With(in) the Forest: (Re)conceptualizing Pedagogies of Care

Abstract

Drawing on moments from an early learning forest inquiry located on Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSÁNEĆ territories, otherwise known as Victoria, BC, this paper engages with the messy politics of “care” that emerge when early childhood education and colonized forest ecologies meet. In it, we take up the challenge of unsettling our deeply held conceptualizations of care through a series of pedagogical stumblings with young children’s worldly forest relations. Foregrounding the question “what constitutes good care in troubling times?” this discussion explores the logics we draw on to respond to the increasing sense of urgency in contemporary calls to teach children how to care for the earth. Can we learn to inhabit pedagogies of care in early childhood educational practice beyond simply retooling the extractive settler-colonial stewardship frameworks that brought us to this era of uncertainty? And what happens if we invite a wider cast of participants into our understandings of care than those prevailing early learning approaches tend to promote?

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With(in) the Forest: (Re)conceptualizing Pedagogies of Care
Haro Woods, Narda Nelson, Sherri-Lynn Yazbeck, Ildikó Danis, Deanna Elliott, Julia Wilson, Johanna
Payjack, and Anne Pickup
Haro Woods is a second-growth forest situated on the unceded Coast and Strait Salish territories. e woods are not separate from
the rest of the territories despite the perceived name and boundary changes that have resulted from colonization and urbanization
of the area. Haro Woods is an assemblage of Douglas r, hemlock, arbutus, big leaf maple, and cottonwood intertwined with English
ivy, Himalayan blackberry, and spurge laurel. Finnerty Creek, an urban-inuenced drainage-to-shoreline network, runs through
the forest, while black-tailed deer, chestnut-backed chickadees, barred owls, banana slugs, and a myriad of other creatures feed, nd
shelter, and migrate with(in) and through the woods. Urbanization, by both passive and active presence, has caused soil and root
disruption, erosion, and some disturbance to wildlife.
Narda Nelson is a master’s student in the School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria, located on the traditional territories
of Lekwungen-speaking peoples. Drawing on her background in gender studies, Narda takes an interdisciplinary approach to
rethinking young children’s relations with animals, plants, and landscape forms. She works as a pedagogista with UVic Child Care
Services, with a particular interest in thinking with processes of rot (compost), death, and waste-ows as a conduit for promoting
sustainable and ethical futures with children. Email: nelsonn@uvic.ca
Sherri-Lynn Yazbeck is an early childhood educator at UVic Child Care Services. Drawing on her background in psychology,
philosophy, and early childhood education and inspired by “ordinary moments” with children, she is interested in the entangled
multispecies relationships and encounters that take place in the classroom, playground, nearby forests, and gardens. She is intrigued
by how these human and more-than-human assemblages create place and pedagogy in early education. She is also researching what
it might mean to practice care and sustainability through these children/more-than-human relationships. Email: syazbeck@uvic.ca
Ildikó Danis is an early childhood educator at UVic Child Care Services. She has a degree in early childhood special needs education
from Georgia State University, Atlanta, and experience in the Canadian, U.S., and Hungarian educational environments. Her interest
in complex and inclusive ways of forming “natural childhoods” spurred her curiosity about children’s relations with place and
everyday natural materials. Her focus on child-material relations and movement pedagogies is motivated by a commitment to
attending to stories and events that evolve by chance in the themes of children’s relations with other species, with the material world,
and with place. Email: idanis12@uvic.ca
Deanna Elliott is an early childhood educator at UVic Child Care Services. Her 19 years of experience working with toddlers has
strengthened her interest in materials and outdoor play spaces. She is curious about how relationships with place transform over
time for educators, children, and the more-than-human others. She is currently interested in the relationships toddlers build in forest
spaces, specically the engagements that take place among toddlers, forest spaces, and more-than-human others. Email: dinnie@
uvic.ca
Julia Wilson is an early childhood educator at UVic Child Care Services. In addition to her early childhood education diploma, she
has a degree in psychology/sociology from the University of Victoria. Her curiosity in the interdisciplinary eld of human-animal
studies has been her inspiration and driving force in fostering empathy and caring toward all species. Email: jnw@uvic.ca
Johanna Payjack is an early childhood educator working at UVic Child Care Services. She has 16 years of experience in the ECE
eld and is currently taking infant and toddler specialization courses. Fuelled by her recent coursework, she is exploring the question
“what are our preconceived images of the toddler and how do those images play out in the materials we present in our shared
environments?” Email: jpayjack@uvic.ca
Anne Pickup is an early childhood educator at UVic Child Care Services. Her 30 years of experience working with children from
infancy to school age has strengthened her interest in fostering deep connections between the natural world and the children and
families she works with. She is particularly interested in how as educators we can incorporate children’s play while respectfully
collaborating with the more-than-human others we encounter. Email: pickupal@uvic.ca

