How climate change education is hurting the environment

Fikile Nxumalo writes about Planet Texas 2050 and how climate changes will negatively impact students in an article published in 2018.Office of the VP for Researc

Decolonial Water Pedagogies: Invitations to Black, Indigenous, and Black-Indigenous World-Making

In this paper, I share everyday stories of young people’s pedagogical encounters with water. I share these stories as illustrations of pedagogies that welcome young people into caring relationships with more-than-human life. I focus on the decolonial potential of these pedagogical encounters in relation to what they activate for Black, Indigenous and Black-Indigenous world making

Unruly Raccoons and Troubled Educators: Nature/Culture Divides in a Childcare Centre

Current times of anthropogenically damaged landscapes call us to re-think human and nonhuman relations and consider multiple possibilities for alternative and more sustainable futures. As many environmental and Indigenous humanities scholars have noted, central to this re-thinking is unsettling the colonial nature/culture divide in Western epistemology. In this paper, through a series of situated, small, everyday stories from childcare centres, we relate raccoon-child-educator encounters in order to consider how raccoons’ repeated boundary-crossing and their apprehension as unruly subjects might reveal the impossibility of the nature/culture divide. We tell these stories, not to offer a final fixed solution to the asymmetrical, awkward and frictional entanglements of humans’ and raccoons’ lives, but as a responsive telling that may bring forth new possibilities for responsible, affective and ethical co-habitations

Decolonial Water Stories: Intergenerational Pedagogies at an Indigenous Summer Camp in Austin, Texas.

This paper is situated within a growing body of work in early childhood studies that suggests the need to firmly situate early childhood education within current ecological challenges and their unevenly inherited impacts. Through a participatory ethnography of an Indigenous summer program led by Indigenous elders, we engage with the question of how early childhood pedagogical practices might move away from dominant romanticized and developmental approaches to learning about the natural world. Attuning to transdisciplinary decolonial perspectives, we work with stories, Indigenous knowledges, and everyday pedagogical encounters to make visible possibilities for situated decolonial pedagogical engagements with more-thanhuman worlds.Office of the VP for Researc

Nomadic Research Practices in Early Childhood: Interrupting Racisms and Colonialisms

This paper considers how research practices on racialization in early childhood education might be reconceptualized when racialization is placed within relational intricacies and affects in multiple encounters. By foregrounding race and its emergence in multifarious, unpredictable ways in everyday encounters between human and non-human bodies, space, and discourse, the paper investigates how a movement toward research analyses that engage with both the materiality of race and its systemic and discursive formations might be used to constantly seek new ethical ways of responding to and acting against racisms and colonialism in early childhood

Effect of Intra-row Spacing on Growth and Yield of Irish Potato (Solanum tuberosum L. cv. Mondial) Grown in a Sub-tropical Environment of Eswatini

Irish potato yields vary widely, usually showing a declining trend, due to differences in in-row spacing used, as well as poor varietal selection for specific locations. In this study the growth and yield responses to different intra-row spacing on Irish potato cultivar Mondial was evaluated. The treatments consisted of four intra-rows spacing namely: 15 cm, 30 cm, 45 cm and 60 cm. Inter-row spacing was maintained at 90 cm for all treatments. Treatments were arranged in a Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) and replicated four times. Measurements were taken on plant height, number of potato tubers per plant, leaf length and width and fresh weight of potato tubers. In-row spacing were significantly different at P <0.05 with 15 cm producing the highest mean height (26.90 cm) at 14 weeks after planting. The number of stems per plant were not significantly influenced (P>0.05) by the intra- row spacing. The highest number of main stems (6) was recorded at 45 cm spacing and the lowest (5) at 15 cm spacing. The number of tubers per plant were not significantly different (P>0.05) in all the intra row spacing, and 15 cm intra row spacing had the highest number of tubers. There were significant (P<0.05) differences among the different intra row spacing for yield per plot. The highest yield (6.71 t/ha) was at the 60 cm spacing and the lowest (4.87 t/ha) was at the 15cm spacing in terms of size and marketability of the tubers. Based on the findings of the study it can be concluded that intra row spacing can be chosen according to the farmer’s desired size of tuber: that is to say as the intra row spacing decreases there is also a decrease in the size of tuber produced and vice versa. These results have shown that Irish potato (cultivar Mondial) grown at the 60 cm x 90 cm intra row spacing gave the best yield results and economic yields

