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Fiona Fogg: 2023 Cook Prize Gold Medal Acceptance Speech
No full textIllustrator Fiona Fogg gives an acceptance speech for Anglerfish: The Seadevil of the Deep, written by Elaine M. Alexander (Candlewick)https://educate.bankstreet.edu/cook/1008/thumbnail.jp
Introduction: Learning With Treescapes in Environmentally Endangered Times
Get PDFAs we write this in a cool and rainy north of England, the planet is burning. Some of the highest temperatures in Earth’s history are currently being recorded in Death Valley, US. Italy is recording temperatures of 118 degrees farenheit (48 degrees Celsius). Rhodes is on fire. I (Kate) remember when I realized the extent of the disaster that is the climate emergency coming upon us. It was listening to a geologist describing the slow and then very fast loss of a glacier in the High Arctic. We are realizing our world is slipping away from us
Making Kin with Trees: Three Educators and Children Entangled with Treescapes
Get PDFIn this article, three educators from one small U.S. city draw on Donna Haraway’s feminist, posthumanist idea of making kin to explore their personal relations with trees and their work as educators to support children’s entanglements with trees. Working in three very different contexts with children: a working-class neighborhood, a public school kindergarten, and a forest kindergarten, the three authors illuminate the “magical” emergences of making kin with trees that fundamentally shifts what becomes possible to do and be. Their writing contributes to the fields of critical childhood geographies, feminist posthumanist pedagogies in early childhood education, and writing in affect and spirit, to argue for the importance of making kin with more-than-human others within a particular place
Connecting Children and Young People with Trees
Get PDFEngaging children and young people with the natural world has never been more important. The benefits of outdoor learning span from increased nature connection to improved self-esteem and physical wellbeing. But with so many potential risks and barriers, how can we help practitioners feel confident and capable in an outdoor setting and therefore improve access to green space for children and young people? The education team at the National Forest Company set out to tackle this challenge. The National Forest was established in the early 1990s in a post-industrial area of the English Midlands. It covers 200 square miles and has seen a huge transformation from black to green over the last thirty years through an intensive program of tree planting and habitat restoration. However, nature was not designed to be the only beneficiary of this work. Green spaces were created near to where people live, work and learn to promote engagement with nature. It became clear early on that working with schools and youth groups across the Forest would be vital to making this happen. Here we describe the varied ways that outdoor learning provision has been supported and improved in the National Forest – from traditional in-school settings to engagement through arts and culture. We address some of the challenges facing outdoor learning providers and offer a pathway to success that can be followed elsewhere. By offering a variety of ways to engage with the local treescapes, the National Forest hopes to foster the next generation of custodians of this ever-changing landscape
Arboreal Methodologies: Getting Lost to Explore the Potential of the Non-innocence of Nature
Get PDFThis paper recounts a workshop that took place in a polytunnel in a forest school in Sligo, North-West Ireland on a cold day in early-December. The event sought to materialize ‘arboreal methodologies’ (Osgood, 2019; Osgood & Odegard, 2022; Osgood & Axelsson, 2023) which are characterized by the enactment of feminist new materialist praxis to engage in world-making practices (Haraway, 2008) intended to unsettle recognizable tropes of biophilia that have come to frame both child and nature in narrow ways. The arboreal methodologies that participants were invited to mobilise were situated, material, affective, and involved metaphorical and material practices of ‘getting lost’. The workshop invited a sense of wonder at the ways arboreal methodologies might offer possibilities to confront human exceptionalism and wrestle with our complex, often contradictory relationships to ‘nature’. The approach taken involves methodologies without method (Koro-Ljunberg, 2016) to bring speculative, embodied encounters in the forest, together with unlikely tales of how forests work on and through us. We pursue a critical, tentacular engagement with the forest and take seriously its potential to agitate familiarity and strangeness, wonder and fear, nature and culture. In this paper we re-encounter embodied becomings-with the forest to think and sense other ways to take life in the Plantationocene (Tsing, 2015) seriously
Singing in Dark Times: Improvisational Singing with Children Amidst Ecological Crisis
Get PDFThrough this research-creation project -- which is represented by a process-driven ten-minute video -- the author asks what ways of knowing emerge when children and adults, more-than-human, and inhuman engage in improvised singing together in an urban park? This project recognizes our current dark times within ecological collapse and operates from a space that hopes to build relationality with sonic ecologies through listening-and-singing experiences, while centering the voices of children and other singers within the ecologies we sing in-and-with