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is writing emerges out of a tangle of challenge and
possibility generated in the process of learning to care
for, and with, young children and more-than-human
others in a time of rapid environmental change. We live
in an era where news and social media sites increasingly
chronicle catastrophic loss created in the upheaval of
accelerated climate change, mass extinction, and other
violent phenomena. At the same time, social media has
been instrumental in mobilizing powerful resistance
movements against corporate and state fossil-fuel
development projects. Within this paradox and others,
indicative of the complicated times we live in, early
childhood educators are called to teach children to “care
for the Earth” as a conduit for enhancing childhood
development and creating more sustainable modes of
living (Chawla & Cushing, 2007; Collado & Staats, 2016;
Cox et al., 2017; Hedefalk, Almqvist, & Östman, 2015;
Louv, 2008).
Caring is what we do on a day-to-day basis with young
children and families. Sometimes we are even referred to as
care-givers. But increasingly we wonder what constitutes
“good” care in troubling times. How do dominant Euro-
Western frameworks inuence our understandings of
what it means to be in care-full relations with others?
And can we learn to inhabit pedagogies of care in early
childhood educational practice without simply retooling
the extractive settler-colonial stewardship frameworks
that brought us to such uncertainty in the rst place
(Clark, Pacini-Ketchabaw, & Hodgins, 2014; Nelson, Pacini-Ketchabaw, & Nxumalo, 2018; Nxumalo, 2016; Pacini-
Ketchabaw & Nxumalo, 2015; Taylor, 2017)?
Common Worlding Inquiry Framework
Sherri-Lynn, Ildikó, Anne, Julia, Deanna, and Johanna are early years educators who work together with Narda,
a pedagogista1 and researcher, as part of a university child care services educational team made up of a larger
group of educators, sta, researchers, and pedagogical facilitators. For over ve years, we have engaged in an
ongoing collective inquiry process as part of an intention to open ourselves up to new understandings of children’s
immediate common worlds (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2015). Among other things, a common
worlding approach reframes childhood as collective and relational rather than individualistic and developmental,
points we see as particularly pertinent to a discussion on care where we are trying stretch the very notion of who or
what can be considered part of our community and capable of engaging in care-full relations with others (Pacini-
Ketchabaw, Taylor, & Blaise, 2016; Taylor, 2013, 2017).
Each year, we choose an inquiry theme and guiding concepts to shape common worlding pedagogies in each of
Drawing on moments from an early learning
forest inquiry located on Songhees, Esquimalt,
and WSÁNEĆ territories, otherwise known
as Victoria, BC, this paper engages with the
messy politics of “care” that emerge when early
childhood education and colonized forest
ecologies meet. In it, we take up the challenge of
unsettling our deeply held conceptualizations of
care through a series of pedagogical stumblings
with young children’s worldly forest relations.
Foregrounding the question “what constitutes
good care in troubling times?” this discussion
explores the logics we draw on to respond to the
increasing sense of urgency in contemporary
calls to teach children how to care for the earth.
Can we learn to inhabit pedagogies of care in
early childhood educational practice beyond
simply retooling the extractive settler-colonial
stewardship frameworks that brought us to
this era of uncertainty? And what happens if
we invite a wider cast of participants into our
understandings of care than those prevailing
early learning approaches tend to promote?
Key words: care; forest; pedagogy; colonization;
nature; early childhood

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our centres from which a dynamic process of collective-focused engagement with young children can emerge.
Examples of past inquiries include thinking with paint, water, compost, textiles, tape, and movement and rethinking
relations with inhabitants of Haro Woods, an urban forest that surrounds the childhood centre on three sides
(Clark & Nelson, 2014; Clark et al., 2014; Hodgins, 2015; Land, 2017; Land & Danis, 2016; Nelson, 2018; Nelson,
Coon, & Chadwick, 2015; Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2013; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Clark, 2014; Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw,
2015; Yazbeck & Danis, 2015). e inquiry process is underscored by a commitment to learn to think and do
dierently together with materials, place, plants, animals, and landscape forms in response to the way status-quo
ways of thinking and doing have contributed to the making, and everyday remaking, of the dangerous times in
which we now nd ourselves. As Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Arica Taylor (2015) point out:
The recognition that … critical changes in earth systems are primarily human-induced carries
ethical implications for early childhood pedagogies. We can no longer afford the illusion of
our separateness from the rest of the natural world and so educators and young children must
rethink understandings of our responsibilities to the common world with share with other living
beings. (p. 45)
But what do we mean when we say we want to “think and do dierently with care” in our early childhood
forest pedagogies? Pacini-Ketchabaw and Taylor (2015) argue that “in settler colonial societies, the seemingly
unremarkable, everyday business as usual of early childhood education remains inadvertently (albeit oen
unknowingly) entangled in the social and ecological legacies of colonialism” (p. 1). With their words in mind,
we want to make “caring for and with” in our forest pedagogies remark-able. at is, rather than taking what
it means to care with young children for granted, we want to rethink and remark on our understandings in an
eort to unhinge them from what Heather Davis and Zoe Todd (2017) call the ecocidal logics that are so deeply
embedded in contemporary Canadian society. From our perspective, it is increasing clear that in these “colonized
and ecologically challenged times” (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor, Blaise, & de Finney, 2015, p. 3), business as usual
in early childhood education is simply not an option. At least, not if we take seriously the necessity to turn away
from the ongoing violence of well-established and untenable patterns of living that threaten the very existence of
a growing number of communities on earth.
More than an innocuous exercise, this discussion represents something consequential and oen overlooked: that
is, that the moral frameworks we infuse with everyday enactments of care in our early childhood practices, as well
as those we use to draw conclusions about who is or is not capable of giving or receiving care, reinforce specic
patterns of relating (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). is paper is an invitation to think expansively about what might be
required of us, as early childhood educators, to cultivate critical, creative, and care-full pedagogical interventions
into colonial patterns of relating, particularly those that render the plants and animals we share space with as
little more than instrumental conduits for enhancing childhood development. In it, we link the articulation of
pedagogies of care in everyday moments to the vital project of transformation necessary for creating viable futures
together. How might we mobilize care to “do otherwise” in everyday early childhood moments? And what might
be required of us in early learning practices to open up space for such possibilities to emerge?
Settler Colonial Implications
In using the terms settler colonial and settler colonialism throughout this discussion, we draw from the work of
Unangax scholar Eve Tuck and her colleagues Marcia McKenzie and Kate McCoy (2014), who describe settler
colonialism as “a form of colonization in which outsiders come to land inhabited by Indigenous peoples and claim
it as their own new home” (p. 6). Tuck and her colleague Wayne Yang (2012) write that

