Lines in the snow; minor paths in the search for early childhood education for planetary wellbeing

Anne Myrstad,Abigail Hackett,Pernille Bartnæs

doi:10.1177/2043610620983590

Anne Myrstad, Abigail Hackett + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/2043610620983590

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Abstract

This paper explores what place means for early childhood education at a time of global environmental precarity. We draw on fieldwork in Arctic Norway, where kindergarten children spend time with snow for more than half of the year. Children’s movement attunes to the nuances and diversity of the snow, as seasons, temperature, light, wind and weather change the consistency of snow and the possibilities for what can occur. The paper presents data of children walking in deep snow during an ice-fishing trip, a practice known as ‘grynne’, asking what we can learn both about the moment-by-moment attunement between child, snow and place necessary to grynne, and the paths of movement left behind in the snow afterwards. We draw on Manning’s work in order to trace the major and minor gestures running through grynne, as an analytic starting point for educators considering the role early years pedagogy might play in planetary sustainability.Thinking beyond the notion of humans as masterfully in control of environment, Ingold’s notion of correspondence offers a counter, advocating for a ‘lifetime of intimate gestural and sensory engagement’ as a way of learning to attune more deeply to place and take seriously the way in which place and humans mutually shape each other. In a place where seasonal temporality matters, in extreme ways that change how children’s bodies can move, we consider what children’s entanglement with snow can teach us, educators as well as researchers, about education for sustainability.

Highlights

Children, like all of us, are embedded in local places, wherever they may be and interpenetrated by global flows of knowledge, materials and virtual connections (Alaimo, 2016; Hackett, Procter, and Seymour, 2015; Somerville, 2015; Taylor and Giugni, 2012)
Whilst the purpose of the kindergarten trip was to make a base camp and do ice fishing, following our methodology, we were interested in casting our attention beyond the pre-planned activities, to pay attention to what kinds of correspondence might unfold between place, children and snow
An important shift in the scholarship around environmental precarity and education has been to move beyond tropes of ‘solutions’ or ‘human mastery’

Summary

Introduction

Like all of us, are embedded in local places, wherever they may be and interpenetrated by global flows of knowledge, materials and virtual connections (Alaimo, 2016; Hackett, Procter, and Seymour, 2015; Somerville, 2015; Taylor and Giugni, 2012). We consider how conceptualising children’s movement through deep snow as a mutual process of correspondence (Ingold, 2013), replete with minor gestures (Manning, 2016) that offer the possibility to unthink human mastery (Singh, 2018), might provide literal and metaphorical lessons for how educators might respond in a context outside of human control. Somerville (2016) critiques environmental education frameworks for their Western-centrism, pointing out that when we teach children that the environment is important for human survival and it is their responsibility to act to save it, we are conveying to children that they are heroes who can save the planet with their actions Whilst this aims to move individuals to act in particular ways, it sends a message about the human race as powerful masters of both their own fate and that of the rest of the world. By emphasising children’s attunement to their surroundings, we want to create a field of resonance for the minor gesture and offer alternatives to the dominant political and economic discourses of sustainability-as-mastery (Elliott and Davies, 2009; Ingold, 2019; Somerville, 2016)

Methodology approach

Conclusion