Workshop: Writing Small Weather Stories to Change the Narrative

Theme: Postqualitative Research (Voicing Places): Basic Skills and Good Practic

Emerging methodologies - basic introduction to communicative response-abilities

New ways of doing research, for understanding worlds differently

Voicing Derbarl Yerrigan as a feminist anti-colonial methodology

The paper voices Derbarl Yerrigan, a significant river in Western Australia, through three imperfect, non-innocent, and necessary river-child stories. These stories highlight the emergence of a feminist anti-colonial methodology that is attentive to settler response-abilities to Derbarl Yerrigan through situated, relational, active, and generative research methods. Voicing Derbarl Yerrigan influences the methodological practices used as part of an ongoing river-child walking inquiry that is concerned with generating climate change pedagogies in response to the global climate crises and calls for new ways of thinking and producing knowledge. In particular, the authors found that voicing as a methodology includes listening and being responsive to Derbarl Yerrigan\u27s invitations, paying attention to pastspresentsfutures, and forming attachments through naming. By telling lively settler river-child stories, this paper shows how voicing Derbarl Yerrigan is vital to open new possibilities for education and has implications for settler-colonial contexts, where the focus on learning shifts from learning about the world to learning to become with multispecies river worlds

An unapologetic feminist response

In the spirit of reformulating notions of critique, this response builds on the creative research experimentation that the authors enacted to consider air differently. The authors continue to be lured by generosity, curiosity, surprise, and wonder and suggest two feminist responses that relate to and generate knowledge in alternative ways. Two experimentations (collective experimental story writing and erasure poetry) are offered to readers with the aim of activating new thinkings, doings, and relations with air

Conversations with rain: Proposing poetic and non-linear interpretation strategies in the art gallery

Conversations with Rain aims to disrupt conventional socio-constructivist and cognitive notions of the child familiar in museum settings by rethinking children’s relations with art objects and weather worlds. Our rationale suggests that poetic and non-linear interpretation strategies, combined with artist studio practices that heighten presence and attention, expand the potential of more porous entanglements for children with the world, and potentially transform our climate futures. Disrupting didactic Gallery programming and environmental ‘learning about’ practices, we propose responsive, participatory, multisensory, open-ended, and poetic opportunities that recognise the unfixed, iterative, and tacit knowledges of the child. Building a body of research through a suite of five creative outputs Conversations with Rain contributes to more-than-human pedagogies that investigate how interdisciplinary, embodied, and practice-led approaches deepen engagement, lead to more responsive nature and culture relations, and enliven connection and empathy with children, art objects, and the world

Weather bodies: Experimenting with dance improvisation in environmental education in the early years

This paper reports on insights gained from incorporating dance improvisation into a broader early years environmental education ethnographic research project. Findings are reported from a two-day workshop where a dancer was invited to work with young children to attune to the weather through their bodies. In these workshops, the practice of dance improvisation was used as a deliberate interference to disrupt the disconnected and disembodied ways in which weather is often taught to young children. The paper argues that when children attune with weather through the embodied and relational practice of dance improvisation, this challenges the common practice of learning about weather as a separate phenomenon happening outside the classroom. Dance, as an intervention, helps to de-stabilise binary human-nature relations and reveals how children might come to understand their (human) selves as also weather bodies. New ways to understand humans’ entanglements with current weather events are also articulated, offering educators and researchers strategies for considering how the practice of dance improvisation might be integrated into early years education as an innovative approach to environmental learning

Aesthetic-ethical-political movements in professional learning: Encounters with feminist new materialisms and Reggio Emilia in early childhood research

© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Professional learning is considered essential for early childhood teachers, and is frequently associated with childhood outcomes and dominant constructs of quality which perpetuate neoliberal ideals and position early childhood teachers within a framework of rationality, privileging discourses of masculinity and power. By engaging with feminist new materialist perspectives, with the concept of ‘movement’, and with the theory-practice of the educational project of the city of Reggio Emilia, Italy, this paper extends understandings of professional learning to include nonhuman others as worthy interlocutors, and puts forth an invitation to welcome unease and an aesthetic-ethical-political stance in early childhood education. To complicate normative conceptions of professional learning, fragments from a project that used pedagogical documentation and dialogue to transform children’s relations with waste are presented. These fragments elucidate how professional learning in early childhood education might be aesthetically-ethically-politically conceptually grounded and practiced. The conclusions presented are neither simple nor linear; rather invitations are offered to problematise, to avoid being satisfied with overt, dominant and linear constructs, and to welcome uncertainty in worldly relations

Walk to country, talk to country

“It’s good to talk to Country,” says Anne Poelina, affirming that from a very early age, in the Kimberley region of northern Australia, Indigenous people are ‘taught Country’. They learn that the land is alive, that it has agency, and that it holds memories of our shared experiences, both human and other-than-human. “It’s good for your mental state to talk to Country,” Poelina continues, “to meditate on how your mind and heart, spirit and soul are aligned with the Earth on which you walk, knowing that when you walk on this Earth, the Earth can actually feel your presence, and with that vibration there is a transmission that is bouncing off this Earth, wanting us to understand that Earth can feel our presence. That’s how we speak to Country – it’s a different mindset. English speaks a different way.