Re-membering the lands of schooling

Abstract

What if children remade the world? What would adults have to give up, make room for, no longer silence or erase to allow this world to be remade? In this paper I propose that thinking with, in and through the land of schooling is one way to account for the violences that adult humans have inflicted on the earth and specifically the lands of schooling. Working with an embodied re-membering of the past, which entails rejecting colonialist practices of erasure and avoidance of the lands of schooling. The setting for this work is the colonised land of South Africa, which is not in the past and a seminar, facilitated by the author, on re-membering the lands of schooling, held on the land of the coloniser in Great Britain in 2023. The seminar troubled the enduring and problematic legacy of coloniality. The seminar offered an opportunity for some of the adult participants to engage in re-membering the land of their primary schooling as an ecopedagogical practice, which centred childhood as already knowing and entangled with climate injustices perpetuated generations ago, in a timeline of the earth that is not linear. Re-membering the land of schooling foregrounds some of the complexity of childhood and the land on which primary schooling happens. I experiment with tracing partial entanglements of the land of schooling, and offer storytelling and counter-mapping to animate ways of thinking, playing and recognising differently child and the land of schooling, as always already in relation.