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land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make
Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of
Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological
violence. This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted
each day of occupation. This is why Patrick Wolfe (1999) emphasizes that settler colonialism is
a structure and not an event. In the process of settler colonialism, land is remade into property
and human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of the owner to his property.
(p. 5)
Red River Métis (otipemisiw) scholar Zoe Todd (2016b) discusses colonialism as an ongoing form of violence that
“tries to erase the relationships and reciprocal duties we share across boundaries, across stories, across species,
across space, and it inserts new logics, new principles, and new ideologies in their place” (para. 2). Michi Saagiig
Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2013) foregrounds settler colonial resource extraction and
the connection to Indigenous dispossession as processes that work together. She describes land, plants, and
Indigenous and animal bodies as framed as resources for extraction and dispossession under colonial and capitalist
frameworks.
It is vital to reect on these points to avoid falling into the trap of believing that, in virtue of our “good” intentions,
we sit outside the continuation of structural settler colonial violence. It feels necessary to juxtapose them with our
desire to rethink what it means to care with young children on the Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSÁNEĆ peoples’
territories, whose connections to the places we live and work on continue despite brutal histories of colonization
and its contemporary forms. Keeping the seriousness of what is at stake in mind, the question becomes one of moral
obligation: What can we do about it in our work with young children? Vanessa Clark, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw,
and Denise Hodgins’ (2014) approach in “inking with Paint: Troubling Settler Colonialisms rough Early
Childhood Art Practices” is helpful to think with in attempting to cra our approach to thinking through our own
entanglements on colonized lands:
By situating and implicating ourselves in destructive (albeit active and creative), violent, imperial
colonialist practices, we attempt, through our art pedagogy, to respond to the amnesia of settler
colonialism (Hilden & Lee, 2010). In engaging colonialism in this way, we hope that our work
can contribute to decolonizing efforts. Yet, we are leery of calling our work decolonizing, as
Tuck and Yang (2012) remind us of the problems in doing so. For example … even though we
attempt to respond to settler colonialism, we cannot stand outside its messy, implicated, ongoing
activities, and thus we recognize that there is no easy binary of colonizing/decolonizing.... Our art
pedagogy is therefore a motion toward becoming implicated in settler colonialism, as we work
to continually think through its complexities, creativities, and shifting and changing activities.
(p. 754)
We follow their example from similarly fraught positions as settlers engaging in forest pedagogies on the lands of
Lekwungen-speaking peoples, as well as that of Natasha Myers (2017) in turning our attention to “asking better
questions and cultivating more robust modes of inquiry” (p. 3) in our forest pedagogies. is also requires us to
take seriously the ongoing and uneasy process of unravelling our assumptions about what it means to care with
plants and animals and others we encounter in the forest we visit every week with 2- to 5-year-old children.
Caring For, Caring With
e way we learn about what care looks and feels like and who or what is deemed deserving or cast as a passive

