Thinking with Black Ecologies in Early Childhood Education

This paper draws from ongoing work on liberatory possibilities that emerge from pedagogical and curricular engagements with Black ecologies in early childhood education. The focus is on possibilities for responding in affirmative ways to racist colonial erasures and deficit constructions of Black place relations. We offer possibilities for Black ecologies to be a site for a situated (re)storying of Black nature relations that is also responsive to socio-ecological injustices. The purpose of this work is to encourage early childhood educators and researchers to think alongside the potentials and challenges of this work. As orientation devices, the paper offers questions and propositions accompanied by illustrative research stories. This storytelling is intended to highlight that Black ecologies hold multiple possibilities for early childhood pedagogies that are anticolonial, affirm Black childhoods, and are place based in ways that center repair, relationality/kinship, and reciprocity. Engaging storytelling to illustrate how Black ecologies might be put to work in early childhood education signals that stories are one of multiple modes of relational inquiry with Black ecologies. This illustrative storytelling also includes insights from research with a group of Black Canadian parents on their ecological practices with and educational desires for their young children. Our modes of storytelling underline that engaging with Black ecologies in early childhood education involves bringing together the real and the imagined— as inventive practices that are also anticolonial and antiracist.