Fikile Nxumalo

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• Doctor of Philosophy Early Childhood Education
• Professor (Associate) at University of Toronto

This article examines children’s encounters with dead and dying bumble bees in their everyday entangled lives. Within the context of an early childhood classroom located in suburban British Columbia, Canada, the article stories situated and emergent bee–child worldings to illustrate possibilities for learning with other species in anthropogenically...

This book draws attention to the urgent need for early childhood education to critically encounter and pedagogically respond to the entanglements of environmentally damaged places, anti-blackness, and settler colonial legacies. Drawing from the author’s multi-year participatory action research with educators and children in suburban settings, the b...

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...

Working with Black feminist concepts of Black futurity and Black refusal, this article seeks to illustrate what is possible when early childhood research does not begin with the anti-Blackness that is pervasiveness in early childhood education. My focus is on the liberatory potential of attending to quotidian relational world-making practices in th...

This commentary highlights the urgent need to re‐envision climate and environmental education in response to the escalating climate crisis and its far‐reaching social, ecological, and political implications. As young people increasingly express concern for their futures, the authors call for a transformational change in science education that engag...

This article puts forward modes of belonging that hold potential for enacting environmental education for socio-ecological justice. The focus is on orientations that can shift the experiences of young, racialized immigrant children living and learning in settler colonial Canada, where neoliberal multiculturalism has a strong hold on early childhood...

In this article, we enact a partial cartographic storying of reconceptualist turns in our work. We do this by situating ourselves in relation to each other and our work across time as a mode of tracing the (situated) possibilities that these turns have enacted for children-in-relation with worlds. In enacting this dialogic and cartographic storying...

We are three Black women working in childhood and youth education research and practice in Tkaronto, Canada. In this paper we bring together our personal, research, and pedagogical inquiries into Black ecologies. We focus on foregrounding how Black ecologies can bring possibilities to (re)story Black nature relations and respond to socio-ecological...

The current intensification of Israel’s on-going war on Gaza has killed over 25,000 people in less than four months; half of them children. Nearly 60,000 people have been injured, almost all civilians, and many of them children (UNICEF). Many more thousands are missing beneath the rubble caused by the 25,000 tonnes of explosives that have been drop...

Given that human-caused climate change is one of the defining educational contexts in the 21st Century, we ask this question of ourselves and our educational research community: What is the role of education and educational research as we attempt to “cultivate equitable educational systems” in a world dominated by climate breakdown and related emer...

In this paper, we highlight climate change pedagogies within the context of an Indigenous Summer Encounter for Latinx and Indigenous children led by Miakan-Band Elders, members of a Central Texas Coahuiltecan community. We focus on anticolonial cartographies activated through movement, sound and performance that enacted Indigenous fugitivity, futur...

This article is derived from a webinar series conversation titled, “Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry.” During the webinar sessions the panelists, Dr. Fikile Nxumalo and Dr. Eve Tuck, discussed the ways in which their philosophical orientations contribute to how they enact inquiry as co-theorizing.

The goal of this chapter is to assess research that can inform understandings of places and spaces of learning.The chapter assesses evidence across three types of learning spaces: built spaces, digital spaces, and natural spaces. It looks at the role of these different kinds of spaces for learning, attainment, interpersonal relationships, skills de...

The overall goal of the ISEE Assessment is to pool multi-disciplinary expertise on educational systems and reforms from a range of stakeholders in an open and inclusive manner, and to undertake a scientifically robust and evidence based assessment that can inform education policy-making at all levels and on all scales. Its aim is not to be policy p...

This paper is a response to multiculturalism’s reductionist and othering constructions of Black presence in Canadian early childhood research and practice. We engage in possibilities for creating movement away from multiculturalism as the primary way of responding to anti-Blackness in Canadian early childhood education. We put forward orientations...

Megan Bang (Ojibwe and Italian descent) is a Professor of the Learning Sciences and Psychology at Northwestern University and is currently serving as the Senior Vice President at the Spencer Foundation. Dr. Bang’s research focuses on the complexities of navigating multiple meaning systems in creating and implementing more effective and just learnin...