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recipient of it shapes consequences and inuences the way we world together. Simply put, the way we conceptualize
care matters. Pauliina Rautio (2017) argues that
concepts can be thought of as answers to questions posed by the world. Concepts are answers
insomuch as they are certain ways of thinking about and acting within the world—excluding
other ways. In some cases we have grown accustomed to the answers or conceptualisations to
the extent that the original questions are no longer easily available. (p. 94, emphasis in original)
As such, reconceptualizing pedagogies of care, as well as putting them into action, is messy, imperfect, and
sometimes dicult work. Rather than relying on universalisms to reinforce a sense of being set apart from other
species in our forest pedagogies, we are learning to pay attention to moments that bind us together with forest
ecologies and the histories of this place.
Our interest in thinking about care as a profoundly more-than-human phenomenon pushes back on prevailing
child-centered approaches in Canadian early childhood education. An array of voices guides us in this inquiry
process, including those of the children we work with, our colleagues, and Tsawout Elder, ethnobotanist, and
knowledge keeper Earl Claxton, Jr., who took us on a forest walk to share some of the histories of this place and
his continued acts of resistance against ongoing settler colonial degradation of these territories. In sharing a few
of his cultural teachings about trees and other plants we regularly encounter in the forest, Elder Claxton also
reminds us that for Lekwungen-speaking peoples, the plants, animals, and landscape forms of these territories have
always been understood as teachers and kin. We are reminded here of Todd’s (2016a) assertion that with growing
eorts to foreground human-animal relations in academia, there is oen a failure to “credit Indigenous thinkers
for millennia of engagement with sentient environments, with cosmologies that enmesh people into complex
relationships between themselves and all relations, and with climates and atmospheres as important points of
organization and action” (pp. 6–7). It is with acknowledgment of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples’ inclusive
worldview that shaped—and continues to shape—relations in the places we now live and visit (Penn, 2006) that
we strive to open up our understandings about what it means to care with others in our forest pedagogies as a vital
part of challenging colonial assumptions about this place and our responsibilities here with young children.
In this discussion, we also draw on a number of Euro-Western feminist scholars’ voices. Like us, they must be
understood as rooted in the tradition of dominant thought that we are attempting to challenge in our pedagogies.
However, we draw on both non-Indigenous and Indigenous feminist scholarship to theorize care because, as Hodgins,
Yazbeck, and Wapenaar (forthcoming) point out, feminists have long challenged dominant conceptualizations of
care, putting forward the assertion that there are practices and aects in everyday moments that make living
possible. For example, Max Liboiron and colleagues (2017) describe care as “a form of political and ethical practice
that ‘holds things together’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011, p. 90; Martin et al., 2015),” further pointing out that “care
work can disproportionately aect certain groups more than others depending on gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality,
and perceived abilities” (p. 6). In her recent book Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More an Human Worlds,
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) conceptualizes care as an integral act of maintenance in everyday worlding
relations, a “critically disruptive doing” (p. 12), and “a speculative aective mode that encourages intervention in
what things could be” (p. 66).
Care emerges here as a contestable notion, one reproduced through our everyday relations. Welcoming an array of
subjectivities into our understandings, while pausing to rethink the “why” and “how” we care for and with others,
becomes vital in rethinking this dynamic. ere is no doubt that we, and the children we work with, care for the
forest. And yet, the values mainstream society infuses with everyday acts of caring for ourselves, plants, animals,
and the places we live simultaneously play a role in reproducing global systems of catastrophic loss. Given the

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seriousness of these times, the question becomes whether we can learn to care dierently and appreciate modes
of care in a way that resists carving care up into the imagined divide of so-called human interests versus more-
than-human others, so oen depicted as little more than resources to be managed for our (human) benet. What
consequences are produced in the types of care we choose to guide our everyday relations? As Puig de la Bellacasa
(2017) argues,
far from being an innocent activity, care in naturecultures cannot be purged from its predicaments:
for example, the tendency to pastoral paternalism, the power it gives to care takers, and the
unequal depletion of resources it implies in existing divisions of labor and exploitation of
nonhumans and humans…. [Care] is not about ideal “feel good” relationships, something
particularly crucial to think within the context of contemporary ecological engagements in
shattered and disproportionately distressed geographies of naturecultures. (p. 164)
ese points resonate with our choice to take a common worlding approach in our forest inquiry work. Taylor and
Giugni (2012, following Foucault [1986] and Levinas [1989]) discuss this method as useful for reconsidering “the
limits of the social … beyond a singular ethic of care of the self … [beyond] an exclusively human-focused ethic
of care of the ‘other’ … and [beyond] an ethic of care of an externalised environment” (pp. 110–111). If the point
of engaging in forest pedagogies is to foreground our shared vulnerabilities and responsibilities with others in an
eort to imagine new possibilities for living together, it seems to us that thinking expansively about what it means
to care and who is capable of this everyday act is an important part of the process.
Stumbling With
Far from easy or straightforward, engaging in this work demands we turn a critical lens on the way our own
conceptualizations of care are shaped by cultural practices that continue to privilege settler colonial ways of
knowing, managing, relating to, developing, playing in, and extracting from the places where we live and work.
Despite “knowing the forest” as the place we walk at least once a week with children, sometimes we feel like we are
stumbling over unfamiliar terrain in our attempts to rethink what it means to care in Haro Woods, beyond what
we have been taught about stewardship and enhancing childhood development (Nxumalo, 2016; Taylor, 2017).
Oxford tells us that stumbling can mean “to trip or lose one’s balance while walking, or move with diculty”
(Oxford University Press, 2018). Perhaps learning to care dierently with young children—that is, in a way that
refuses the foundational logics of an extractive capitalist society—means learning to stumble more oen as part of
the uncomfortable but necessary process of unsettling deeply held colonial narratives about what it means to care
with(in) this place.
We embrace the word stumbling here, and the feeling of uncertainty it creates, to help us navigate the tensions
of learning to care for and with others as settlers on these territories. To do this, we articulate three stumblings.
“Stumbling I” highlights our messy attempt to acknowledge the forest as an active participant in coshaping our
experiences and thoughts throughout this discussion. “Stumbling II” foregrounds the emergence of the Euro-
Western binary notion of a nature/culture divide in forest moments and the subsequent conceptual fault line this
imagined split creates, also known as anthropomorphism, which we have been taught to avoid since we were
young children in the Canadian educational system. “Stumbling III” draws attention to pedagogical moments
with invasive plants and unruly animals. Rather than trivialize stumbling as a stigmatized means of navigating the
world in an ableist society, we take it up as a tentative and powerful way of moving through the world that departs
from the cocksure arrogance of settler colonialism that moves throughout this place.
Each of the stumbling articulations we propose touches on issues deserving greater attention than we can provide

