Pedagogist: Chelsea Hann
Educators: Alex, Shannon, Megan*
Children: Tynikka, Mickey, Rufus, Coralee, Damon, Mia, Tyler, Jordan, Trey, Graysun, Greta, Micha, Tina, Vera, Kaedance
With support from ECPN leadership team – Meagan Montpetit & Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw
In early childhood classrooms where I work as a pedagogist in rural northern British Columbia, conversations about bears often emerge. Bears are part of the community landscape and live in complicated relationships with human inhabitants. In a small community on the unceded territory of the Wet’su’wet’en, children in one early childhood centre have shared various curiosities about bears over the three years I have been working with them. Children and educators tell many stories of bears during classroom engagements with drawing or while engaging on the land around the early childhood centre.
My pedagogical intentions are to invite local, intimate knowledges about educational ideas we encounter, rather than to consume knowledge that is not part of the place where we live. For example, with bears, I invite children to create knowledges that are grounded in our experiences in our community, not in learning facts about “bears of the world.” The moments I share in this field note are only a tiny portion of the work done across multiple classrooms. The bear inquiry is still ongoing within the centre, and each classroom is doing something different in thinking about bears. The documentation in this field note comes from one classroom over a period of two years.
Following Tracks
It is late summer. The classroom sets out on a walk together into the hayfield a few blocks from the centre. These walks are a common part of their days; the children and educators enjoy extending their time together beyond the classroom and the outdoor yard. Before going on this walk today, the children talk about treasure maps. They draw maps on pieces of paper and roll them up like scrolls. When the classroom reaches the field, everyone is invited to spread out and look for treasure. Children hold their maps out, unfurled, and begin to search. As bodies scatter across the vast field, a cry echoes through the air:
Tynikka: “Hey, look over here! A track!”
Children come running, looking in the dust at faint markings.
Mickey: “What’s that?”
Tynikka: “It’s tracks. I know it’s tracks.”
Rufus: “What did them?”
Coralee: “Maybe a wolf? Maybe a bear?”
Damon: “I think whatever it is, it lives here.”
Rufus: “It makes holes.”
Areas in the grass that are pressed down invite children to speculate about what could be visiting this field when we are not here. The children theorize about creatures that move here at night—it could be wolves or bears or something else entirely.
Noticing Scat
The educators and children walk in the community year-round. During the autumn months, the class needs to pay close attention to signs of bear scat. Sometimes, we can’t walk along the dike in the community, because bears are grazing on berries, mushrooms or grasses. The forested area has large sections that are suitable for bears to bed down in, so we must pay close attention to the freshness of bear scat and the reports of community members we meet when we walk.
One day, we see a pile of bear scat on the dike path. It is not the largest we have seen nor as full of berries as some of the scat we have seen in late summer, but it reminds us that bears are present. This opens a conversation.
Mia: “Hey, look at that poop!”
Tyler: “It’s bear poop!”
Jordan: “It means we have to go another way.”
Mia: “What if the bear is nearby?”
Tyler: “Maybe it’s looking for fish.”
“Eat Them Bears One Day”: Bear Stories
Complex stories of bears continue to emerge both on our walks and in the classroom. Children share their complicated relations with bears and we talk about big topics such as life and death.
In the classroom on a spring morning, I set up the projector and turn off the lights for the children, educators and I to watch videos of a black bear emerging from its den in spring and of the interior of an empty bear cave documented by a hiker. The videos are projected on the ceiling and walls of the classroom. Children mimic the bear, standing when the bear does, squealing, laughing. They roll on their backs like bears. They scratch like bears, waving their hands and feet with fingers and toes stretched wide.
I turn on the lights and we gather to draw on a large paper on the floor. We draw bear dens, bears, snakes in the cave, and rainbow bears. The children draw a storm and Sonic the Hedgehog outside the bear cave in bold, bright colours—black, blue, orange, pink, green. An educator joins us on the floor and asks the children for help to draw another bear cave.
“What do we need for this cave?”
Trey brings one of the classroom’s beanbag chairs to the drawing space and lies on it like a bear.
“Bears have beds in their caves. They sleep like this.” (Sprawls body across the pillows)
Children and educators draw bears. Graysun draws the bear’s skeleton.
“The bear is eating salmon in the cave.”
As the children draw, a shark materializes outside the cave.
Graysun: “The shark is coming to eat the salmon and the bear.”
