Sustainable and systemic approaches to addressing mental health are critical in higher education,... more Sustainable and systemic approaches to addressing mental health are critical in higher education, as studies consistently show that university students and academic staff have higher rates of psychological distress than the general population. These issues have undoubtedly been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, where social distancing, mandated online learning, fear, and uncertainty around public health have increased feelings of stress, anxiety, and isolation. Therefore, in a COVID impacted world, cultivating wellbeing and connection in both physical and virtual learning spaces has become a social and educational imperative. Recent experiences of the challenges of supporting wellbeing and connection in the online classroom highlight a range of known and emergent risks. However, these experiences also provide opportunities for reimagining how wellbeing and connection are experienced and promoted in that space and for articulating understandings of student care. Thinking beyond h...
The Educational Turn, Rethinking Higher Education, 2023
Sustainable and systemic approaches to addressing mental health are critical in higher education,... more Sustainable and systemic approaches to addressing mental health are critical in higher education, as studies consistently show that university students and academic staff have higher rates of psychological distress than the general population. These issues have undoubtedly been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, where social distancing, mandated online learning, fear, and uncertainty around public health have increased feelings of stress, anxiety, and isolation. Therefore, in a COVID impacted world, cultivating wellbeing and connection in both physical and virtual learning spaces has become a social and educational imperative. Recent experiences of the challenges of supporting wellbeing and connection in the online classroom highlight a range of known and emergent risks. However, these experiences also provide opportunities for reimagining how wellbeing and connection are experienced and promoted in that space and for articulating understandings of student care. Thinking beyond highly individualized western conceptualizations, this chapter aims to position wellbeing as a collective concept, where the wellness of the self is inextricably linked to the wellness of the world. In doing so, we interrogate the presumed universality and neutrality of commonly used online learning technologies and work toward developing learning designs with a pedagogical intention of care, inclusivity, relationality, and student voice.
In response to dominant discourses of quality and an over-reliance on humancentric practice, the ... more In response to dominant discourses of quality and an over-reliance on humancentric practice, the Learning with Place framework emerges as an innovative way to rethink practices, structures, and policies within education and beyond. ‘Learning with Place’ views the local Place as agentic, recognising Place as inclusive of local First Nations knowledges and stories, histories and the more-than- human (for example, landforms, waterways, animals, insects, flora, and fauna). Through ‘Learning with Place’, deep relationships with the local Place are generated and these relationships become the catalyst for actions and decision-making regarding caring for/with local Place. This article offers an example of ‘Learning with Place’ in action through an early childhood teacher education program and shares ways in which the framework can be utilised in multiple contexts and disciplines.
NORRAG Special Issue 06: States of Emergency: Education in the time of Covid-19, 2021
The global pandemic has shone a spotlight on entwined social, economic, and planetary crises. Thi... more The global pandemic has shone a spotlight on entwined social, economic, and planetary crises. This essay considers the call for education for sustainability to shift from relations of mastery and management to reciprocal relations of care.
The grass is moving but there is no wind: Common worlding with elf/child relations, 2021
Drawing from the post-qualitative research in the dissertation, Animal Magic, Secret Spells, and ... more Drawing from the post-qualitative research in the dissertation, Animal Magic, Secret Spells, and Green Power: More-Than-Human Assemblages of Children’s Storytelling (Molloy Murphy, Animal magic, secret spells, and green power: More-than-human assemblages of children’s storytelling. https://doi.org/10.15760/etd.7318, 2020), this article mobilizes common worlding pedagogies (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 23(4), 507–529, 2015) to research elf-child relations in an early childhood community. Informed in part by an assemblage of 1970s animated holiday specials, a cherished classroom book coauthored by an elf, (Fróði, What does it take to see an elf? The Elf Garden, 2018), and the popular commercial figure “Elf on a Shelf,” the 2–5 year-old child participants in this study practiced thinking and playing with elves using storytelling as a method of research and knowledge production. In this 12-week study, children’s elf figurations and stories offered a window into the complex and shifting more-than-human assemblages that constituted their everyday school life. The children’s relational encounters with elves were complexified at the nearby Children’s Arboretum where we discovered evidence of elves both living and dead. In the arboretum’s meadow, the children signaled the presence of elves to one another by saying, “the grass is moving but there is no wind.” These elusive and compelling figures came to be vital participants in the more-thanhuman socialities (Tsing, Anthropology and nature (pp. 27–42). Routledge, 2013) of our school community. Though entangled with Eurocentric/Euro-Western ideations in ways that deserve interrogation, the children’s process of attuning to elves generated new ways of “becoming witness” (Rose & van Dooren) to the land and its past/present inhabitants and envisioning just and caring relations with the more-than-human.
