Viral Pedagogies

Community within Viral Times

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Nicole Land

We have spent the last two months working at reading the context of each COVID classroom – and feeling the power, dismay, and irregularity in referring to classrooms for their context amid ongoing pandemic ebbs and flows. It feels strange – and maybe it always should – to ask “what matters in this classroom in viral times?”. This is a question of method (how do we pay attention differently during viral times?) as much as it is of curriculum-making (how do we participate with children in the crafting of a relevant, meaningful, ever shape-shifting curriculum in dialogue with viral worlds?). Since a thread of this project is to imagine how we might collaborate digitally when our researcher and educator co-researcher bodies cannot physically meet in the same room, we have been experimenting with keeping what we are calling a “Running Chat”; a Google Doc where we put our writing-on-the-move and note connections or dwell in the disjunctures of what we notice differently in education spaces right now. We gathered over Zoom this week to re-turn, to revisit, what we have written so far in the Running Chat and to look toward some concepts that we want to work at for the last few months of our viral pedagogies project (although we know the project will live well past the day our funding runs empty). What is emerging for us is a profound focus on community-making as a question of living well together: how do we come together now? How do we think about creating more livable worlds and community together with children in viral times, when we are in and of COVID worlds?

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Viral Pedagogies

Viral Pedagogies

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Nicole Land

Speaking of the uncertain work of returning to pedagogical inquiry work, we asked in our last blog – posted almost one year ago – questions of how to pick pedagogical inquiry research back up from within the mess of the COVID pandemic, where however we make choices to proceed, these choices implicate us in viral worlds; worlds that either yearn for a return to the status quo, spaces that refuse a reiteration of what was and seek the otherwise, or moments that sit in the muck between then and now, between what was and what might happen. We asked: what might we do with the stories, histories, experiments, speculations, reflections, and moments that animated our pre-pandemic work in the face of COVID? And more importantly – how? How do we pay attention to the concepts COVID riddles, where the act of returning is one of answering and care? How do we tune to and move with ethics and politics differently, in dialogue with the enduring traces COVID continues to etch on (our, other, children’s, more-than-human) bodies?

We return now with a ‘new’ (as in unfamiliar, as in grounded in these times here and now – not new as in never engaged before, nor new in the sense that it is made of purely inventive energy) project that we are calling Crafting Pedagogies with(in) Suspension: Viral Pedagogies in COVID times in Early Childhood Education. We will continue to blog about this project here, with Moving Pedagogies, because we want to build an active archive of all the iterations of our work together. All of our work particular to the Viral Pedagogies project will be categorized as such, should a reader want to focus more on this work than Moving Pedagogies, although we will take no pains to separate the two projects that share a bloodline, that have bodies and spaces and worlds in common.

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Viral Pedagogies, Weaving together questions

Returning

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Nicole Land
(this image is of my COVID kitty, Caper. Her excitement at learning that pigeons exist, as shown in this picture, feels like a good start to this post)

Along the left hand side of this page, WordPress has made for us a modest lexicon for our Moving Pedagogies work. You might need to scroll down – look for “tags” – and there you will find a roving and running vocabulary that nourishes our thinking with moving: being implicated, bordermaking, care-full, collective, death, ethics, materials, moving with, noticing, ownership, pausing, relations, responding, walking slowly. More a purposefully chaotic thesaurus than a glossary, these words that form the ever dexterous spine of our work to think about moving and pedagogy orient toward reading and wording practices concerned with tangles, overlaps, affinities, and questions. With the crisp surprise of the right synonym, the charm of a concept that shares a dwelling but that dances along the surfaces of that home with a different rhythm, this lexicon names questions of moving well together. It is not prescriptive; it adopts neither the hunt for definition that a dictionary might embody nor the indexing or cataloguing function of a glossary. What this automatically-collected array of concepts does ask of us is to remember that these words are moments and concepts. They are happenings, gatherings, collisions; these words are glued to our pedagogical intentions and commitments, and they are the glue that loses its stickiness in the name of continually calling us to return to the pedagogical contours of the moments that make a concept.

Returning is where we launch from now. It has been almost two years since our last blog post here. I would love to blame COVID-19 but that is not fair. A virus cannot dissolve a thesaurus; a pandemic can amplify proximities, both near and far, but it cannot stop the movement – the tumbles over and over and over – of concepts that are secretly questions. What our viral times can compel of us is to return, knowing that now, returning is not an act of nostalgia nor retreat but one of gentle confrontation as we ask of our lexicon: what can we do together now, here? How can we re-learn how to pay attention to the practices that manifest you, in your specificity, while also learning to notice how urgency has shifted to name different vital concerns? How do we return to these concepts that felt so acutely meaningful that we couldn’t put them down, that lived in our endlessly long email chains and our jotted down notes, and that we thought together with children, noticing how this lexicon began to take shape within and across our common and uncommon places and spaces again as we return?

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How do we move well together with/in the yard?

How Noticing Becomes an Act of Reflection and Care

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Maria Wysocki with Nicole Land

It has been quite a journey to observe and live with the children the relational ways that ‘masteries’ and ‘ownership’ come to happen with the yard, as we study its dynamic of movement and life collectively. We move and we notice, and vice-versa, in this environment that offers endless experiential moments in which we enlarge our understanding of who we are, how we move, and what disrupts our movements, shaping our experiences and understandings on intrinsic human – nature relations and dependencies.

