In my work as an ECPN pedagogist working in early years programs on Vancouver’s North Shore, I aim to create conditions with children and educators that respond to the complexities of our times. One way I do this is by taking seriously children’s ideas and theories about the world. In this way, our collective thinking is shaped, not by predetermined outcomes or guiding children towards specific facts we believe they should know, but by fostering an environment for us to come together with children and think alongside them about their curiosities about the world.
In the many programs where I work, children often express their wondering and concerns about bears. I have deliberately steered away from traditional early childhood curricular practices such as studying bears’ life cycles or planning a teddy bear’s picnic. Instead, I strive to create opportunities to truly listen to children’s thoughts about bears, respecting both their interests and their fears as genuine responses to the world they experience.
Scare the Bear
One afternoon, Jack* invites other children to join him to create a bear painting. Living in North Vancouver, the children often perceive bears as intruders in human spaces. The city has information on bear awareness that advise residents how to make garbage and organic waste less attractive to the bears, suggesting scents that bears dislike. As the media portrays bears, they are not welcome in human spaces; therefore, we need to keep them away. Taking Jack’s invitation seriously activates collective thinking and allows alternative narratives about bears to emerge.
Jack: “Let’s make a bear painting!”
Maria: “A bear painting?”
Jack: “We’re painting to scare the bear away.”
I ask Jack how they began making a bear painting. He explains that the children created a game in the morning called “scare the bear.” It is a game where an adult pretends to be a bear and the children try to scare it away so the centre can be safe again. I continue asking why we need to scare the bear away, and the children share that bears are dangerous, so we must scare them away.
Jack empties the shelf of small paint pots and lays them out on the table.
Maria: “Do we need all these colours to make the bear painting?”
Jack: “Green will make the bear think it’ll get sick and scare him. Blue makes them sad.”
Charlie: “The pink will scare it away.”
Jack: “Rainbow isn’t bears’ favourite colours. Bears really really really hate the colour rainbow.”
Ayla: “We only use the colours they don’t like.”
Maria: “Are there any colours they do like?”
Jack: “No. They hate brown, blue, and red and because red will make them think blood is there.”
Maria: “How about purple?”
Jack: “Purple makes them really really really hungry, and they don’t want to be really really really hungry.”
Maria: “How about orange?”
Jack: “Orange makes their belly rumbly and also makes the bears think they are really bad.”
Maria: “What does the white do to the bear?”
Ayla: “Makes them think they’re really scared.”
To help everyone know which colours to use when making a bear painting, the children and I decide to create a list of colours and what each colour means to the bears.
Green makes bears sick.
Blue makes the bears run away and be sad.
Yellow, the bears hate it.
Purple makes bears hungry.
Orange makes bears’ belly rumbly.
Red reminds them of blood, so we really really really really really need it.
White makes bears think they’re scared.
Pink makes bears sick, sicker than the green colour.
So that’s why the bears don’t like the rainbow colours.
The idea of scaring the bear lingers in the classroom for weeks and months as the children continue to make bear paintings using colours that bears dislike.
Shared Spaces: The Bears “Don’t Like Us Anymore”
One day, the children create another bear painting and I take it outside to the yard so it can dry. However, when the children return the next day, the bear painting is missing!
Ayla: “The bear painting is gone!”
Maria: “What happened to the bear painting?”
Ayla: “It’s because the bears took it!”
Jack: “Then, let’s hang it inside the window so we can trick them.”
The children are convinced that the bears disliked the painting so much that they took it away. To prevent this from happening again, the children decide to hang the painting inside the room next to a window, where the bears can’t reach it.
As the children believe that the bears must be tricked into staying away, I become more curious about the relationship between humans and bears that has led to bears being unwelcome in “human spaces.”
Maria: “We make these bear paintings every week to trick the bears. Why are we tricking them?”
Gus: “Because they will kill us.”
Jack: “Bears are causing trouble because they don’t like us anymore.”
Maria: “What happened?”
Jack: “Because we keep making bear paintings and keep tricking them.”
Maria: “Then should we stop?”
Jack: “No, because the construction site is so loud the bears don’t like it and they come here.”
Gus: “Yeah, they don’t like us anymore.”
Jack: “We love them, but we realize they can hurt us.”
As our conversations about bears continue, we become aware how difficult it is to live with bears. In the context of North Vancouver, bears are frequently spotted in the neighbourhoods digging through garbage left by humans. More often than not, bears are not interested in us humans, yet they are often scared away by loud alarms that many North Vancouver residents have installed.
Encounters with bears are very real for these children. In the example above, children and I struggle to think through our relations with bears beyond simply liking or disliking sharing space. The idea that “they don’t like us anymore” prompts us to reconsider human-bear relations. Thinking with bears is one way that we create the conditions to respond to the complexities of 21st-century life for children. Amid ongoing climate challenges, which are primarily caused by human activity, resisting positioning bears as bad and humans as good, through bear painting, demonstrates a small moment where we work to disrupt human exceptionalism.
*All children’s names are pseudonyms