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rural communities extraction intimacy land storytelling anthropocene place-responsive pedagogy pedagogist

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Anti-extraction and Intimacy: Storytelling Pedagogies of Place in the North, Part Two

In this two-part blog post, I share the pedagogies I am crafting in northern British Columbia and how my pedagogical commitments come to life in various ways. In the first post, I shared my pedagogical orientations – how and why I enter educational practices of storytelling, anti-extraction and intimacy to propose alternative educational futures amid resource extraction. In this second post, I offer traces of how these practices are emerging within communities through ongoing work in classrooms and with educators in engagements on the land. Sharing the stories of early childhood educators who live and work in small communities in the north through audio, video and photo traces opens rich possibilities for educational experimentation in relationship with the land.

Resisting “One Size Fits All” Curriculum

As a community pedagogist I provide pedagogical support to four rural communities and four early childhood centres through regular in-person and virtual visits. My work with communities engages with place as I travel lengthy distances between communities and closely attend to the topography and culture of each place that I visit.

As I listen to educators and children I pay attention to deep relations with place and specifics of what it means to live and work in the north. I notice that one of the tensions that lives in early childhood spaces is that stories of best practices or curricular possibilities that are showcased often come from other regions in British Columbia or even other countries, and often do not reflect the culture or interests of the specific place. In response to this ongoing reality, I have chosen to focus my curiosities as a northern pedagogist on paying attention to place. Becoming closely aware of the specific culture(s) of the north and working to co-create curriculum that attunes to the experiences of those in the north, I work to generate pedagogies of anti-extraction and intimacy.

Resisting the urge to apply best practices or curriculum methods that reflect the cultures of other regions in British Columbia (or internationally) is an intentional move of resisting extractive practices in early childhood. My work does not aim to replicate a one-size-fits-all approach to early childhood spaces in the north, where, for instance, the aesthetics of programs mirror one another. At the ECPN, we do not value these discourses of sameness. Rather, I am curious about what happens when educators, children and I examine our situated place and cultivate space for joyful engagements that reflect the vibrant cultures children and educators of the north are immersed in. I am curious about what stories might be told when attending closely to place. How might these stories of what happens in early childhood spaces reflect the each community’s vibrant culture?

In this blog post, I share small stories of the work emerging with children and educators in one rural community west of Prince George. These stories respond to the larger questions I outlined in my first blog post: What happens when education is an endeavour to become closely attuned to the place where we live? What alternatives become possible when we attune to place? The moments shared in this post illustrate the joyful, vibrant work of one community and are not offered as a roadmap of “best practices.”

“Alien Landing Pad” Stories: Becoming Intimate with Place

It is the evening of the first day after the summer solstice in 2023. I am visiting a small community to the west of Prince George, spending multiple days working in an early childhood centre. Walking back to the hotel after work, I hear a honk behind me. Debbie, a community educator I’ve known for almost four years, pulls up in her car.

“Hey, I have something to show you! Let’s go for a field trip.”

We head east on the highway, turning off onto a country road before climbing steep switchbacks.

“That’s my old house. We lived there for a while before we moved into town.”

The asphalt turns to gravel, and the road narrows.

“This is called The Microwave. We’re going up to the very top.”

Halfway up the final stretch, a bushed-in single-lane road, we meet a truck coming down the mountain. We begin the dance of reversing to a space where the truck can get past us. Debbie rolls down the window and chats with the driver.

“You know everyone once you live here long enough.”

The single-lane trail grows rougher, sharp rocks of the mountain summit jaggedly sticking up from the ruts. Finally, we arrive at the top. Adjacent to an open area for vehicles to park is an abandoned building with an unfamiliar mechanical structure on top: gleaming white instruments pointed up into the sky.

“We call this the alien landing pad because most people don’t know what this place was for when it was active. But now, you can come up here on a quad or in a car; the gate is always open. People climb up onto the platform.”

We climb. My hands grip the old wooden railing as I try to will my vertigo into submission. The platform is made of thick wire mesh, so I can see through it to the ground below, which induces feelings of seasickness. What a strange, silent place on top of the world! Nothing is untouched, even here. Boulders have been blasted to make space for this structure, and bits of discarded materials have fallen into crevices from bygone partygoers.

