (Victoria Department of Education and Training, 2016: 13). Arguing that “the active guidance and support of reflective leaders strengthens intentional practice to improve outcomes for children and families” (p. 14), intentional teaching is situated as a strategy for carefully shaping opportunities for children’s learning in planned ways that align with the curricular and developmental outcomes an educator prioritizes—outcomes that are later detailed as identity formation, connections to the world, meaningful well-being, participation in learning, and effective communication skills. Pedagogical intentions, here, emphasize locally meaningful outcomes: intentions activate outcomes, and outcomes are deemed valuable by educators (and, depending on an educators’ approach to practice, this will involve different degrees of collaboration with children, parents, families, communities, and more-than-human others).

While the language of “pedagogical intentions” is not utilized in the BC ELF, the framework is grounded in an invitation for educators to articulate, critically reflect on, and share their particular understanding of children’s learning. Utilizing a reconceptualist approach to early childhood education, the framework describes the concept of “the image of the child” as “not only a person’s beliefs about children and childhood, but also their beliefs about what is possible and desirable for human life at the individual, social, and global levels” (Government of British Columbia, 2008: 4). The BC ELF foregrounds an image of the child that positions “young children as capable and full of potential; as persons with complex identities, grounded in their individual strengths and capacities, and their unique social, linguistic, and cultural heritage” (p. 4). Enacting this image of the child then is an intention threaded throughout the document, as educators are encouraged to reflect on how their practice does (or does not always) understand children as capable, active participants in their learning related to well-being and belonging, exploration and creativity, language and literacies, and social responsibility and diversity. Pedagogical intentions, here, are concerned with making present an educator’s conceptualization of childhood and learning (and, different educators will hold different views of how, and what, pedagogies relevant to a capable and competent image of children might entail).

We do not argue that the VEYLDF and BC ELF have the “right” or “best” understanding of pedagogical intentionality, or, concurrently, that our conceptualization of pedagogical intentionality, or our specific pedagogical intentions, is preferable or transferrable. Rather, we borrow from the VEYLDF that notion that pedagogical intentions should, to varying degrees, care about outcomes or consequences. From the BC ELF, we carry the idea that pedagogical intentions activate our own understandings of childhood and learning.

Crafting our Facetiming Common Worlds pedagogical intentions

In our Facetiming Common Worlds inquiry, we knit the attention to place and more-than-human others that undergird our common worlds pedagogical intentions together with concerns about consequence, as articulated within the VEYLDF, alongside a recognition from the BC ELF that our pedagogical intentions are always personal, partial, and rooted in our own understandings of childhood and learning. Pedagogical intentionality is, for us, an uncertain but purposeful, layered but limited, consequential but non-linear practice of navigating and co-constructing everyday pedagogical relationships in purposeful, answerable, and situated ways. We see pedagogical intentions as always evolving ethical obligations we craft collectively and individually and constantly work to answer to. Intentions are both anchors and activities, where the touchstones and work are collectively articulated, lived, and re-articulated. Being intentional is a complex proposition: it means marking the conceptual terrain we ground our practice in, knowing how this terrain denotes a meaningful but partial commitment to a way of being with the world, generating learning relationships that actively work toward realizing the ethical and political contours of these worlds, and then submitting these pedagogies to conversations that purposefully extend, unsettle, and risk the conceptual terrain and practice they shape and are shaped by.

It is this definition of pedagogical intentionality that supports our collective intention in our Facetiming Common Worlds inquiry. In the following section, we offer three pedagogical intentions that guide our work and share stories of how we craft, deploy, question, answer to, and recraft these intentions in our collaborative work with children. We detail how these intentions, rooted within a common worlds framework, mobilize concepts developed by Donna Haraway (2016) as pedagogical intentions. For each concept + intention, we share our pedagogical intention, explain our connection to the concept, present a story that mobilizes this concept as a pedagogical intention, and conclude by sharing some lingering questions extending from this intention.

“Doing” pedagogical intentions

We began our Facetiming Common Worlds pedagogical inquiry with our overarching pedagogical intention, but quickly found that we needed more specific intentions that required us to burrow in more precise ways into thinking with digital technologies with children to exchange children’s place-specific encounters while crafting practices that deepen and complexify how we learn and think collectively with settler colonial lifeworlds. We wanted to avoid doing Facetime as a novelty, a “task,” or as a practice that subscribes to romantic, developmental, or global citizen conceptions of childhood. We struggled with what it might mean to learn with more-than-human others with technologies, as we confronted how our habitual (adult) relationships with technology understood digital tools as something to help or aid us, not necessarily as a collaborator to learn with. We believed that we needed to create intentions that foregrounded place, practices, thinking collectively, and settler colonial inheritances.