Late Summer
I set up the laptop and the Bluetooth speaker on a table in the classroom. White sheets of paper and drawing pencils are offered on the table. Together, educators, children and I gather at the table to draw. We watch a livestream of grizzly bears fishing at Katmai Falls in Alaska while we draw together, the laptop propped at the end of the table so everyone can see. Chairs scrape the floor as children come and go from the drawing table. We watch as the bears duck their heads into the water and return with large salmon in their jaws. The powerful roar of the waterfall fills our classroom as another collective drawing paper fills with salmon and bears.
The live cam shifts to a camera under the water, where the fish become the central focus, swimming upstream in large groups.
Greta watches, laughing. “Look at all the salmon. Mommy salmon, daddy salmon, look, a baby salmon too!”
All of a sudden, a bear’s mouth enters the frame and snatches up some salmon.
Greta is outraged, her body coiling into a spring of frustration as she begins to draw.
“Hey, no! That’s not okay, bear! The bear ate up that salmon! One day, I’ll be big. I’ll catch them bears one day, eat that bear one day.”
Greta draws the bear’s mouth eating up the salmon.
Mia joins the drawing area. She picks up a pencil, watches the fishing bears for a moment, then begins to tell a story.
Once upon a time, there was a great big grizzly bear. He came on down the mountain into town and ate up all the cattle. The farmer called the police station, and the policeman said, “Don’t worry, I’m on my way there.”
Greta nods and keeps drawing.
“I’m telling Mommy, one day I’m going to eat up that bear that ate the fish.”
Micha offers: “I want to go where the bears are one day. Can we go to the bears one day?”
We sit in silence, continuing to draw, watching the bears, and allowing the stories to be part of the complication that lives within our landscape in the north. Many ideas are beginning to form about how we live together as bears, humans and other creatures. We cannot ever come close to bears, but there is a curiosity and speculation that creates a feeling of closeness. We are keenly interested in the difficulties of living alongside one another, and the complexity of being alive. When tension, conflict or necessity arises, bears must kill to eat or might be killed themselves. Who lives? Who dies? Who hunts? Who is hunted? These are all complex questions that we are grappling with as we draw and talk about bears.
Being With Bears
Winter
When I arrive at the centre in the dark winter afternoon, Tyrell meets me in the hallway outside the classroom. “Miss Chelsea, did you bring the bear movie? We need to watch the bears! But shhh… people are still sleeping!” Tyrell grabs my hand and pulls me excitedly into the classroom. The children who are awake tiptoe to help me set up the computer and projector.
We watch a video of hibernating rescued grizzly bears who live in a nature preserve on Grouse Mountain in Vancouver, BC. We set up the projector to watch the bears in their den, pointing the projector screen at the ceiling.
As the rest of the children wake up from their rest, they find a space on the floor to lie back and watch the bears, or to draw together on comfy mats on the floor or gather at one of the classroom tables.
Micha pays close attention to the live camera time feed, counting the numbers of the seconds until the camera needs to be refreshed.
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero.”
Micha reminds us to refresh the bear stream.
“Hey, the numbers are stopped. We need to hit play!”
When the bears wake up to go for little walks outside of the den, everyone stops what they are doing to come watch. We didn’t know that bears could be so active while hibernating until we watched the bear cam! When family members arrive for pick-up, children bring them inside the classroom to show the bears.
Tina: “Come look! The bears are up. They are going outside!”
Vera: “What is that bear doing? Will he go outside to use the bathroom?”
Kaedance: “Oh, one bear is going back to sleep. Will the other one come back?”
The work with bears is part of our ongoing curriculum engagement in the centre. Everywhere we go in the community, we are reminded that we share overlapping spaces with these mysterious animals. We continue to talk about bears. We share what we know through drawings and conversation and speculate together about unanswered questions. At the time of this field note’s publication, bears are awakening across the province from their winter slumber, and we are paying close attention to their returned presence in our community and all the complexity this reemergence brings.
This ongoing inquiry with bears is pedagogically significant because it invites educators and children to build knowledge of bears that is local and intimately concerned with the specificity of bears we encounter, whether these encounters occur when we walk on the land or in the classroom through livestream. Creating knowledge together through stories and close observation of bears offers an alternative way of learning that does not stop with Western scientific fact-finding. Storying ideas, rather than learning facts about bears, creates opportunities to linger with concepts we might not have thought of otherwise.
*All children’s names are pseudonyms
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