Storying with plastic excess: relations with plastic in early childhood education

Abstract

ABSTRACT The earth is drowning in plastic waste. Yet, as the plastic waste crisis grows exponentially, responses to excess waste remain stuck around containment and management processes. These approaches fail to notice that plastics know no boundaries. We now encounter plastic rocks, plastic water, plastic bodies, plastic worlds spilling into oceans and rivers and across landscapes. Responding to the complexity of plastic’s unruly presence demands careful attention both globally and within situated local contexts. This article explores how the queer synthetic curriculum takes up the concept of excess through common worlding waste pedagogies to attend to children’s relations with plastic waste. We speculate with the idea of excess by making large amounts of plastic the main protagonist in an early childhood classroom. Disrupting waste management’s metaphors of distance, we exaggerate plastic’s presence: a plastic whale stomach is stuffed with plastic bottles, dozens of bottles hang from the ceiling, hundreds of bottles are strewn across the classroom floor, and crochet hooks turn out plastic yarn balls. Without claiming to develop children’s understanding of the problematic nature of waste, this article stories moments of excess that might provoke subjective transformations as children encounter excess in their daily lives.