Since plastics became available in the 1950s, consumers have dealt with the issue of plastic disc... more Since plastics became available in the 1950s, consumers have dealt with the issue of plastic discards by simply sending them "away"-considering them "out of sight and out of mind" and looking away from any responsibility for this material and its ongoing effects. In this article, an interactive exhibit was generated to provoke relational encounters between children and plastic discards. Situated on a university campus that wins annual awards for sustainability, Plastic City was erected anew each week; a compelling small-scale experiment regarding what is made visible and what is outcast in the utopian settler-colonial imaginary of the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Abstract Angela Molloy Murphy, Ed.D., has been an early childhood educator since 1997, establishing an independent early childhood program in 2005. A member of the Common Worlds Research Collective, her dissertation involves children and materiality-how children shape and are shaped by their material surroundings. Her research is grounded in a daily practice with children informed by experimental arts, critical posthumanism/ feminist new materialisms, and the Reggio pedagogical and political theory of the hundred languages, exalting the value of pluralism and a "dialogue between differences."
This article uses a multispecies inquiry to
research the relations between human children
and oth... more This article uses a multispecies inquiry to research the relations between human children and other-than-human animals, specifically, a piglet, in a home-based early childhood setting. The focus of this work is to activate critical posthumanism and common worlds scholarship to consider the ethics of relations of care in which the fate of the cared-for is uncertain. I draw on Puig de la Bellacasa’s theory of care to consider the implications of our school community’s care for the piglet, which was offered freely and in full awareness of uncertain consequences and precarious futures.
Early childhood settings have become contested spaces, or sites of struggle, between economic and... more Early childhood settings have become contested spaces, or sites of struggle, between economic and sociocultural interests disputing their purpose. Recent years have shown increased pressure on children in early education settings to demonstrate predetermined learning outcomes, which (a) limits the scope of what is possible in the classroom, (b) narrows the range of what learning is considered valid, and (c) privileges the experience and values of the dominant culture, thereby determining who and what matters in early childhood settings. Thus, in the current education climate where conventional knowledges are routinely privileged, unconventional knowledges and small stories from children’s lives are frequently disregarded or otherwise pushed to the margins of daily classroom life. The purpose of this post qualitative study was to position children’s storytelling as a disruptive force to western, positivist, and humanist knowledges in early childhood education and research. In this study, I am thinking with theory using critical posthumanist/new materialist theories as a research approach to consider children’s storytelling in an early childhood setting. Adopting the role of observant participator, I worked alongside ten 2.5-5-year-old (co)-participants using observations, photography, and classroom discussions to investigate the relational and emergent dimensions of children’s storytelling. I used pedagogical narration as an approach to data analysis, drawing lines between interconnected episodes and pointing to the more-than-human relational encounters that were present in children’s everyday storytelling practices. In ii this study, I found storytelling to be a generative process, produced within a complex assemblage of human and non-human actors. The second finding that emerged is that an expanded concept of narrativity is required to fully attune and attend to the multiplicitous storytelling occurring within early childhood settings. Lastly, in this study, children’s stories were shown to have to the potential to act as thought experiments for envisioning possible worlds. This study broke from conventional education research by considering not what worlds are being reflected in children’s storytelling, but rather what worlds are being produced. This is an important distinction at this particular moment in history, when we must consider what knowledges are legitimized and what are outcast by our systems of education, and what worlds are produced and reproduced in the process.
This is a story situated in the Pacific Northwest region of North America, where encoun... more This is a story situated in the Pacific Northwest region of North America, where encounters with a non-native “rescue” squirrel present disequilibrium for an educator and surprises for an early childhood classroom community. Thinking with Haraway, Latour, and common world frameworks challenges the educator’s “back to nature” narrative and generates opportunities to engage with different perspectives about the intersection of nature and culture, human and nonhuman kin, and the limiting quality of anthropocentric, child-centered pedagogies in early childhood education.