Debbie and I sip tea, resting on the edge of the platform, looking down at the valley below. We can see the town, the forest fire still hungry on the opposite side of the valley, and snow-capped peaks to the west. Debbie points out landmarks and tells stories.

“In the winter, folks know that The Microwave is used for children to sled. Someone will block off the bottom with their vehicle, and another will ferry children up the mountain in the back of their pickup all day. Families will come and someone will bring hot chocolate. That’s just what we do here. We say, ‘Sorry, road’s closed. Children are sledding today.’ And everyone knows that’s just how it is.”

Driving back down in the twilight, we stop for a mother bear and four cubs crossing the trail as the full moon rises. Grouse startle from the ditches, scattering across the narrow road on every switchback bend. In the full dark of the moonrise, a group of children head out of the bush trails on bikes, meeting us at one of the final cutblock patches before the final descent into the valley. This, as Debbie says, is how it is here.

Being invited into the stories of a community takes time and the cultivation of reciprocal relations. Because of the ongoing extraction realities in northern regions, where outsiders often move in and out of communities with goals and strategies for their own benefit from local knowledge and resources, relations built on an understanding of anti-extraction and intimacy take time and effort to build. Relations built between a community and myself as a pedagogist depend on careful listening and respectful response.

In the community from which the story above emerged, these relations have taken more than three years to cultivate, with active participation from community educators who work with the centre I visit and in other educational settings, such as the local Native Friendship Centre. These relations began during COVID restrictions as I connected virtually with educators and children in centre classrooms. Phone calls or Zoom allowed space for educators and children to share stories that mattered to them and to share the conditions of early childhood education as they lived it. Once the restrictions were lifted, connecting in person became possible.

During both virtual and in-person connections, I resisted the idea that meetings were solely about me extracting information about the community or the children’s interests and curiosities. Rather, I created a framework for opening up space for storytelling, where children and educators could share what mattered to them. By creating conditions for intimate relations, I was able to learn about the gifted storytellers present in the community.

This work to resist extracting knowledge requires slowing down. It is not a quick exchange or a fast-paced journey. Not all communities enter these intimate relations at the same pace. For some, the foundational movements may take longer. Some communities may choose not to engage with a pedagogist or decide that the relationship is not the right fit. All of these potentialities require respectful listening.

In my work to build reciprocal relations with the community, there is a strong sense of feeling one another out, getting a sense of whether I was seeking entrance into the community with an agenda to extract, to take knowledge for my own sake and purposes, or with an intention of surveillance and judgment, which is something many people in the north have experienced. Many months into my work, an educator tells me, “If you had entered conversations in any other way, this collaboration wouldn’t have worked. We needed to know you were willing to understand the way of life and the culture before you came here. Then when you arrived, you felt familiar, like you were part of us already.”

I continue to ask questions about the local cottonwood forests, the creek flow, the complicated relations with current industrial projects. Being curious about the landscapes of this place, I attend to what it means to live here and to come to know intimately the multiplicities that construct life in this place. Through our careful engagement with place, educators have slowly opened spaces for me to join them on the land in intimate ways. They have invited me to go bear spotting, to pick mushrooms, and to climb to the top of the alien landing pad because of the careful movement to centre place as the focus of our educational endeavours.

“The Mountain is on Fire!”: Stories of Place in the Classroom

In the summer of 2023, northern B.C. was heavily impacted by forest fires. I paused my visits to communities during the worst of the season, as some communities were living under evacuation alert or orders. Fires near some communities came close to the highways. Some educators stayed in communication during our pause, sharing photos of the fires and the burn zone aftermath. The smoke from the fires migrated all the way to my home in Prince George, settling in the river valley and choking the air. Fires blazed across the province, but all winds seemed to point to Prince George in the centre of the interior plateau.

When I returned to this small community in September, the mountainside above the town was still hazy with smoke. On windy days, the flames built up again, becoming visible to the community. While not an immediate threat to the town, the fire was still close. Travelling west towards the community, I drove into what felt like a wall of cement—dark, grey. The smell of chemicals and ash permeated every surface. Coming down out of the pass into the bottomland, I was surprised to see skies were clear, except for the plume of smoke that billowed up and over the mountain, then headed down the valley.

