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Situatedness

This blog post is the second in a series of posts that share insights derived from the presentation “Storying With” offered by ECPN community pedagogists Tracy Barkman, Mary Kim, Rachel Phillips and Karen Rodden at the 2023 Early Childhood Educators of BC (ECEBC) conference Power of Story. At the conference, pedagogists shared stories and documentation from their work with educators and children to highlight how pedagogical work takes up the concept of story in multiple and diverse ways.

Pedagogists design and nurture, within local contexts, pedagogical projects that are deeply responsive to the conditions of our times. These projects are situated in communities’ social, political, cultural, linguistic and material lifeworlds and are designed through a deep engagement with the process of pedagogical narration. Through this dialogical curriculum-making process, pedagogists work to create spaces for educators and children to consider how to live well together (Vintimilla & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017). Embedded in the role of the pedagogist is a commitment to transforming structures and habits in early childhood education that are rooted in developmentalism and other Euro-Western dominant discourses. Pedagogists strive to generate pedagogies that promote livable futures.

This post and the ones that will follow respond to specific conditions of 21^st-century lives of children. Each of these four posts will focus on a concept that emerged from the presentation “Storying With.” These concepts are intentionality, situatedness, provoking and contamination. This second post focuses on the concept of situatedness.

Situatedness refers to the interconnections of particular sociocultural, historical and geographical contexts that create a unique juncture in place and time. Each place has its complexities that carry concerns and nuances specific to a particular moment in time and place but are also embedded in a broader history and geography that shape local stories. The presentation at Power of Story illustrated how ECPN pedagogists use storying to interrogate and respond to the specific situations they are each working in. Each story the pedagogists shared emphasized how the curriculum they create responds to the unique characteristics of each region, program and participant’s lived experiences.

In this post, we reflect on the offering from Tracy Barkman, a pedagogist working in Interior BC and the town of Nelson. Nelson is situated in the West Kootenay region of southeastern BC. Nelson’s mountainous geography contributes to an economy strongly rooted in natural resources (e.g., forestry, mining, hydroelectric power generation, tourism), which has influenced the community’s relationships with and experience of place.

In Canada, understanding Indigenous land and history is vital due to the country’s history and ongoing legacy of settler colonialism. Acknowledging Indigenous peoples’ connection to the land and their experiences sheds light on the ongoing impacts of colonization. This knowledge is crucial for fostering reconciliation, honouring Indigenous rights and sovereignty, and addressing the systemic injustices that continue to affect Indigenous communities today. This understanding is particularly critical for those working in education, as much of Canada’s education system is built on colonial logics. Pedagogists play a vital role in challenging these entrenched narratives and fostering inclusive environments that recognize and respect Indigenous perspectives, histories and rights in the programs in which they work. Acknowledging Indigenous relations to place requires time and effort to learn the specific stories of a place. In Nelson, during the building of the hydroelectric dams along the Kootenay and Columbia Rivers, much of the land was flooded, and the Sinixt peoples were erroneously declared extinct in Canada in 1956. This historical narrative remains intertwined with Nelson’s present-day story. It is significant as the Sinixt people strive for recognition, reclaim their history, which was submerged due to dam construction, and advocate for more environmentally just practices in their territory today (Sinixtnation.org, 2022). These narratives, blending human and more-than-human perspectives, spanning past and present, form the foundation of Tracy’s pedagogical inquiries and decisions.

As a presenter, Tracy shared that she crafts curriculum with children and educators inspired not only by the broader geography and history of Interior BC but by the particular locations of the early childhood programs in the town, facilitating unique experiences of place with each program. ECPN pedagogists do not search for best practices or stories of truth that are universally applicable. Instead, their work is context specific and responsive in complex and intersecting ways. Tracy’s pedagogical work is unique to Nelson, specific even to the neighbourhoods of each program, and therefore can’t be replicated elsewhere. Pedagogists recognize that every early years program possesses its own distinctive narrative, community dynamics and intricacies, along with its unique physical setting. Rather than viewing this diversity as a drawback, it’s a source of creative potential.

Four early childhood centres that Tracy works with are situated at the upper edges of Nelson, where the forest gives way to town. This positioning between city and “natural” landscapes creates the conditions to frequent forest spaces and encounter more-than-human community members. One centre located “uphill” has many creeks and waterfalls that weave under and over the ground as they make their way from the mountain top down to the lake. At this centre, Tracy, the educator and the children regularly walk to a creek waterfall that is located nearby. As the seasons change, they pay close attention to the waterfall’s ebbs and flows. Thinking with and carefully encountering water is a situated response to the location of this centre and to some of the 21^st-century concerns in this region. There is a controversial history of damming waterways and a concern with how deforestation and the common practice of rerouting waterways affect ecosystems.

At the end of summer, water use in Nelson is often restricted, and the residents’ relations with water change. During her weekly walks with the educator and children to the waterfall, Tracy brings the children’s attention to how the water around them is shifting. The children notice that the creek they visit starts to run dry; they sing songs to try to call the water back to the creek. This change in climate and ecology affects ways of living in Nelson. Although the lack of water is concerning, it creates the opportunity for Tracy and the educator to think carefully with children about what it means to be in relation with this place, specifically with water. To do this, they think with questions such as:

• What would it mean for young children to notice and build relations with the water in their surroundings, particularly waterfalls that flow into the Kootenay River, rather than seeing water as a resource?
• How might we notice the connections between “natural” or “lively” water and the water in the centre, for example, from a tap?

This inquiry into getting to know a waterfall and thinking with water as lively responds to larger questions of living in the 21^st century in this specific geological area. These questions and modes of revisiting the waterfall are helping Tracy, the educator and the children tell “otherwise” water stories. This particular example of creating a responsive curriculum speaks to the situated nature of the work of a pedagogist that comes through in each of the presenters’ stories.

Early childhood spaces are dynamic and complex. Engaging with this complexity in our early childhood spaces is to live curriculum as a collective unfolding that responds to that which is emerging and is carefully nourished in dialogue with others. This is a very different way of living early childhood education than a set of technocratic practices that can be executed by rote (e.g., whenever “this” happens, you follow it with “that”). This type of curriculum making cannot be predicted or replicated, because it grows in relation to each specific context, with particular participants, places and times. It considers ethical questions, so there are no easy rights and wrongs to be found. It is lived, making it situated, important and intensely complicated.