Blogs
April 23, 2025
Living with Caterpillars – Experimentations Beyond Human-Centric Practices in Early Childhood Education – Part 2
With support from ECPN leadership team – Meagan Montpetit
In my previous blog post, I (Teresa, an ECPN pedagogist living on the unceded lands of the T’Kemlups Te Secwepemc peoples within Secwepemcul’ecw) shared glimpses from a pedagogical inquiry with a team of educators, a group of toddlers, and the caterpillars that were sharing their classroom in the spring and summer of 2024. This blog series invites you to walk alongside us as we work to transform our ways of living and learning with caterpillars and other creatures that inhabit our early years centre.
As a pedagogist who thinks with common worlds[1], I experiment alongside educators with how our daily curriculum-making practices with children might centre ethical ways of being with each other and with more-than-human others during converging climate crises. I am interested in questioning the common early childhood education practices that shape the ways educators and children think and speak about animals and plants, in an effort to emphasize human/more-than-human interdependence.
Amid the educators’ growing concerns about 21st-century humancentric logics that create a false separation between children and the natural world, the educators and I created pedagogical commitments that place human beings within a web of relations. When taken seriously, these commitments require us to change our usual practices with children and caterpillars. The first post in this series traces our attempts to disrupt traditional, teacher-directed, fact-based learning. It tells of the tentative and situated pedagogical processes we created to live alongside caterpillars as complex living beings rather than viewing them as mere objects of study. Our processes included slowing down to observe caterpillar-child movement, collectively tuning into more-than-verbal communication through drawing and revisiting our drawings to extend children’s ideas. As we experimented with these practices, we hoped to nurture “visionary”[2] dispositions in children and ourselves, opening to unfamiliar knowledges and ways of being in a world of overlapping environmental crises.
In this post, the last in the two-part series, I will further trace the practices we created, noting how these intentional shifts opened possibilities for relating with more-than-human others. I begin this post by linking our situated pedagogical practices with a broader effort to challenge human-centred approaches that are grounded in developmental psychology.
Connecting humancentrism with developmental psychology in early childhood education
The intertwined logics of human supremacy over land and animals, and the foundations of developmental psychology are deeply embedded in many early childhood education practices. For example, nature-based education is often framed as a positive experience for children – typically children from more affluent backgrounds[3] – to acquire valuable skills or facts while immersed in the outdoors. However, this perspective tends to neglect the more complex possibilities that emerge when we centre the interconnectedness of all living things, including human beings, as part of a “web of relations”[4].
In many classrooms, including in British Columbia, life in the toddler room revolves around rigid routines. Diapering, mealtimes and scheduled outdoor activities shape the contours of the day. Educators, often in a state of constant motion, are tasked with “managing” the children through these routines. During transitional moments, while one educator prepares snack and another takes children one by one to change their diapers or use the toilet, the third educator may find herself left to “entertain” the rest of the children, a role that often includes managing disruptive behaviours and ensuring that the group remains “under control.”
These routines are not merely about time management. They are shaped by developmental psychology’s emphasis on the individual child, and they reflect broader societal values that prioritize autonomy, self-regulation and achievement, often measured through recognizable milestones. Curriculum, within this developmental framework, is understood as a set of preplanned, enjoyable activities designed to keep children busy through the day, catering to a dominant view of children as innocent, having limited attention spans and being on a linear developmental path.[5] In this context, educators often hesitate to deeply involve themselves in children’s play unless there is a dispute to resolve or a safety concern. The assumption is that adult involvement might disrupt or “ruin” the “natural” and “spontaneous” learning that is believed to occur as children individually explore their world.
These dominant images of educators as observers, facilitators or managers and children as developing and innocent reflect the prevailing early childhood education paradigm in much of Canada today. Within this developmental framework, the focus is placed on each individual child’s perceived successes or shortcomings, which can make it difficult to consider collectivity and relationality – how children relate to one another and the world around them.