The concept that we are touched by and touch others, that we are interconnected through “elements of the environment,” as Sharon Todd (2023, p. 10) writes, comes to my mind as I reflect on this memory. All of us are interconnected intimately within our surroundings by something as tangible as a touch on skin or as intangible as the air we breathe, Todd writes. I realize that the absence of smoke in the community means its presence somewhere else; the smoke travels from this place to another far away. I am likely carrying smoke particles on my clothes and car that originated here, even though this is the first time I have visited since the fires began. This thought reminds me that while I may not always be physically present with this community, I am still part of their world between visits. I am mindful that I carry the community’s stories with me when I leave, and I am responsible for holding and retelling the stories in respectful and reciprocal ways, acknowledging the intimacy of moments shared.

Respectful and reciprocal storytelling is an invitation to think together, not an opportunity to display an intimate moment for extractive purposes. The story below illustrates an invitation to think together about wildfires with children. I share it to welcome readers into our unique conditions and thinking, not as an example of best practice or a blueprint for responding to children’s curiosities.

During this September visit, the children in the infant-toddler classroom are abuzz with stories of fire and fire rescue. Until a couple of weeks ago, the community was inundated with fire fighters from the B.C. Forest Service responding to two forest fires close to the town. Now, flames are visible at night as an orange glow in the mountainside above the town, even when the smoke is too heavy on the upper slopes to see the fires during the day. But down the street from the centre, first responders often visit a long-term care home, and fire trucks drive past the classroom window frequently.

In the classroom, the educators and I respond to children’s conversations by offering the children brightly coloured cellophane paper and a bin of water to fight fires. Children build large piles of cellophane flames and rush to respond with fire trucks, helicopters and water, calling one another to come and help put out the flames.

As the educators and I listen carefully to the children’s ongoing conversations about fires and fire trucks, we make plans to travel across the road to a beloved grass field that has recently been excavated for future development. This place beckons us to bring our materials to it, even though it might not be a place that people would readily imagine children visiting. As an entire centre, we are collectively grieving the loss of wide open, rolling tussocks of grass, where we have had many experiences. The infant-toddler classroom window faces the field, and the children have spent the past weeks watching machinery overturn the surface. So much change has occurred in a short time to the places we are familiar with! The field has become hilly with dirt and gravel, and the mountains above the town are actively undergoing transformation through fire. We choose this site as an opportunity to extend children’s fire conversations beyond the classroom by moving the materials to this newly excavated environment.

When we enter the site of the excavated field, the children unpack the supplies from the wagon they have brought. Plastic fire trucks and helicopters, long pieces of cellophane for flames, and buckets of water join bodies as children run and climb. The hills of dirt become mountainsides on fire, as the children run and climb to extinguish the flames. “Quick, the mountain is on fire!” Calls can be heard as children scramble up and down in the dust, their bodies straining against the gravel scree tumbling down over their footfalls.

Engaging with fire and fire conversations in the infant-toddler classroom was a response to place. Through leaning into the changes in the landscape and allowing children to respond to what they could see happening outside their window, the educators and I set aside time for children to become more intimate with the reality they were experiencing. Rather than avoiding the excavated field or moving away from conversations of fire as being too distressing, we moved closer, becoming more intimate with what was currently present. As Naccaranto, discussed in Part One of this post, invites, we “turned towards the fire.”

“You Help Us See It”: Educator Engagements on the Land

As of this writing in 2024, I am working with educators in this community to engage with the land for an entire year during evening walks in the community. All educators in the community are welcome to attend, not only those who work in the early childhood centre I visit regularly. In my first blog post, I discussed the modern epoch known as the Anthropocene and how global resource extraction movements have shaped education. I outline how education and, in particular, early childhood education have been increasingly fine-tuned to focus on practices that aid economic outcomes. The intention of this year-long engagement with educators is to offer alternative stories of education, disrupting ideas of education’s purpose as a tool to feed economic growth and experimenting with what happens when we attend closely to place.

Monthly engagements on the land began in September 2023. Educators and I met in a parking lot near a local creek. We talked about why gathering on the land was the focus of these monthly sessions and how the land held significance for our practice. We decided to focus our attention for the fall and winter sessions on the patch of forest next to the creek near the parking lot. I invited educators to document what we noticed at the creek.

