Envisioning Black space in environmental education for young children

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this article, we bring attention to absences and deficit assumptions that continue to circulate in relation to environmental education for young Black children in North America. We focus our attention on tracing some of the ways in which racial innocence works to exclude and limit possibilities for young Black children’s learning. Our analysis includes making visible connections between racialized discourses of childhood innocence, antiblackness in schooling, ongoing settler colonialism, and dominant forms of environmental education for young children. In seeking otherwise possibilities for Black childhoods in environmental education contexts, we turn to Black speculative fiction as a creative and generative mode of imagining fugitive educational spaces for young Black children.