At the heart of developmental psychology is an emphasis on human cognition that privileges human-centred knowledge and learning. This view suggests that pedagogical efforts focusing on other worldviews, on other ways of knowing or on more-than-human knowledges are irrelevant or even suspect.[6] The language of developmental psychology thus upholds a human-dominated worldview, one that perpetuates colonial injustices and hierarchies by attempting to reduce the world’s complexity into linear, compartmentalized frameworks that ignore the richness and heterogeneity of the actual world we live in.
By centring human cognition and individual growth, developmental psychology reinforces a worldview that sees human beings as separate from, and superior to, other forms of life. This framework makes it difficult to envision a world where humans are not at the centre but are rather part of a broader existence shared with other living beings.
Our inquiry with caterpillars and children aimed to centre our human relations with caterpillars, emphasizing how we are interconnected with these more-than-human beings.
(Note: All of the children’s and educators’ names have been changed to protect their privacy.)
After naptime one day, the children bring each other to the caterpillar enclosure. They take adults by the hand, pulling our attention to the new form the caterpillars have taken. Something important has happened and we all must take note.
The caterpillars have announced this change with their posture. Most of the caterpillars are hanging upside down from the roof of their enclosure. Because we have been carefully attending to caterpillar bodies and movements, we notice immediately that they look different and they aren’t moving anymore.
“Where are their heads? Do they have heads?” asks Marla.
“No. They’re just bodies,” Harriet replies.
“They don’t have ears! I have ears,” Marla says.
“They don’t have mouths,” Spencer adds.
“They would be hungry,” says Priya, rubbing her belly. “Their tummies would be sore!”
When singing a favourite song about sleeping bunnies who wake up to hop hop hop, Priya runs to the caterpillar enclosure and announces to the group that “the caterpillars aren’t hopping.” The group rushes over to see.
We turn to the drawing book, marking with detailed pen drawings the new form the caterpillars have taken. In the absence of movement, positioning takes centre stage.
Priya moves over to the wall and stretches her legs up on the wall, with her hands on the ground.
Andrea, an educator, says, “You look like the caterpillars, hanging upside down.”
“I go upside down with my feet, like the caterpillars,” Priya says.
Priya hops down and returns to the drawing book. She takes up a pen and carefully draws. “I’m making an upside down.”
Soon, a line of caterpillar-children appears on the wall of the room, demanding to be drawn.
A few days later, the first chrysalis starts shaking. The children call this spinning.
“Can you spin like a caterpillar?” they ask each other as they twirl around the room. Spinning emerges in drawings, with pens twirling across the page.
Constructing meaning, creating connections: Rethinking education with children, caterpillars and ecological futures
Sylvia Kind’s image of children as “constructors of meaning rather than repositories of thought”[7] led us to rethink how we engaged with the caterpillars and the broader pedagogical processes in our classroom. If we believed that children actively create knowledge through their ongoing relations with caterpillars, it followed that we must question dominant education practices that focus on teaching children known facts about caterpillars. To see children as already actively constructing meaning, we were required to ask ourselves: What kind of educational encounters can we create that nourish connection – not just between the children and the caterpillars, but among the children, the educators and the broader world? And, importantly, what kind of active engagement did this require of us as educators?
The encounters with caterpillars, viewed in light of these questions, were not just about children gaining facts but about creating conditions for humans to become in relation with peers, educators and the more-than-human world.
Taking this standpoint, we interpreted children’s conversations, drawings and gestures as “figuring out together” or constructing meaning. The goal was not for children to land on the “right” answer – rather, the act of figuring out how to think through ideas together required children to work through their questions together and invent new ways to communicate, using their bodies, their arms, drawing and a few words. Wondering together – staying with a puzzle and working as a group – was the point.
As our inquiry continued and caterpillar lives became central to our everyday thinking, the educators and I frequently reflected on the ethics of bringing living creatures into the early years centre. The children were deeply engaged in caring for the caterpillars and checked on them without prompting. However, since our intention was to disrupt human-centred educational practices, we questioned whether removing these creatures from their natural environment and meeting them within their plastic confines limited our ability to engage with them as complex living beings. These discussions inevitably led us to ask whether bringing caterpillars into the classroom was the “wrong” thing to do.