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within the parameters of this discussion. For example, while we touch on anthropomorphism, we do not oer
denitive answers to large questions about it; instead, these stumblings represent our attempt to navigate the
unfamiliar terrain of unsettling the frameworks we unconsciously invoke in choosing to care for (or neglect)
certain creatures and the places they call home. In Stumblings II and III we oer brief vignettes of forest inquiry
moments to provide examples of emergent everyday encounters in our work. We own these settler stumblings
as part of an eort to get somewhere new in pedagogy and practice, knowing we will continue to trip through
the ongoing process of trying to disrupt normative understandings of care. Rather than providing neat and tidy
answers or attempting to cover up our stumblings, here we make explicit some of the everyday tensions that
emerge in resisting the “tempting dichotomy” (Haraway, 1988) of either adopting the prevailing child-centered
approach to care or risking the appropriation of Indigenous land pedagogies. Because neither of those two are
viable ways forward, we accept the challenge of guring out an alternative way forward and see stumbling as an
inevitable and generative part of an imperfect process.
Again, this work is not necessarily easy to put into practice. Taking a common worlding approach to embrace
early childhood as a situated, plural, and political process is a radical departure from the dominant child-centered
approaches we (Sherri-Lynn, Ildikó, Julia, Deanna, Johanna, and Anne) learned in our training to become early
childhood educators. is shi requires us to rethink the norms, hierarchies, and values that continue to inform
our teaching and research practices, which can feel awkward and unsettling at times, but that is precisely the point.
As evidenced in the last 40-plus years, status-quo approaches to living have proven overwhelmingly dangerous to
the viability of the earth’s narrowing array of life forms.
Care itself is not exempt from producing this dynamic. e type of care we learn to cultivate through Euro-Western
frameworks tends to carry with it a belief that “we” belong to an undierentiated humanity, the Anthropos, which
exists outside of a passive “nature” at our disposal for human benet (Taylor, 2017). Because this construct remains
largely uncontested in mainstream Canadian ECE discourses, we believe it must be unsettled if we are to move
away from perpetuating the frameworks underlining unsustainable global patterns of living. Taylor and Giugni
(2012) write that working with a common worlding approach means “[taking] account of children’s relations with
all the others in their worlds—including the more-than-human others” (p. 108). Taking up this intention, we are
committed to thinking with more-than-humans as if they matter, that is, as coparticipants in storying and caring
for and with the places we live and learn (van Dooren & Rose, 2012).
Stumbling I
In writing this manuscript, we feel compelled to acknowledge Haro Woods as coauthor in its creation. is is
problematic for a number of reasons. And it is here we begin to stumble. Because we cannot set ourselves outside
of a long line of settlers who have laid claim to these territories in various ways, we list Haro Woods as a coauthor
in this paper with the understanding that this is not a neutral act. However, we also feel this is an important step
in decentering ourselves and interrupting the belief that we (humans) are sole creators of the forest pedagogies we
work with. We also see this move as consistent with the common worlding approach we work with and through
which we are attempting to learn to care with, think with, do with other species and landscape forms (elements) as
active coparticipants in worlding practices.
While uncertain about naming Haro Woods as a coauthor, knowing it could be misconstrued as an assumption
that we see the land is a willing participant in writing our version of the story or see ourselves as entitled and
capable of interpreting the voice of the forest, we feel we could always nd reasons to stay safe and complacent
in our work. Maybe it is time to risk doing something dierently in our writing instead of saying something in

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practice and neglecting to do so in academic circles. Remembering Earl Claxton Jr.’s suggestion that settlers need
to try to do things that feel uncomfortable, such as say hello or thank you in local Indigenous languages, to try
to get somewhere new even if we risk making mistakes, perhaps we can think of this simple act as an expression
of care, in the hopes it might crack open space for other readers to question their own interdependencies with
the places where they live, learn, and work. We tentatively take this step with the recognition that we continue to
benet from living on Lekwungen-speaking peoples’ lands and that much work remains to be done to check our
everyday structural privilege and support Indigenous struggles for justice.
Stumbling II
We are walking in the forest. e forest oor is littered
with sticks. We wonder how they got here. Windy days?
Dying trees? Sawed o? Belt loops, pockets, and hands
grasp, carry, abandon, and pick up again. “En garde!”
Sticks become swords, bridges over fast owing creeks,
forts protecting from heavy rains and hiking poles guiding
through deep water and up hills. We recognize “this stick’s
alive!” as we crouch down carefully, petting moss or
examining mushrooms rooted within. “It’s not a hole, it’s a
home!” We discover termites and wood bugs weaving their
way through, leaving us to wonder who else might inhabit
these homes. What microorganisms are we not seeing as we
grasp, carry, abandon, bridge, fort, and hike? We struggle
to leave sticks behind.
We are walking in the forest again. Among the trees, soil, deer, and moss we also nd abandoned bike parts, sharp
metal, beer cans, broken chairs, plastic shards, and condoms. At times, our eyes seem keenly primed to notice these
things above all else—as we walk, a child calls out “broken glass!” and an educator with glove on hand picks it up
and carries these le-behind pieces through the forest and back to the centre for “proper disposal.” Other times, our
attentions are drawn to “forest things”—we crouch down low, heads together, to watch closely as a banana slug crosses
the trail, never seeing that small piece of glass just to the side. Still, there are times we silently notice, make note in our
minds, say quietly to ourselves or maybe even out loud “broken glass,” but we walk on—acknowledging and wondering
but leaving behind.
What happens when we invite a wider cast of participants
into our understandings of care in early learning
pedagogies? For example, as Sherri-Lynn and Anne
highlight above, what if a stick’s need to care for and
with the forest factors into a conversation with the
children about how many sticks we should remove?
And, is it possible to care for the garbage we nd in the
forest outside of dominant environmental education
approaches that position young children as eco-heroes?
Of course, these speculative thoughts emerge from our
perceptions. Rather than sharing them here as part of an
attempt to transcend our settler positionality, we follow
Figure 1. Sticks-bridge.
Figure 2. Sticks-garbage.