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How do we do movement as communicating?

Flipping Vehicles

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Nicole Land thinking with Sanja Todorovic and Jajiba Chowdhury

We thought with the children with a provocation of flipping over the vehicles (so they were belly and tires up) to try to ‘get to know’ them differently, and to see what happens if we shake up the children and vehicle’s well-known pathways around the yard. Often, we have noticed, the children use the plastic vehicles on familiar pathways, running around a shelter in the yard. How might we notice how we communicate with/in movement if we intentionally try to disrupt our well-travelled pathways?

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How do we practice noticing while walking together?

Resisting Explaining

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Nicole Land thinking with Angélique Sanders, Kassandra Rodriguez Almonte, and Angela Chow

Today we went to a walk with a steamy/sweaty/dripping/raining/foggy quad – it was this unexpected, unfamiliar phenomena where the quad seemed to trap the warm air after a rainstorm, filling the quad with a dense, heavy mist as though it was raining from all directions.

The “rain” caused us and the children who noticed it to stop, to ask “what just happened”, but not necessarily to seek a rational, science-driven water cycle/weather explanation, but to actually wonder: what just happened – what is this incredibly cool thing that this quad place can do, and how do I respond to it?

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How do we move well together with/in the yard?

Grieving Cut Trees

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Nicole Land thinking with Maria Wysocki, Selena Ha, Andrea Thomas, and Alicja Frankowski

Recently, there was a significant cutting of trees in the yard. Some of the trees we have thought very carefully with were removed.

As I was thinking about our relations to trees, I was reminded of Natasha Myers’ work. I’ve attached one very short article by her, called. For Myers (2017), “gardens are sites where it is possible to get a feel for the momentum that propels people to involve themselves with plants” (p. 297). She speaks about the human-centred ways we currently have of thinking about gardens: humans plan, design, and care for gardens; they are the master and primary care-er *for* a garden. Myers links that to the Anthropocene, which connects to our conversations about stewardship, as the talks about this assumption that humans can solve human-created problems by finding better fixes and pre-empting anticipated plant catastrophes (I’m thinking about the trees Andrea described getting cut down along her street in the name of preventing a parasite they didn’t even yet have).

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How do we do movement as communicating?

Sliding, Blankets, and taking Pauses Seriously

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Nicole Land thinking with Sanja Todorovic and Jajiba Chowdhury

After working to pay attention to how moving happened in communicative ways in the yard, we noticed that there seems to be something important happening with the slide. The playground has two side-by-side slides. We offered the children a provocation where we placed a blanket over one of the slides and we thought with the children about using half the blanket-covered slide. Jajiba and I were talking about the tensions in setting intentions for using the slide – when the children are interested in sliding with the blanket or taking it off of the slide, how do we balance that with sharing with them that our intention is to think together about using half the slide? How do we know when to push what our curiosities by ‘fixing’ the blanket on the slide (like, what happens when we use on side of the slide? Or, one slide is covered in the blanket – how can we use the other slide?) and when to notice how moving with the blanket is also a response to the provocation, also a way of the children engaging with the ‘problem’ we are offering them? I think that this is a question we need to keep negotiating with the children.

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How do we move well together with/in the yard?

What We Can and Cannot Notice

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Nicole Land thinking with Maria Wysocki, Selena Ha, Andrea Thomas, and Alicja Frankowski

I’ve been thinking about what we can notice and what we cannot notice when we think with moving: in the yard, whose movements are acceptable or enjoyable or agreeable and whose movements are not? I am thinking about how our inherited ways of knowing movement call us to pay attention to certain movements. I’d suggest that we are taught to pay attention primarily to human movements and then also to particular sanctioned kinds of human movements (developmental skills, gross motor skills). I am thinking too about all of the movements in the yard that are part of living well together in the yard, but that we don’t often notice or sometimes we work not to notice. Like how we don’t often attune to rat movements or only get to know rat movements in certain ways (like dead rat bodies), but also other movements: tree movements, bark moving, snail moving. It’s harder to notice these movements. Thinking about our intentions to want to create conditions where we have to actually think about moving, I’d suggest that paying attention to these kinds of movements requires more work; we have to change how our own bodies move and shift how and what we notice. I think that this connects to thinking about getting to know moving in a particular place: how does a place (the yard) shape how moving happens? How do the conditions of the yard shape how we can notice moving? And the flip side of that question – how do the ways we notice moving shape how we create conditions for moving in the yard? 

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How do we practice noticing while walking together?

Why Slow?

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Nicole Land thinking with Angélique Sanders, Kassandra Rodriguez Almonte, and Angela Chow

We have been thinking about pausing and the hard, sometimes nearly painful, work of noticing carefully while walking (or being in a place) slowly. We thought too about how noticing draws us to other noticing – we have to respond in a moment-to-moment way, rather than knowing already what it is we might encounter and how we might engage with it. What I think has been interesting in our conversations is that we are thinking a lot about what slowing down looks like and demands: what does slowing down actually entail? If slowness is more than just a speed, how do we move slowly with the children?

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