Without any firm answers, we were left to sit with the possibility that by participating in this common practice – one that some of us had been doing for over a decade – we were perpetuating harm, not only on the caterpillars, but in the ways the children in our care envisioned possibilities for relating with more-than-human others.
In response, we redoubled our efforts to move imperfectly toward different ways of being together. We tried to extract ourselves from the familiar focus on routines and efficient classroom management in favour of creating a “curious practice”[8], one that was about “going visiting” rather than “arriving” at a predetermined destination. This mindset asked us to remain open to uncertainty, to not know in advance what would happen and to embrace imperfection.
Eventually, the butterflies emerge from their chrysalis, and we walk, as a group, to release the butterflies near a city-run garden specifically planted with pollinator-friendly flowers.
We are not the first group in the neighbourhood to release newly transformed butterflies in this garden, and Blackbird is savvy, perching on a tree nearby, waiting.
As the first butterfly stretches their wings to flutter into the blue sky, Blackbird snatches them out of the air and swiftly flies off, only to be replaced by another blackbird a few moments later, ready for the next butterfly.
The educators and I watch, unable to intervene. Some of us are visibly horrified.
The children seem to take it in stride.
“That bird is having a tasty lunch,” says Spencer.
Priya encourages the butterflies, “Fly butterfly! Fly!”
We are reminded that, while the enclosure may have seemed like a safe place for caterpillars to mature, it did nothing to prepare them for life outside the classroom. In our research, we find multiple studies that suggest butterflies and moths “remember” lessons they learn as caterpillars, leading scientists to caution that early habitat matters greatly in the later success of butterfly species.[9]
For the educators and me, this reiterates the need for careful ethics and an understanding that none of our moves will ever be innocent or perfect.
Continuing collective drawing practices with yard others
Back in the classroom, the caterpillars are gone, but their traces remain in drawings and memories of the collective experiences we’ve shared. While we would normally just clean up and move on to the next activity, our efforts to connect with caterpillars through daily practices of drawing and collective movement have made an important impact on our classroom, the children and ourselves. We cannot move forward now as though nothing has happened.
Now that the weather is warm, we spend most days outside in the centre’s play yard, so the educators and I decide to continue working toward a slow attunement to the lives around us through drawing and movement.
In addition to bringing drawing materials outdoors and curating our conversations to focus attention on our relations with animals and plants in our midst, we decide to remove most toys. With our pedagogical commitment to lingering with more-than-human others, we see the toys as a distraction to the slow attunement we’re trying to nourish. We keep the shovels and pails in the sandbox and keep the water table filled for cooling off as temperatures reach record highs in our region. In this way, the yard itself and the plants and animals who share it with us become the focus of our attention.
Immediately rotting logs, a huge pine tree, dirt piles and clover patches come into view. The children call our collective attention: “Come! See! Look!” We adults respond to their calls, sitting with small groups around these places intentionally listening, noticing and making connections between what we are seeing and saying.
“A bug! A bug is hiding!” cries Wallace, pointing down.
“A crow! A crow hiding,” Annabelle responds, pointing up.
The wind picks up and moves through the yard, fluttering our hair.
Molly notices three white moths fluttering on the wind. She stops to watch, pointing and gesturing until everyone looks. Molly jumps, attempting to imitate moth movement. Other children join in.
Molly and Spencer lie down on their stomachs to get a good, long look at a beetle in the grass.
We decide to draw the yard, making sure to add all the important places, movements and creatures.
Spencer and Annabelle bring what they’ve noticed to the drawing paper. “I need to draw the crow,” says Annabelle.
“The beetle goes here,” Spencer says, drawing a careful circle with lines poking out. “We need clouds.”
As we’re drawing, we hear Crow cawing from high atop the lamppost near the fence, which is his regular perch.
Spencer turns to caw back at Crow, mimicking the sound with a grin: “Ah Ah Ah! Ah Ah Ah!”
I fly a crow mark over the top of our drawing page, moving my pen between the clouds. “Ah Ah Ah!”