Key words: ECE; anthropocentrism; throwntogetherness; contact zone; common worlds
Sustainable and systemic approaches to addressing mental health are critical in higher education,... more Sustainable and systemic approaches to addressing mental health are critical in higher education, as studies consistently show that university students and academic staff have higher rates of psychological distress than the general population. These issues have undoubtedly been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, where social distancing, mandated online learning, fear, and uncertainty around public health have increased feelings of stress, anxiety, and isolation. Therefore, in a COVID impacted world, cultivating wellbeing and connection in both physical and virtual learning spaces has become a social and educational imperative. Recent experiences of the challenges of supporting wellbeing and connection in the online classroom highlight a range of known and emergent risks. However, these experiences also provide opportunities for reimagining how wellbeing and connection are experienced and promoted in that space and for articulating understandings of student care. Thinking beyond h...
The Educational Turn, Rethinking Higher Education, 2023
Sustainable and systemic approaches to addressing mental health are critical in higher education,... more Sustainable and systemic approaches to addressing mental health are critical in higher education, as studies consistently show that university students and academic staff have higher rates of psychological distress than the general population. These issues have undoubtedly been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, where social distancing, mandated online learning, fear, and uncertainty around public health have increased feelings of stress, anxiety, and isolation. Therefore, in a COVID impacted world, cultivating wellbeing and connection in both physical and virtual learning spaces has become a social and educational imperative. Recent experiences of the challenges of supporting wellbeing and connection in the online classroom highlight a range of known and emergent risks. However, these experiences also provide opportunities for reimagining how wellbeing and connection are experienced and promoted in that space and for articulating understandings of student care. Thinking beyond highly individualized western conceptualizations, this chapter aims to position wellbeing as a collective concept, where the wellness of the self is inextricably linked to the wellness of the world. In doing so, we interrogate the presumed universality and neutrality of commonly used online learning technologies and work toward developing learning designs with a pedagogical intention of care, inclusivity, relationality, and student voice.
In response to dominant discourses of quality and an over-reliance on humancentric practice, the ... more In response to dominant discourses of quality and an over-reliance on humancentric practice, the Learning with Place framework emerges as an innovative way to rethink practices, structures, and policies within education and beyond. ‘Learning with Place’ views the local Place as agentic, recognising Place as inclusive of local First Nations knowledges and stories, histories and the more-than- human (for example, landforms, waterways, animals, insects, flora, and fauna). Through ‘Learning with Place’, deep relationships with the local Place are generated and these relationships become the catalyst for actions and decision-making regarding caring for/with local Place. This article offers an example of ‘Learning with Place’ in action through an early childhood teacher education program and shares ways in which the framework can be utilised in multiple contexts and disciplines.
NORRAG Special Issue 06: States of Emergency: Education in the time of Covid-19, 2021
The global pandemic has shone a spotlight on entwined social, economic, and planetary crises. Thi... more The global pandemic has shone a spotlight on entwined social, economic, and planetary crises. This essay considers the call for education for sustainability to shift from relations of mastery and management to reciprocal relations of care.
The grass is moving but there is no wind: Common worlding with elf/child relations, 2021
Drawing from the post-qualitative research in the dissertation, Animal Magic, Secret Spells, and ... more Drawing from the post-qualitative research in the dissertation, Animal Magic, Secret Spells, and Green Power: More-Than-Human Assemblages of Children’s Storytelling (Molloy Murphy, Animal magic, secret spells, and green power: More-than-human assemblages of children’s storytelling. https://doi.org/10.15760/etd.7318, 2020), this article mobilizes common worlding pedagogies (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 23(4), 507–529, 2015) to research elf-child relations in an early childhood community. Informed in part by an assemblage of 1970s animated holiday specials, a cherished classroom book coauthored by an elf, (Fróði, What does it take to see an elf? The Elf Garden, 2018), and the popular commercial figure “Elf on a Shelf,” the 2–5 year-old child participants in this study practiced thinking and playing with elves using storytelling as a method of research and knowledge production. In this 12-week study, children’s elf figurations and stories offered a window into the complex and shifting more-than-human assemblages that constituted their everyday school life. The children’s relational encounters with elves were complexified at the nearby Children’s Arboretum where we discovered evidence of elves both living and dead. In the arboretum’s meadow, the children signaled the presence of elves to one another by saying, “the grass is moving but there is no wind.” These elusive and compelling figures came to be vital participants in the more-thanhuman socialities (Tsing, Anthropology and nature (pp. 27–42). Routledge, 2013) of our school community. Though entangled with Eurocentric/Euro-Western ideations in ways that deserve interrogation, the children’s process of attuning to elves generated new ways of “becoming witness” (Rose & van Dooren) to the land and its past/present inhabitants and envisioning just and caring relations with the more-than-human.