Sharon Nelson-Barber, a sociolinguist, directs Culture & Language in STEM Education within WestEd’s Science and Engineering content area. She is co-founder of POLARIS—Pacific/Polar Opportunities to Learn, Advance and Research Indigenous Systems—a research and development network that supports healthy communities by integrating Indigenous perspectiv...

This chapter elucidates critical concepts of place in relation to Black-feminist and more-than-human geographies in the context of early childhood education. This conversation helps get at pressing political contexts for science education that are often excluded in white educational spaces. Our conversation with Dr. Nxumalo offers practical startin...

Who is a child and what is childhood? These are not easy questions to address, yet they are questions that every adult could potentially answer. Every adult was once a child and we all have some form of understanding and conceptualization of childhood; albeit these may be rooted in different ontologies and draw on diverse epistemes. As such, these...

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 a...

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided yet more evidence of the impacts of injustice across intersecting raced, gendered and classed lines. For Black people, the pandemic is further exposing the brutal effect of ongoing systemic health inequities (Etowa & Hyman, 2021). At the same time, an intensified global uprising against anti-Black violence in resp...

In this chapter, we are engaged in the task of highlighting the ways in which Black geographies have been placed into conversation with early childhood studies. Working from the understanding that the field of Black geographies is relatively new to early childhood education and early childhood studies, we begin with a review of the orientations tha...

The symposium we present here is inspired by the tensions and potentials of decentering the human in early childhood education research . In particular, we see several important questions emerging that can benefit from further engagement in early childhood scholarship. These questions include: How can unsettling human-centeredness also unsettle the...

Inquiry-based curriculum is a responsive approach to education in which young children are viewed as capable protagonists of their learning. Inquiry-based curriculum has the potential to challenge the dominance of developmental psychology as the primary way of understanding young children's learning. This approach to curriculum-making also disrupts...

This essay engages with the generative potentials and necessity of attunement to place in education. I focus in particular on what bringing Indigenous and Black feminisms and feminist new materialisms into conversation, might mobilize towards unsettling the anthropocentric, colonial and anti-black inheritances of early childhood education. I situat...

The authors bring together decolonial, place attuned, and critical posthumanist orientations to analyze an event during a residential workshop organized as part of a state-funded research project on decolonizing early childhood discourses in South Africa. An invitation during the workshop to grapple with what might be unsettling by attending to the...

Classroom pet programs have become extremely popular in urban North American early childhood classrooms. This article challenges anthropocentric child-pet pedagogies by proposing common world pedagogies of ‘staying with the trouble.’ Drawing from a common world multispecies ethnography in one early childhood centre, the authors engage with the spec...

We interviewed Fikile Nxumalo in Vancouver during the Critical Ethnic Studies Association (CESA) conference in June of 2018. An important part of her research has taken place in the province of British Columbia, Canada where she has collaborated with early childhood educators.

nquiry course. We focus on the situated ethical and (micro)political grapplings that emerged from paying attention to the more-than-human alongside asymmetrical human and more-than-human lifeworlds. Our orientation toward the ethical and (micro)political is enacted through visual, poetic, and narrative storytelling that attempts to make visible wha...

This powerful edited collection disrupts the deficit-oriented discourses that currently frame the field of early childhood education (ECE) and illuminates avenues for critique and opportunities for change. Researchers from across the globe offer their insight and expertise in challenging the logic within ECE that often frames children and their fam...

This conclusion chapter highlights some of the ways in which key concepts and practices put forth by the authors of the book show potential to disrupt deficit discourses in early childhood education. The chapter also discusses why alongside such potentially emancipatory orientations, there remains a need for constant vigilance against neoliberal ra...

In 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 i...

Amidst the ongoing impacts of systemic and personally-experienced discrimination in many young children’s lives, addressing issues of social justice and equity remains an urgent concern in early childhood education (ECE) settings. In this chapter, we respond to this concern by reviewing recent scholarship that has described and critically interroga...

In this article, the authors critically and generatively encounter emergent curriculum, drawing from their experiences working as pedagogistas in three different early childhood education centres in Western Canada. The intent is to engage with the concept of emergence as that which can bring ethical and political engagements with curriculum and ped...