We began imagining how, and with whom, we might build such intentions. We have each been incredibly inspired by the work of feminist science studies and environmental humanities scholar Donna Haraway (2016), and as we grappled with creating pedagogical intentions that picked into our overarching intention, we found our footing with words:

Playing games of string figures is about giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads and failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe even beautiful, that wasn’t there before, of relaying connections that matter, of telling stories hand upon hand, digit upon digit, attachment site upon attachment site, to craft conditions for finite flourishing on terra, on earth. String figures require holding still in order to receive and pass on. String figures can be played by many on all sorts of limbs, as long as the rhythm of accepting and giving is sustained. (p. 10)

Here, and throughout the book, this quote lives in—Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Haraway, 2016)—we felt echoes of common worlds conceptions of place, an emphasis on the labor of practices, an ethic for thinking collectively, and a politic constantly concerned with accountability and dismantling Euro-Western structures. This resonates with both the process and practice of our understanding of pedagogical intentionality and the specific ethical concerns and attunements that animate our central intention. Pulled toward Haraway’s discussion of staying with the trouble, stories of urgency, and giving and receiving, we began to imagine what might be required to think with Haraway’s concepts as pedagogical intentions. How might we mobilize these rich, demanding concepts as anchors and activities, as uncertain but purposeful, layered but limited, consequential but non-linear practices of navigating and co-constructing everyday pedagogical relationships? Haraway’s concepts serve as powerful and, at times, difficult provocations for our pedagogical intentions. While we trace their citational roots and try to remain loyal to their theoretical nuances, we are foremost concerned with how these concepts deepen and challenge our Facetiming practices. This, we believe, emphasizes the work of “doing” our understanding of pedagogical intentions with Facetiming Common Worlds.

Pedagogical intention: staying with the trouble

We are concerned with sharing and responding to the pressing, vital, and complex realities of living with the park and forest. Haraway (2016) shares an ethic of “staying with the trouble,” where, rather than focusing on how we might resolve ecological precarity or uncertainty in order to create not-yet-real futures, we might focus instead on how we are implicated in, respond to, and inherit current complex worlds with children. As Haraway details, “our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places … staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present” (p. 1). We see staying with the trouble as a method for thinking together with children about how we can care with the park and forest right now. This involves shifting from traditional understandings of environmental sustainability, which understand children’s relationships with more-than-human others primarily in terms of children’s future stewardship and often absolve adults of responsibility, toward a commitment to inheriting the messy realities of the park and forest with children (Nelson et al., 2018; Taylor, 2017; Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015). Tugging Haraway’s notion of staying with the trouble into a pedagogical intention, we work hard to exchange digital place stories that matter today, with this place—stories that help us to attend and attune (Rautio, 2017) to the park and forest, stories that are not easy or pretty or solvable, stories that stay with park and forest troubles.

Doing our intention: messy (polluted) water stories

Urban creeks run through both Cruickshank Park and Haro Woods. These creeks are a mix of rain run-off, lively fish and critters, city drainage, drinking water for deer and dogs, and muddy turbid currents. The children often Facetime water stories. Together, we listen to the sounds the pobblebonk frogs make in Cruickshank Park and tune into the trickle of the water over the stones in Haro Woods. Our digital stories share creeks that are far from perfect. Sometimes, staying with the messiness of the creeks fills us with sadness or frustration, as we notice when the creek is so saturated with sediment that it is opaque, and the frogs and worms vacate. In mobilizing our pedagogical intention to stay with the trouble, we stick with the difficulty of these water stories and wonder together where the water has gone when it runs dry during certain seasons. We ask how the water moved, and the stories it told, before it became entangled with settler colonialism. We question where the water comes from, try to trace where it travels, and debate how different lives are differently impacted by the changing water. Our water stories are not worried about saving or rescuing the water nor finding scientific explanations for drought. Rather, we Facetime stories that make us consider what might be required to carefully and collectively stay with the troubles made visible with polluted creeks in urban places.

Extending our “staying with the trouble” intention

Working with the pedagogical intention of staying with the trouble generates unfamiliar and uneasy ways to think with water and place with children. Rather than working with broad environmental water-rescue narratives, our “doing” must be specific and relational to the places where we are entangled with water. Crafting water stories with local places means that we attend to complex knowledge and stories that are always present: how do we stay with the trouble of the water stories we inherit and create (unevenly) with children?