Since plastics became available in the 1950s, consumers have dealt with the issue of plastic disc... more Since plastics became available in the 1950s, consumers have dealt with the issue of plastic discards by simply sending them "away"-considering them "out of sight and out of mind" and looking away from any responsibility for this material and its ongoing effects. In this article, an interactive exhibit was generated to provoke relational encounters between children and plastic discards. Situated on a university campus that wins annual awards for sustainability, Plastic City was erected anew each week; a compelling small-scale experiment regarding what is made visible and what is outcast in the utopian settler-colonial imaginary of the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Abstract Angela Molloy Murphy, Ed.D., has been an early childhood educator since 1997, establishing an independent early childhood program in 2005. A member of the Common Worlds Research Collective, her dissertation involves children and materiality-how children shape and are shaped by their material surroundings. Her research is grounded in a daily practice with children informed by experimental arts, critical posthumanism/ feminist new materialisms, and the Reggio pedagogical and political theory of the hundred languages, exalting the value of pluralism and a "dialogue between differences."
This article uses a multispecies inquiry to
research the relations between human children
and oth... more This article uses a multispecies inquiry to research the relations between human children and other-than-human animals, specifically, a piglet, in a home-based early childhood setting. The focus of this work is to activate critical posthumanism and common worlds scholarship to consider the ethics of relations of care in which the fate of the cared-for is uncertain. I draw on Puig de la Bellacasa’s theory of care to consider the implications of our school community’s care for the piglet, which was offered freely and in full awareness of uncertain consequences and precarious futures.
Early childhood settings have become contested spaces, or sites of struggle, between economic and... more Early childhood settings have become contested spaces, or sites of struggle, between economic and sociocultural interests disputing their purpose. Recent years have shown increased pressure on children in early education settings to demonstrate predetermined learning outcomes, which (a) limits the scope of what is possible in the classroom, (b) narrows the range of what learning is considered valid, and (c) privileges the experience and values of the dominant culture, thereby determining who and what matters in early childhood settings. Thus, in the current education climate where conventional knowledges are routinely privileged, unconventional knowledges and small stories from children’s lives are frequently disregarded or otherwise pushed to the margins of daily classroom life. The purpose of this post qualitative study was to position children’s storytelling as a disruptive force to western, positivist, and humanist knowledges in early childhood education and research. In this study, I am thinking with theory using critical posthumanist/new materialist theories as a research approach to consider children’s storytelling in an early childhood setting. Adopting the role of observant participator, I worked alongside ten 2.5-5-year-old (co)-participants using observations, photography, and classroom discussions to investigate the relational and emergent dimensions of children’s storytelling. I used pedagogical narration as an approach to data analysis, drawing lines between interconnected episodes and pointing to the more-than-human relational encounters that were present in children’s everyday storytelling practices. In ii this study, I found storytelling to be a generative process, produced within a complex assemblage of human and non-human actors. The second finding that emerged is that an expanded concept of narrativity is required to fully attune and attend to the multiplicitous storytelling occurring within early childhood settings. Lastly, in this study, children’s stories were shown to have to the potential to act as thought experiments for envisioning possible worlds. This study broke from conventional education research by considering not what worlds are being reflected in children’s storytelling, but rather what worlds are being produced. This is an important distinction at this particular moment in history, when we must consider what knowledges are legitimized and what are outcast by our systems of education, and what worlds are produced and reproduced in the process.