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Anna Tsing (2015) in situating our (human) speculations about more-than-human others as the only starting
place we have to invite new considerations of, for example, a stick’s need to stay in the forest versus automatically
giving in to the desire to take, extract, and consume without wider consideration of others’ needs. Like us, a stick
or a piece of garbage does not cease being part of the ecological system once it leaves the forest space. However, its
ability to engage in a type of relational reciprocity changes depending on where the stick or the garbage continues
to live. While we stumble with the challenge of not contributing to the reication of so-called nature spaces as
existing separately from human spaces (the forest versus the childhood centre), we are simply trying to open up
new considerations beyond a child’s personal desire to extract (sticks, in this case) from the forest.
Pacini-Ketchabaw and her colleagues Sylvia Kind and Laurie Kocher (2017) describe encounters such as this one
as “a moment of meeting, where things and forces and human and non-human beings come together in spaces
of dierence” (p. 34). By meeting with, they suggest, “we decide how to respond—whether to follow, join with,
intervene, provoke, perhaps work against. Something is set in motion in this encounter” (p. 34). We wonder about
the power such moments hold to crack open space for learning to be aected (Latour, 2004, as cited in Taylor &
Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015), learning to attend, not only to our own ability to care, but also to the abilities of those
we encounter in the forest. Here, we stumble with unravelling our assumptions about how the world works. Water,
sap, soil, wood bugs, logs, and mushrooms are mobile, intra-active participants in our stick-y encounters, each
aected by the other, each aecting each other, each requiring us to listen with all our senses and be open to
becoming dierent, vulnerable, aected (Davies, 2014). Listening in these encounters, as Bronwyn Davies (2014)
writes, “is not about being bound by what you already know. It is [about attuning ourselves to] life as movement”
(p.1), where something as seemingly still as a stick on the ground is in care-full motion with the forest in ways we
had not previously imagined.
In the Euro-Western philosophical tradition, acknowledging sticks and garbage as active agents in forest relations
means opening ourselves up to the charge of anthropomorphism. Inspired by the example of Lekwungen-speaking
peoples, for whom so-called inanimate objects and other creatures have always been understood as kin who actively
coshape place relations, we return to Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), who speaks to the Euro-Western discomfort with
including more-than-humans in our understandings of care. Katie Ulrich (2018) puts it well in discussing Puig de
la Bellacasa as:
ready to risk the charge of initiating an anthropomorphist ethics of more-than-human care”
because speculative thinking will be necessary for imaging more caring worlds, and anxieties
about anthropomorphizing cannot be allowed to “paralyze our ethical imagination” (219). She
says we can’t let charges of anthropomorphism prevent us from acknowledging how nonhumans
do shape us, how the “cared for coforms the carer too” in cases when it seems humans are the
main ones doing the caring (219). (para. 6)
Opening ourselves up to thinking about how to care for and with the garbage we encounter in the forest might be
one of the most challenging stumbling blocks we regularly encounter in this process. Can we learn to remediate
spaces where care has been abandoned, where neglect itself becomes an act with repercussions? Over the past
few years, we have been paying attention to the garbage we inevitably face each time we enter Haro Woods, in
our endless, unsettling encounters with glass, abandoned bike parts, sharp metal, plastic shards, condoms, etc. At
times we put on gloves and remove the garbage; other times we examine it and move on. Sometimes we don’t, or
choose not to, even see it. While antithetical to the pristine images conjured up when nature-spaces are imagined,
garbage in the forest is one of the most predictable “others” we encounter. e conicted feelings we experience
about the abundance of garbage in the forest feel, in many ways, unreconcilable, yet demand care-full attention.

