Learning with vital materialities: weather assemblage pedagogies in early childhood education

Abstract

Early Childhood Education in general, and Early Childhood Education for Sustainability in particular, have dominantly relied on an ontological framework that privileges children’s agency. This paper challenges this dominant narrative by attuning to the everyday ways in which children are moved by the weather within a multitude of weather assemblages. It attempts to illustrate how ‘learning’ could be achieved when bodies come in relation with, and are able to be affected by, other bodies. Drawing on ideas from post-qualitative research orientation that highlights weather-generated data, the paper elucidates how the weather acts on and comes into relation with humans and non-human bodies. It contends that noticing and engaging with the vitality of weather offers possibilities for creating affects and that this potentially leads to an attunement towards ecological sensibility. Notions such as ‘vital materiality’ and ‘lively assemblages’ are discussed as a possibility to go beyond an anthropocentric understanding of the weather, which could pave the way towards a more relational ontology as a basis for emphasizing human’s ‘inter and intra-dependence’ with non-human nature, and hence, arguably, sustainable living.