Uncommoning Sense: Feeling a Changed Climate in Early Childhood Education

A Conversation with Alex Berry

BCcampus research fellow Alex Berry links early childhood pedagogies with feminist environmental humanities to explore new ways of sensing uneven, everyday climate realities in the early years. Her project, Activating Early Childhood Teacher Education for Sustainability in B.C., engages early childhood education students in attuning to how particular bodies sense and feel climate change in particular places. In response to the prevalence of climate catastrophe discourse in B.C., Alex uses small, artistic experiments to question the common-sense ways we think children experience nature.

“As many early years scholars have argued before me, early childhood education has been characterized by colonial and neoliberal ideas of humans as bodies that sense the world in rational and autonomous ways. Early childhood’s persistent pedagogical reliance on visual ways of knowing, and a dependency on developmental psychology’s five senses as autonomous, intrinsic, and divided, are examples of this,” says Alex. “Children with magnifying glasses setting out to discover the wild unknown or the freedom of children’s sensorial fun getting messy outdoors are all too familiar images that re-inscribe a settler colonial view of the world.”

Inspired by the work of her mentors and colleagues in the Common Worlds Research Collective, Alex suggests the prevailing understandings of the senses in early childhood produce educational practices separating children from the damaged worlds they inherit. She hopes that her research might make a modest contribution to the ongoing efforts of early childhood scholars trying to shift these conditions.

Alex’s work is interested in thinking alongside early childhood education students in re-imagining the senses for times of pressing environmental precarity. Through artistic and embodied methods, she explores how early childhood pedagogies might approach human sensoria as intercorporeal and embedded with non-human networks. Alex highlights that noticing non-human others in early childhood education is not enough. Her work builds on a feminist concern that current climate crises require new ways of being and thinking together with other humans. Alex suggests “… early childhood spaces have immense potential for inventing forms of togetherness that centre difference, reciprocity, and experimentation. My hope is that students feel that possibility.”

A central focus of Alex’s project has been the creation of an experimental, online, and place-based course, Sensing a changed climate in early childhood, for pre- and in-service educators across B.C. The course is part of Capilano University’s Early Childhood Care and Education program and is curated around a series of micro-workshops, guest speakers, and low stakes, on-the-ground experiments for ‘uncommoning’ the senses. The course will be followed by a virtual exhibition of student processes and an open-access archive of anti-colonial, arts, and place-based teaching resources.

The creation of the course involved many rich, behind-the-scenes collaborations. “The course itself emerged from a deeply collective and cross-disciplinary labour with researchers, community members, artists, and students. Envisioning and creating the course alongside people from fields beyond my own has generated an incredibly hospitable ground for pushing early childhood’s disciplinary framings beyond its status quo” says Alex. “I am extremely inspired by, and grateful for, the generous intellectual spaces these dialogues have afforded.”

Alex’s project is a collaboration between Capilano University’s Centre for Research in Childhood Studies and the University of British Columbia Okanagan’s FEELed Lab, directed by Dr. Astrida Neimanis. FEELed Lab is a collaborative and interdisciplinary feminist environmental humanities field lab that explores climate experiences through feminist, anti-colonial, antiracist, queer, and crip perspectives.

This research is supported by the BCcampus Research Fellows Program, which provides B.C. post-secondary educators and students funding to conduct small-scale research on teaching and learning as well as to explore evidence-based teaching practices focusing on student success and learning.