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Whether we like it or not, it is a reection and a reminder of our own complicity in consumer-culture patterns of
relating.
In grappling with these tensions, Anne engages the children with a story called What Matters, written by Alison
Hughes and illustrated by Holly Hatam (2016), which she nds helpful in thinking about the ongoing materiality of
garbage, the connections it creates, and the question of how to care with it by focusing on waste-ow connections
rather than resorting to an out-of-sight-out-of-mind philosophy. As the story goes, “a small, small, thing” (p. 5)
like removing garbage comes to matter a great deal. Myra Hird (2016) talks about the need to come to terms with
waste’s indeterminacy, that is, its ability to matter beyond human neglect, as a critical factor in coming to terms
with the “imprescriptability of our ethical responsibility to future human and environmental sustainability waste-
world making” (abstract). Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), too, highlights the ethical necessity of “remediating neglect,”
wherein “these ethics attract attention to the invisible but indispensable labors and resources [of earth others]”
(p. 162). “e ethicality here,” she says, “is about making us care for what humans—most of us—have learned to
collectively neglect” (p. 162).
Rather than focusing on picking up garbage within the good/bad binary descriptors attached to acts of “recycling
care,” perhaps we need to shi the focus to how these acts might impede or promote others’ ability to care. In Hughes
and Hatam’s (2016) story, the act of picking up a soda can becomes less about the care-full act than about how it
comes to matter to a series of other lives—those of an ant, a snail, a spider, a worm, a stream, a dog, baby birds, an
ocean—all in connection with that can. is story sheds light on some of the tensions and contradictions emerging
in our practice as we engage in (re)conceptualizing pedagogies of care. While we have learned to recognize the
shapes care takes in binary terms of good or bad, right or wrong, perhaps we can learn with young children about
questioning or contesting where certain modes of care come
from, why we value them, and what they continue to do in the
process of creating or worlding new ways forward.
Stumbling III
We are walking in the forest. We notice some trees covered with
ivy. e sun shines brightly through their green leaves. On other
trees, we see the ivy has been cut. It surrounds the tree, dead-
brown-decaying. As we continue to walk, we ask the children,
“What are your thoughts about ivy in the forest?” Some walk
away without answering; others look around; one child responds,
“It’s pretty, its leaf is like a heart”; another comments “It’s choking
the trees!” As we continue to walk, some children drag previously
cut vines behind them. Others use them to create a measuring
stick. We wonder about weaving baskets. It is time to make
our way back to the centre. We drop the ivy vines we have been
carrying. We leave them in Haro Woods.
An almost archway of Himalayan blackberry bushes moves over
the path we are walking on. As we stop to pick “ready berries,”
we are startled to see a mouse on a bramble eating too. We are
wildly curious. Our eyes dart around trying to catch a glimpse.
We decide to move back to give space. One educator crouches Figure 3. Ivy.

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down to model stillness and the mouse scampers
down a long, trailing bramble, taking cover under
the educator’s skirt for a moment and then out the
other side and into another blackberry bush. We
feel relief and excitement about our encounter.
A child expresses later in the day, “We share the
forest. We share the berries.”
We have come to know English ivy and Himalayan
blackberries as invasive and damaging to the
forest. But, as Ildikó and Johanna discuss, we
stumble here again with an impulse to appreciate
the beauty of the sun shining through heart-
shaped ivy leaves, the possibility of weaving
baskets with its trailing stems, savouring the
sweet (sometimes sour) taste of a “ready berry,”
and sharing in the excitement of seeing a mouse
eating the same berries we like to eat. We nd
joy in splashing in pockets of water le behind because of soil erosion and watching deer drink from these same
pockets. We watch deer sometimes eating from “colonizing” plants and notice the way birds nd shelter in the ivy.
One child excitedly cuts ivy to “save trees” while another looks horried at the prospect of killing it, asking “Why
can’t we save the trees and the ivy?” Care-full lines become blurred and entangled with carelessness, and we wonder
where responsibilities lie. Does care for one take care away from another? Pedagogista Nicole Land asks, “What
makes it possible for us to care with these connections as connections that matter—as we think about inheriting
and navigating settler colonial worlds” (personal communication, April, 2017)? We see such questions as critical
in our attempts to create pedagogies of care that refuse to blindly follow settler colonial patterns of relating.
What might it mean to learn to care with “invasive” plants and other unruly species? What happens when we meet
with those deemed out of place? How might we attune ourselves to their modes of care-full existence across the
designations that atten our understandings of where they belong while disregarding the histories of how they
got here in the rst place? Learning to care for and with more-than-human others might mean appreciating the
complexity of a plant or animal beyond such categorizations. Robin Wall Kimmerer (in conversation with Bowers,
2012) is helpful to think with here in response to the question of how to respond to invasive species:
One perspective which is often well represented in indigenous thinking, and less so in Western
thinking, is this notion that the plants themselves, whom we regard as persons (as we regard
all other species and elements of ecosystems) have their own intelligence, role, and way of
being. When we look at new or “invasive” species that come to us, instead of having a knee jerk
reaction of “those are bad and we want to do everything we can to eliminate them,” we consider
what are they bringing us. Plants are our teachers, so what is it they’re trying to teach us? What
is the presence of overabundance of Phragmites teaching us, for example? What do we need to
learn about that? We need to learn about controlling nitrogen and phosphorous. Those plants are
here because we have invited them here. We have created the conditions where they’re going to
flourish. (Bowers, 2012, paras. 46–48).
Of course, as Kimmerer also points out, this does not mean we sit apart from making decisions and taking actions
Figure 4. Picking blackberries.