This paper introduces common worlding approaches in early childhood education as possibilities for situating educational practices within current times of environmental precarity. Particularly, it offers new questions to early childhood nature education practices that reinscribe settler colonial and Euro-Western binary logics.

This article focuses on the inclusion of local environmental education for a class of kindergarten children in Austin, Texas. The purpose is to inspire educators to include local waterways as a compelling source for children to learn alongside environmental challenges in their immediate contexts, to learn how to live in reciprocal relations with wa...

This article aims to center Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies in considerations of place, environment, and “nature” in early childhood studies. We consider how these perspectives might enact knowledge-making that politicizes, unsettles, and (re)stories place-based studies of childhood. In particular, we are interested in...

Classroom pet programs have become extremely popular in urban North American early childhood classrooms. This article challenges anthropocentric child-pet pedagogies by proposing common world pedagogies of ‘staying with the trouble.’ Drawing from a common world multispecies ethnography in one early childhood centre, the authors engage with the spec...

This paper focuses on children’s relations with what is now known as Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia, Canada. In particular, it grapples with encounters with the mountain, atop which several childcare centres are located. The mountain, on unceded Indigenous Coast Salish territories, has become a contested site of colonial capitalist extraction...

This article seeks to contribute towards an unsettling of dominant framings of quality pedagogical practices. The author puts to work the figure of the modest witness as a way of storying everyday pedagogical encounters in childhood settings that might refigure quality in practice as materialized more-than-human becomings. Working within the partic...

In this paper, I craft a methodological orientation for attending to the intricacies of everyday place encounters in early childhood settings with particular attention to settler colonialism and more-than-human entanglements. Drawing from my work with children and educators in childcare settings located in what is now British Columbia, Canada, I us...

In this article we engage in a dialogue about some of the ideas that resonated with us in connection with the “Learning How to Inherit in Colonized and Ecologically Challenged Lifeworlds” symposium that took place at the University of Victoria in September 2014. Our aim is to begin to consider together the possibilities and challenges these ideas m...

Current times of anthropogenically damaged landscapes call us to rethink 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 rethinking is unsettling the colonial nature/culture divide in Western epistemolo...

I situate this chapter alongside recent work in early childhood studies that has used more-than-human 1 epistemologies and ontologies to consider nature pedagogies in relation to Indigenous knowledges, human/more-than-human relationalities, natureculture entanglements, and anticolonial possibilities (Duhn, 2012; Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2013; Ritchie, 201...

The article examines the entangled constitution of the child-bear figure through the analytics of late liberal colonial investments. It maps three frictional child-bear encounters, both imaginary and real, in the context of early childhood classrooms: bears as unwelcome and (yet) original inhabitants that pose a threat to human safety, bears as end...

The article provides a discussion of “researching” neoliberalisms and neocolonialisms in white settler colonial societies such as Canada. It addresses the research implications after conceptualizing neoliberalisms as assemblages that are always already implicated in colonial histories. Specifically, the article discusses the need to rethink methodo...

This chapter provides a challenge to positivist notions of partnership in early childhood education, and instead proposes a re-generative posthumanist perspective, based on relationality of partnerships. Specifically, the chapter addresses the troubles and struggles inherited in research partnerships through a non-idealized vision of research partn...

This article seeks to unsettle representational practices enacted through dominant multicultural pedagogical approaches in the early childhood classroom. Drawing from a research study in early childhood centers that investigated practitioners' and children's negotiations of racial difference, I explore how multicultural pedagogical approaches in ea...

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, spac...

Lunch Time at the Child Care Centre: Neoliberal Assemblages in Early Childhood Education In this article we interrogate neoliberal assemblages within the context of eating and feeding practices in early childhood education. We consider how neoliberal assemblages are enacted and created through multiple linkages between micro and macro regulations a...

The role that histidyl, seryl, tyrosyl, and other side chains of small peptides play in the formation of vanadate complexes has been investigated using 1H, 13C, and 51V nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Formation constants of product complexes in aqueous solution have been determined and the influence of pH on the equilibria established. The...