In the first session, we became familiar with DSLR cameras and walked on the local creek bed engaged in photography and journalling. As the evening ended, educators shared that this experience on the land had evoked a lot of memories.

“I used to do this, go for walks and write. I don’t make time for this anymore.”

“We came to the creek all the time as kids to swim. The water makes these perfect pools.”

I responded to educators’ reflections in an email that included photos and written traces with this question: How might we continue to slow down and become more intimately acquainted with the land we live, work and play on?

Over the months, we have continued to attend to the land, with the intention of slow, intimate relation building. How we document shifts in response to seasonal changes and what emerged in our previous gatherings. Using different equipment is necessary to respond to the land as the seasons shift, because we are responding to evening darkness and to colder and wetter weather conditions. Through these changing conditions, we become familiar with cameras, GoPros, audio recorders and different art materials. For instance, when the first ice forms on the creek, it invites us to observe the flowing water more attentively and to explore videography alongside photography. By closely studying the photos and videos, we actively engage with the land, uncovering previously unnoticed details and intriguing features that may have initially escaped our notice.

As the daylight shortens and evenings drop into darkness, we still gather on the land bordering the creek, but we no longer wander with a journal and camera in hand. Instead, we plan a fireside session of storytelling. Firewood, lighter, tea and the ingredients for s’mores join us as we reflect on what the sessions so far have invited us to notice differently. We talk about what is important to share with other early childhood professionals who are not from this place, and why gathering on the land has been impactful.

Educator Credit: Debbie Vrolyk, Cheylene Jubb, and Emma Larson

These video clips from our fireside session illustrate the intimacy of rural communities and the close connection we have to this place. As educators note in their conversation around the fire, this place holds many histories. The engagements I offer on the land must respond to what already exists here, and attend to the histories of all inhabitants.

As winter snows descend in the new year of 2024, we return to the creek bed. Bundled up against the cold, we create paths through the deep snow as we attune closely to the stories of the land revealed in the crisscrossing of animal tracks. We follow traces of a deer through the cottonwood forest as tracks zigzag across the creek dike. We track an animal trail down the dike, sliding down on our bottoms with squeals as we meet the plumes of cold snow, bumpy granite boulders and whipping willow branches. The cold air turns fog into ice crystals, obscuring a crescent moon into a diffuse yellow glow. We settle on the bank of the creek to sketch with willow stick charcoal. Our drawings detail the tracks and shadows in the snow and the interplay between other inhabitants and our own footfalls.

Winter experimentation on the land challenges ideas of what curriculum practices are possible throughout all seasons. Regardless of the cold, wet and dark, we keep returning to the same place and immersing ourselves in rich encounters. These times invite us to be playful, to slide down embankments to follow deer trails, to probe the darkness with flashlights as we follow an unknown sound, and to take the time to engage with the land as it slumbers under a blanket of snow. As one educator said, “People ask me what I’m doing, going to walk in the creek at night and draw. They say, ‘you must be crazy! It’s cold out, what are you even going to see?’ But I tell them, you just have to be there to get it.”

As an outsider to this community who is also becoming with this place, I am inviting, through these gatherings, educators who are more familiar with the place than I am to become unfamiliar on the land alongside me. While I set the intentions and location of our gatherings, I remain open to the encounter as it happens, listening carefully to what educators offer as they share intimate knowledge of the place. Through careful listening, I weave the shape of the next engagement, inserting an element of unfamiliarity into the next encounter. This is an intentional, intimate move grounded in ongoing collaboration. This example of working with anti-extractive pedagogies is contextual, unable to be replicated and applied to other places.

What might become possible

The stories shared in this blog are intended as an illustration of what might become possible when educational endeavours undertake intimate, anti-extractive pedagogies. These stories are not intended to be a roadmap to best practices for early childhood education. Rather, they are offered as a gift and an opportunity to bear witness to joyful and vibrant possibilities that respond to the urgency of Anthropocene realities.

Acknowledgments

These stories are not possible without the ongoing collaboration and reciprocal relations among educators, children and pedagogist. It is with great fullness of heart that I thank the children and educators of this small community for inviting me to become part of the stories that we will continue to weave together.

All photo credits, unless otherwise specified, are attributed to the author.