Protocol: Mapping social networks, social influence and sexual health among youth in rural KwaZulu-Natal, the Sixhumene cohort study [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]

Background: Sexual behaviour and sexually transmitted infections are strongly affected by social connections, and interventions are often adapted more readily when diffused through social networks. However, evidence on how young people acquire ideas and change behaviour through the influence of important social contacts is not well understood in high-HIV-prevalence settings, with the result that past peer-led HIV-prevention interventions have had limited success. / Methods: We therefore designed a cohort study (named Sixhumene or ‘we are connected’) to follow young people in three rural and small-town communities in uMkhanyakude district, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and the people that these youth identify as important in their lives. We will interview them five times over three years, at each visit collecting information on their socioeconomic, social and sexual health lives, and testing them for HIV and herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2). We will use this information to understand how these young people’s sexual health decisions are formed. This will include evaluating how poor sexual health outcomes are correlated across social networks, how youth mimic the attitudes and behaviours of those around them, who is at greatest risk of acquiring HIV and HSV-2, and who might be most influential within communities and thus best able to promote protective interventions. / Discussion: The information gathered through this study will allow us to describe social connection and influence spread through these real-world social networks, and how this leads to sexual health outcomes. Sixhumene will provide vital inputs for mathematical models of communities and spreading processes, as well as inform the development of effective interventions to protect the sexual health of community members through appropriate targeting with optimised messaging requiring fewer resources

Protocol: Mapping social networks, social influence and sexual health among youth in rural KwaZulu-Natal, the Sixhumene cohort study

Background: Sexual behaviour and sexually transmitted infections are strongly affected by social connections, and interventions are often adapted more readily when diffused through social networks. However, evidence on how young people acquire ideas and change behaviour through the influence of important social contacts is not well understood in high-HIV-prevalence settings, with the result that past peer-led HIV-prevention interventions have had limited success. Methods: We therefore designed a cohort study (named Sixhumene or ‘we are connected’) to follow young people in three rural and small-town communities in uMkhanyakude district, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and the people that these youth identify as important in their lives. We will interview them five times over three years, at each visit collecting information on their socioeconomic, social and sexual health lives, and testing them for HIV and herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2). We will use this information to understand how these young people’s sexual health decisions are formed. This will include evaluating how poor sexual health outcomes are correlated across social networks, how youth mimic the attitudes and behaviours of those around them, who is at greatest risk of acquiring HIV and HSV-2, and who might be most influential within communities and thus best able to promote protective interventions. Discussion: The information gathered through this study will allow us to describe social connection and influence spread through these real-world social networks, and how this leads to sexual health outcomes. Sixhumene will provide vital inputs for mathematical models of communities and spreading processes, as well as inform the development of effective interventions to protect the sexual health of community members through appropriate targeting with optimised messaging requiring fewer resources.</ns3:p

Learning spaces:built, natural and digital considerations for learning and learners

Learning spaces: Built, natural and digital considerations for learning and learner

Decolonial Water Stories: Affective Pedagogies with Young Children

This article is situated within ongoing efforts in early childhood education to unsettle extractive relations with the more-than-human world and efforts to situate children’s learning within current conditions of environmental vulnerability. The authors discuss some pedagogical and curricular interruptions that emerged from foregrounding Indigenous knowledges and non-anthropocentric modes of learning in an inquiry that focused on young children’s water relations. We focus in particular on the affective resonances that emerged from kindergarten children’s encounters with a creek in Austin, Texas. In conversation with Indigenous feminisms, we discuss these affective encounters in relation to their decolonial potentials. We argue for the mattering of affective pedagogies that nurture nonanthropocentric relations while centering Indigenous land and life.Office of the VP for Researc