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that impact others in caring for a place. Similarly, Annemarie Mol suggests that learning to care is not something
we can cultivate by sitting outside of the world, suggesting that “[doing] is not necessarily having a choice” (in
conversation with Boyer & Howe, 2016). Rather than spiralling down into paralysis or recentering ourselves by
foregrounding misplaced “settler guilt,” the point of our forest engagement is more about disrupting simplistic
top-down Euro-Western stewardship models that have contributed to creating the frameworks that underscore
untenable patterns of living.
Our forest encounters inuence thinking and emotions beyond the forest boundaries. ey also defy quantication.
Traditional Euro-Western early educational pedagogies tend to emphasize matters of fact in policy and practice—
for example, when programming is anchored in observing children in a theorized clinical developmental way.
Instead, we work to shi our emphasis on pedagogies to enmesh matters of concern (Blaise et al., 2017) with
matters of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). is includes recognizing care through the act of appreciating the
possibility of shared desires to inhabit place, as Deanna explores in the following vignette.
We are walking in the forest. A child says, “Hello.” We had not
heard anyone approach, but a strong-looking male stands
nearby watching our investigations. He belongs here, appearing
comfortable and sure. We wonder, are we welcome or are we
intruding? Our group is large, spread out, and loud in what seems
the stillness of the forest. He seems relaxed, and he is not alone.
His group has quietly spread around us. We count them—six deer
companions are present, some very close. Someone suggests we
move back, allow space. We wonder, how do we respect and share
this place with our more-than-human-other companions?
Can we say that stopping to notice multiplicities of care with
young children is itself an act of care? Puig de la Bellacasa (2017)
suggests that “[if] to care is to be attracted, to be entangled with
the recipients of care in a relationship that not only extends but
obliges (us) to care, then a world is being made in that encounter
that rather than determining (us), shis (our) priorities” (p. 167,
emphasis in original). But, as she cautions, “care is not about
fusion; it can be about the right distance” (p. 5). is is again a
point of stumbling for us in wanting to avoid the settler colonial
habit of appropriating Indigenous ideas, beliefs, and experiences
and repackaging them as our own. Culturally specic relations
of Lekwungen-speaking peoples with more-than-human others
on these territories is not something that is available to us to simply try on. Settler colonial relations continue daily
to make and unmake worlds in this place, something else we need to remember. With this in mind, we are trying
to learn from an array of perspectives, theories, and teachings that are available to us to start reimagining what
might be required of us to be in reciprocal relations with the plants and animals we encounter on a weekly basis.
Within the Forest Inquiry
We spend a great deal of time visiting and thinking in Haro Woods with the children. An assemblage of movement,
encounters, and stories lls our forest walks, leaving us to wonder how we constantly, and oen unconsciously,
Figure 5. Deer tracks.

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enact care with(in) these particular common worlds. As Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind, and Kocher (2017) suggest, in
our walks we come together and pull apart: “our movements are recursive, acting on each other in a continuous
exchange back and forth” (p. 27), always in motion, enacting, reacting, changing, and challenging movement.
Walking in the forest, thus transformed, becomes intertwined and interdependent with and as our means of
noticing (Tsing, 2015), our way of exploring rhythm (Olsson, 2009), enmeshing human and more-than-human
others together in a complex assemblage unable to be pulled apart. Focusing on the socialities, agencies, and lively
stories others tell, Blaise, Hamm, and Iorio (2017) write, “is a strategy that makes room for relationality, or the
ways in which humans and more-than-humans are integral parts of the universe” (p. 39).
(Re)conceptualizing pedagogies of care is important in our work as early years educators. e way we learn to
understand what it means to care, who gets to care, who is constructed as deserving of care or as a passive recipient
of care shapes consequences and inuences the way we world together. Understanding our common worlds as
produced through mixed-up heterogeneous world relations (Taylor, 2013), rather than as separate or innocent,
opens up space to take notice, become attuned, and listen to other ways of caring with and storying place. It
invites us to be curious and to consider more-than-human others as narrative subjects, weavers of stories, and
carers of place (van Dooren & Rose, 2012). Paying close attention to others’ lifeworlds also draws us into powerful
modes of care that exist outside of contemporary human desires in these colonized and ecologically challenged
times. Consideration of these multiplicities of care beyond the human reminds us to shi our understandings
and be care-full in our practice, to think with pedagogies that enmesh matters of concern with matters of care. As
early years educators, we invite you to look for and reect on those interdependent, messy moments that bind us
together with forest ecologies and the histories that have brought us to these challenging times and continue to
shape place relations. What happens when we invite a wider cast of participants into our understandings of care
in early learning pedagogies?

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(Endnotes)
1 Drawing from the work of Carla Rinaldi (2006), Fikile Nxumalo (2014) writes: “e role of a pedagogista takes inspiration from
the preschools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, where the presence of a pedagogical mentor to support, challenge and deepen educators’
practices and thinking is an embedded part of early childhood education policy and practice” (p. 50). Clark et al. (2014) further
describe the role as one “working collaboratively with educators to deepen and broaden pedagogies in the classroom, including
attending to ethical/political aspects of early childhood pedagogies” (p. 752).