Other children join in. Making their own approximations of Crow’s caw, they run/fly around the yard, cawing and jumping, being crows.
Crow responds to the children: Caw Caw Caw!
The children respond to Crow: Ah Ah Ah!
The exchange goes back and forth.
At the drawing table, a smile erupts across Spencer’s face. “The crow! He’s doing that every day. Ah Ah Ah! He’s teaching me.”
Creating different curricular conditions with caterpillars: Rethinking relations
Spending time intentionally watching, attending to, drawing with, and embodying the movements of caterpillars – and now yard others – opened space for connecting with more-than-human beings in new ways. This ongoing process was filled with moments of uncertainty that felt unsettling. We adults were often confronted with not knowing what to say or do next. However, with our careful creative practices, we hoped to create conditions for both the adults and children in our toddler community to recognize our place within a multispecies web of relations.
Drawing inspiration from Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto, I sought to cultivate an attunement to what Haraway calls “distributed agency”[10] – the idea that humans are also moved and changed through our relations with other species. Haraway urges her readers “to pay attention to significant otherness as something other than a reflection of one’s own intentions.”[11] In this inquiry, we tried to see the caterpillars as beings with their own agency, lives and relational worlds, not solely through the lens of human curiosity or for the benefit of a learning opportunity.
We intentionally moved away from familiar approaches such as teaching the linear, predetermined facts of metamorphosis and toward foregrounded practices like movement and drawing to open more curious pathways.[12] The children welcomed the caterpillars as brief springtime guests, and through drawing and intentional on-the-floor engagement, we adults sought to step outside common teaching practices and attune to the knowledges emerging between children and caterpillars.
Importantly, we focused on toddlers’ more-than-verbal theories and speculations, as many toddlers do not use words to express themselves. By attending to their movements and gestures, we aimed to amplify these unfamiliar bodily knowledges, treating children’s ideas with the seriousness they deserve. Practically, we committed to reworking our usual routines by slowing down our daily rhythms to create a space for drawing together, where both educators and children could carefully notice and engage with caterpillars and the world in ways that went beyond verbal communication.
In closing, this blog is not a blueprint for how caterpillars should be welcomed into early years classrooms but rather an invitation to rethink taken-for-granted springtime curriculum practices. We do not claim to have fully figured out how to live our pedagogical commitments. Practices that decentre the human in education are both urgent and unfamiliar. Creating space for nonhuman agency requires us to pause, question our deeply held assumptions and engage in ongoing pedagogical conversations. This process is not fixed but continually unfolds in our work with young children, other-than-human beings and each other.
[1] Common Worlds Research Collective. https://www.commonworlds.net/
[2] Brown, A-M. (2017). Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. AK Press.
[3] Nelson, N., Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Nxumalo, F. (2018). Rethinking nature-based approaches in early childhood education: Common worlding practices. Journal of Childhood Studies, 43(1), 4–14. https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/jcs/article/view/18261
[4] Taylor, A. (2011). Reconceptualizing the nature of childhood. Childhood, 18(4), 420–433.
[5] Vintimilla, C. (2014). Neoliberalism fun and happiness in early childhood education. Journal of the Canadian Association for Young Children, 39(1), 79–87.
[6] Nxumalo, F. (2020). Place-based disruptions of humanism, coloniality and anti-Blackness in early childhood education. Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, 8(SI). https://doi.org/10.14426/cristal.v8isi.269
[7] Kind, S., & Po, J. (2024). Formations, re-formations and malleabilities: Working with children’s ideas. ECPN Conversation Series, June 17, 2024.
[8] Haraway, D. (2015). A curious practice. Angelaki, 20(2), 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725x.2015.1039817
[9] Blackiston, D. J., Silva Casey, E., & Weiss, M. R. (2008). Retention of memory through metamorphosis: Can a moth remember what it learned as a caterpillar? PloS One, 3(3), e1736–e1736. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0001736
[10] Haraway, D. J. (2020). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people and significant otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press.
[11] Haraway, The companion species manifesto, p. 28.
[12] Haraway, D. (2015). A curious practice. Angelaki, 20(2), 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725x.2015.1039817