This is a story situated in the Pacific Northwest region of North America, where encoun... more This is a story situated in the Pacific Northwest region of North America, where encounters with a non-native “rescue” squirrel present disequilibrium for an educator and surprises for an early childhood classroom community. Thinking with Haraway, Latour, and common world frameworks challenges the educator’s “back to nature” narrative and generates opportunities to engage with different perspectives about the intersection of nature and culture, human and nonhuman kin, and the limiting quality of anthropocentric, child-centered pedagogies in early childhood education.
Key words: ECE; anthropocentrism; throwntogetherness; contact zone; common worlds
Uploads
reciprocal relations of care.
research the relations between human children
and other-than-human animals, specifically, a
piglet, in a home-based early childhood setting.
The focus of this work is to activate critical
posthumanism and common worlds scholarship
to consider the ethics of relations of care in which
the fate of the cared-for is uncertain. I draw on
Puig de la Bellacasa’s theory of care to consider
the implications of our school community’s care
for the piglet, which was offered freely and in
full awareness of uncertain consequences and
precarious futures.
The purpose of this post qualitative study was to position children’s storytelling as a disruptive force to western, positivist, and humanist knowledges in early childhood education and research. In this study, I am thinking with theory using critical posthumanist/new materialist theories as a research approach to consider children’s storytelling in an early childhood setting. Adopting the role of observant participator, I worked alongside ten 2.5-5-year-old (co)-participants using observations, photography, and classroom discussions to investigate the relational and emergent dimensions of children’s storytelling. I used pedagogical narration as an approach to data analysis, drawing lines between interconnected episodes and pointing to the more-than-human relational encounters that were present in children’s everyday storytelling practices. In
ii
this study, I found storytelling to be a generative process, produced within a complex assemblage of human and non-human actors. The second finding that emerged is that an expanded concept of narrativity is required to fully attune and attend to the multiplicitous storytelling occurring within early childhood settings. Lastly, in this study, children’s stories were shown to have to the potential to act as thought experiments for envisioning possible worlds. This study broke from conventional education research by considering not what worlds are being reflected in children’s storytelling, but rather what worlds are being produced. This is an important distinction at this particular moment in history, when we must consider what knowledges are legitimized and what are outcast by our systems of education, and what worlds are produced and reproduced in the process.
Key words: ECE; anthropocentrism; throwntogetherness; contact zone; common worlds
reciprocal relations of care.
research the relations between human children
and other-than-human animals, specifically, a
piglet, in a home-based early childhood setting.
The focus of this work is to activate critical
posthumanism and common worlds scholarship
to consider the ethics of relations of care in which
the fate of the cared-for is uncertain. I draw on
Puig de la Bellacasa’s theory of care to consider
the implications of our school community’s care
for the piglet, which was offered freely and in
full awareness of uncertain consequences and
precarious futures.
The purpose of this post qualitative study was to position children’s storytelling as a disruptive force to western, positivist, and humanist knowledges in early childhood education and research. In this study, I am thinking with theory using critical posthumanist/new materialist theories as a research approach to consider children’s storytelling in an early childhood setting. Adopting the role of observant participator, I worked alongside ten 2.5-5-year-old (co)-participants using observations, photography, and classroom discussions to investigate the relational and emergent dimensions of children’s storytelling. I used pedagogical narration as an approach to data analysis, drawing lines between interconnected episodes and pointing to the more-than-human relational encounters that were present in children’s everyday storytelling practices. In
ii
this study, I found storytelling to be a generative process, produced within a complex assemblage of human and non-human actors. The second finding that emerged is that an expanded concept of narrativity is required to fully attune and attend to the multiplicitous storytelling occurring within early childhood settings. Lastly, in this study, children’s stories were shown to have to the potential to act as thought experiments for envisioning possible worlds. This study broke from conventional education research by considering not what worlds are being reflected in children’s storytelling, but rather what worlds are being produced. This is an important distinction at this particular moment in history, when we must consider what knowledges are legitimized and what are outcast by our systems of education, and what worlds are produced and reproduced in the process.
Key words: ECE; anthropocentrism; throwntogetherness; contact zone; common worlds