Pedagogical intention: sharing stories of urgency

We take seriously that how, why, and with whom we tell stories as we Facetime matters. We constantly ask ourselves questions about why we are exchanging the stories we are sharing and how the stories that we make visible concurrently make other stories invisible. We are inspired by Haraway’s (2016) contention that “it matters what we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with … It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories” (p. 35). Where children unevenly inherit environmental precarities (Nxumalo and Cedillo, 2017), we know that some stories are more urgent—more timely, more confronting, more risky—than others. Certain stories demand our attention, especially when they are difficult, unresolvable, and unsettle our familiar relationships with Cruickshank Park and Haro Woods (Nelson, 2018). We also know that our methods for telling stories are always imperfect. We cannot notice all stories, not all stories are ours to share, and each child, educator, and researcher connects differently to different stories (Nxumalo, 2016a, 2017a; Tsing, 2015). This, for us, generates a pedagogical intention of working to be accountable to our practices of generating and exchanging urgent digital place stories.

Doing our intention: sharing stories of death and dying

In Cruickshank Park, we understand our encounters with dead and dying birds as stories of urgency. The birds make present the realities of life and death for multispecies others, as well as our responsibilities toward how we live and die with others in the park. In Haro Woods, we understand our encounters with bike jumps as stories of urgency. For years, bikers have come into Haro Woods to dig, build, and create low mounds for trail riding and large jumps for BMX biking. The creation of these forms cuts and exposes roots, causes erosion, disrupts worms, and suffocates moss. These jumps make present the realities of life and death for multispecies others, as well as our responsibilities toward how we live and die with others in the woods. It is difficult to meet with dead birds in the park and bike jumps in the forest. As we activate our intention to tune to and share stories of urgency, we discuss how we are unsure how to respond to decaying bird carcasses, uncertain how we should move our iPhones around their bodies, and unclear how near we can get to deceased birds while being respectful, curious, and safe. We talk through how we are unsure how to respond with bike jumps that both draw us in and push us away, that bring us joy and sadness as we desire to climb and slide these forms one day and deconstruct them to “rescue” the more-than-human-others the next. Trying to respond to the urgency the dead birds and bike jumps make present, we have begun to think about how we create borders and boundaries with the birds and bike jumps: how do our emotional connections to the dead birds, soil, moss, and bikes influence where we do and do not travel, and what we do and do not Facetime to one another? How do dead birds, bike jumps, and iPhones reciprocally share and create boundaries with the children in the park and forest?

Extending our “stories of urgency” intention

The borders encountered as we share stories of urgency generate practices that push our pedagogical intentions in unexpected ways. Emotional connections become layered into our pedagogies. Stories of urgency unsettle our pedagogical intentions with their necessity as the force of their interjection reconfigures to whom, what, and how we pay attention; should iPhones and dead birds and bike jumps converse? How do we exchange these stories without pausing, sanitizing, or exceptionalizing them? Thinking with stories of urgency as an intention reminds us that our practices need to purposefully hold space for difficulty and uncertainty: how do we listen to, create, and share stories of urgency—of life and death, of borders and boundaries—with children?

Pedagogical intention: giving and receiving

When we began our Facetiming collaboration, we were conscious that our inquiry could be considered within popular frames of children as “global citizens” who should learn about different people, places, landscapes, and cultures in order to gain the skills necessary to succeed in an increasingly globalized world. We thought that such an approach might focus on exchanging facts and figures about Cruickshank Park and Haro Woods; had we adopted this image of the child, we might have looked at maps and followed the different seasons that happen in different hemispheres. Rather than comparing and contrasting the landscapes that we see through iPhones in a technical or formulaic way, we are inspired by Haraway’s (2016) practice of “passing patterns back and forth, giving and receiving, patterning, holding the unasked-for pattern in one’s hands, response-ability” (p. 12). We work to engage with the consequences that come from making messy connections through Facetiming. We see giving and receiving—storytelling and exchanging—as ethical and political practices that draw us into different relationships with place, multispecies others, people, and technologies.

Doing our intention: digitally giving and receiving place maps

In Cruickshank Park and Haro Woods, we attend to the trees, the sky, and the waterways. Consequential relationships with places form through meaningful entanglements. As we imagine how we might share our relationships with these places with one another, children document their relations with specific trees, rocks, and more-than-human others by creating place maps. These place maps attend to more than just geographical features (a common focus of Euro-Western representations of place) by documenting the ways in which we are entangled with more-than-human others. As we wonder why, and how, we might map with place, we think with Haraway’s (2016) contention that we must work to “relay connections that matter” (p. 10). How might we give and receive digital place maps as connections that matter as we knot together our entangled relations across Cruickshank Park and Haro Woods?