Building Relationships With Our Island Home: Three Stories From Kindergarten in Hawaiʻi
Get PDFAs early childhood educators, we seek to create authentic and meaningful experiences for the children we learn alongside. We must remember that at its core, “education, in its highest form, liberates human potential through transformational teaching and learning experiences” (Meyer, Maeshiro, & Sumida, 2018, p. 17). As a Native Hawaiian early childhood educator in Hawaiʻi, I feel compelled to nurture the children’s emerging sense of place and self to empower them with a strong sense of connection and identity. Although not all the children in my care are Native Hawaiian by blood, they are being raised within a place and a culture that requires each of us to be cognizant of that place and culture. As Meyer (2016) stated, “what will be vital in this century is Culture––a way of being unique to place and people” (p. x). Meyer further clarified that “as a point of history, let it be known that we [Hawaiians] never did privilege” [ideas of race, ethnicity, and blood] as “points of separation” (p. x). There have been efforts to colonize and erase our Hawaiian language and culture for generations (Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, 2013; Kanaʻiaupuni, 2006). My hope as an educator is that each of us––children, educators, and families––will grow to embrace our kuleana, our responsibility and privilege, as people living in this unique and storied place
#31 Children\u27s Literature for an Anti-Racist Society
No full textAt this salon, we learned how to differentiate between a diverse, affirming, and anti-racist children\u27s book. Bank Street School for Children teacher Susie Rios and children\u27s librarian Kharissa Kenner explored these nuances and demonstrated how to curate an inclusive classroom library.
Jennifer Brown, ex-officio president of the Jane Addams Peace Association presented on the Jane Addams Children\u27s Book Award which annually recognizes children’s books of literary and aesthetic excellence that effectively engage children in thinking about peace, social justice, global community, and equity for all people.https://educate.bankstreet.edu/librarysalons/1030/thumbnail.jp
Hangul Zoo: Alphabet Book on Korean Consonants
Get PDFThis independent study is focused around the development of an original alphabet picture book (Hangul Zoo) that aims to support Native English Speakers with their learning of Korean as a second language. Those who have prior experience and knowledge of the English alphabet will benefit from using this book as a tool for bilingual learning. This book will help bilinguals be able to differentiate the two unique alphabets (English and Korean), while still making cross connections. While most alphabet books are catered towards children of ages birth through 5 and are often used in early childhood settings (daycares and preschools) for toddlers, Hangul Zoo is also meant for children and adults older than that. Through the use of playful imagery and alliteration, Hangul Zoo captures the consonant sounds of the Korean alphabet in a way that native English speakers can understand and recall. This “children’s” book also incorporates memorable illustrations and bright pops of color that appeal to the visual learners. Additionally, the story depicts a character who struggles with bilingualism, making the story relatable and applicable to many. This final project will discuss the value of having bilingualism represented through children’s literature as well as the impacts of representation on creating an inclusive and welcoming classroom environment for students
Through My Body and In My Heart: A Primer
Get PDFHow do we think about Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS)? I want to offer here my own thinking about what IKS are. There will certainly be debate about this. These are my views only; they serve as an invitation to others to share their own ways of outlining these crucial ideas. IKS are—for me—fundamentally about the intersections between philosophical ideas and the daily realities of tribal nations, communities, and other entities that comprise the peoples who belong to them, and their lands and waters. Before I discuss this further, let me be clear about what I am NOT engaging here. These are not sacred or limited knowledges. They are not specific knowledges or sets of knowledges; rather, they are principles and connectors. They are sites of convenings. They are systems. IKS unite Indigenous peoples across the globe. Indigenous peoples are simultaneously tethered to place and migratory. We have always moved. Often the movement was tied to food or water. Sustenance. Or to mates. Another form of sustenance, I suppose. The movement allowed Indigenous peoples to trade ideas, peoples. Stuff. Migration enabled relationships between peoples and ideas. Sparked by connection and curiosity, movement spurred innovation. The movement was a particular life force. Those who fail to adapt and adjust perish. Those who do not innovate, perish. Early Indigenous peoples in what is now Alaska created kayaks for transportation in and through waterways. Kayaks were effective in narrow spaces. And fast ones. Kayaks helped move us. They provided fun. Trips toward sustenance