In Cruickshank Park, we create place maps that trace the human pathways from Mumma Tree to Bike Track Hill to Blue-winged Wasp Rock, attend to the Kulin seasons, and attune to the changing water levels in the creek. In Haro Woods, we orient ourselves between Eagle Rock and Worm River as we map the sounds of the creek, the textures of the soil, and the human-worn pathways in the forest. While these maps live on paper and iPhones, these maps make visible much more than a linear, topographical conception of space: the neon-colored pastel markings mix with indentations from pushing against tree bark, which are layered with soil scrubbed into the paper with tree leaves. These maps ignore, and cannot share, a great deal—air, histories, pollution. We wonder how we might do this “messy” place map-making work as a practice of making visible our accountabilities in places of ongoing settler colonialism—how do we work with maps in ways that do not perpetuate objective, instrumental mapping practices? We then take pictures of our place maps from both places and text them to one another. We wonder what is further obscured, and made visible, as we translate these handheld maps into pixels and beam them to one another—what is required to care with stories, presences, legacies, and connections that we share across oceans and that live in the places we learn with every day? We then follow Haro Woods’ maps in Cruickshank Park and Cruickshank Park’s maps in Haro Woods. We wonder what is required to receive place maps from one more-than-human place that is entangled in settler colonial politics in a different place—what are the consequences of giving and receiving place maps in places that have their own stories? Does the giving and receiving of the maps work to overlay stories on places that are already storied—and how might we be response-able to our practices of giving and receiving stories?

Extending our “giving and receiving” intention

Giving and receiving place maps make visible human entanglements and accountabilities with settler colonial places, disrupting “typical” map-making activities with children. Thinking with a pedagogical intention of giving and receiving, and of creating connections that feel consequential and necessary, reminds us that place map-making is not about the maps we create but about how our practices of mapping implicate us differently within our worlds. Giving and receiving, then, becomes an intention concerned with how, and why, we create and hold and listen with different stories and relationships: how do we give and receive consequential stories with place with children?

Sharing (and re-sharing) our pedagogical intentions

Throughout this article, we have developed our understanding of “pedagogical intentions” by weaving a common worlds framework together with the approaches to pedagogical intentionality outlined in two early childhood education curriculum documents. We have argued that, for us, pedagogical intentionality marks a purposeful, layered, consequential, tentative, and situated practice of navigating and co-constructing everyday pedagogical relationships in purposeful, answerable, local ways. This understanding of what it means to think with children with pedagogical intentions foregrounds questions of accountability and answerability, as we grapple with how our intentions literally care for, and delimit, how children might form different relationships with technologies, more-than-human-others, and collaborators oceans away. Importantly, this understanding of pedagogical intentionality requires that we recognize that how our intentions shape these potential relationships is incredibly consequential in settler colonial worlds—it matters that our intentions are deeply politicized, partial, and purposeful.

Building from this understanding of pedagogical intentionality, we have offered three stories of how we mobilize our central pedagogical intentions through our work with children and have made visible how we are inspired by Donna Haraway’s theorizing as we Facetime in careful but non-prescriptive ways that complexified our relations with Cruickshank Park and Haro Woods. We have shared our collaborative practice of formulating intentions, where we begin by holding tight to a theory we find inspiring or timely or robust, experiment with what might be required to mobilize these concepts in practice with children, and constantly work toward enacting this intention as we Facetime together. Crafting and doing intentions, we have argued, is a doubled and continuous practice, where our intentions weave theory with everyday moments with questions with tensions with imperfections. We, therefore, situate our understanding of pedagogical intentions as a practice or process; an action, not a definition.

Finally, at the heart of this article lies our assertion that making visible our pedagogical intentions, putting these intentions at risk, and returning to our pedagogical intentions to question and extend how they inform our work is a necessary practice for us, as researchers and educators working in places of ongoing settler colonialism. In making our pedagogical intentions visible, we recognize that a majority of the scholarship we draw upon is informed by Euro-Western theory: Haraway’s (2016) work and common worlds pedagogies are responses, made of different Euro-Western theories, to dominant neoliberal and colonial approaches to learning; the early childhood education pedagogical frameworks we work alongside are largely loyal to Euro-Western education paradigms. This means that our pedagogical intentions are imperfect and flooded with tensions. While we offer our intentions, and our understanding of pedagogical intentionality, as tentative propositions, we take seriously that we need to constantly grapple with how we are response-able to these same practices. As such, we conclude by offering questions—enduring pedagogical intentions—we carry with us: what does it mean to cultivate pedagogical intentions with complex theoretical lineages while thinking with technologies, with the park and forest, with Wurundjeri Country and Lekwungen territory, with settler colonial inheritances, within existing education systems, with children? To whom, and how, and why, do we need to work to make our pedagogical intentions visible to within the everyday relationships we hold in early childhood education? How can we work to be answerable to the situated, limited, personal pedagogical intentions we hold—and who decides what is entailed in pedagogical answerability in complex common worlds?