Working with an understanding of assemblage as the ad hoc groupings of vibrant materials and elements, this article argues that conceptualizing place as an assemblage opens possibilities for bridging the gap between subjects and objects that continue to structure pedagogy. Considering ‘place’ as an assemblage of humans and their multiple ‘others' puts emphasis on the productive nature of forces and forms as vibrant matter. While much of the literature on ‘place-based pedagogy’ argues for a commitment to place-based local environments as a counterpoint to globalization, ‘place-as-assemblage’ circumvents such politics of resistance. Instead of critique and opposition, the emphasis lies on finding ways for critical engagement and new perspectives through an understanding of the forces and forms that make places, and shape pedagogies. The article draws on New Zealand-based research to reconsider the often taken-for-granted relationship between place and pedagogy.

This collection examines why urban environments are key sites for reimagining and reconfiguring human-nature encounters in times and spaces of planetary crisis. Cities constitute powerful and troubling spaces for human-nature intersections. They typically represent the effects of human dominance over nature: humans in control, taming and managing the wildness of ‘nature’ by domesticating it. Children existing in these mostly adult designed and orchestrated creations are often ignored as city dwellers, along with animals who increasingly migrate into urban areas. Yet cities are also sites of innovation and ‘greening’, of critical democracy and renewal, with the most innovative cities including those where children co-create urban environments, and where animals and plants are valued as co-city dwellers. As this collection shows, troubling and reimagining these sites for diverse forms and ways of living, including of encounter with the other, and thus what can be learnt and taught through urban nature childhoods, is one possible pathway for working out different modes of being human with the earth.

This article engages critically with the concept of agency in infant and toddler educational discourse. It is argued that agency, when conceptualised with emphasis on individuality and the autonomous self, poses a conceptual ‘dead end’ for those who are not-yet-in-language, such as babies and toddlers. In considering agency as an aspect of becoming that is inherent in all matter, the article seeks to explore new pathways for conceptualising agency in infant and toddler education. Methodologically, the article aims to generate complex questions and, following Nigel Thrift's call, ‘wild ideas’, rather than solutions by addressing the relationship between discourse and matter to open up new spaces for thinking and doing ‘agency’ in education, for babies and toddlers and beyond.

Infantmethodologies is a concept that was playfully invented to gauge philosophical interest in the intersection between infants (or a chid; or infancy; or childhood) and methodologies (and philoso...

This article focuses on the Relational Agency Framework (RAF), an analytical tool developed for an Australian review and evaluation study of an early years’ policy initiative. We explore Anne Edward’s concepts of relational expertise, building common knowledge and relational agency to explore how Edwards’ concepts, which she refers to as ‘gardening tools’, and the RAF work together to support early years multidisciplinary networks. We argue that early childhood professionals who come together in a multidisciplinary network develop their collective capabilities through relationality and a focus on belonging. The RAF embeds Edwards’ relational concepts and enables the exploration and articulation of how network participants’ individual, discipline-specific knowledge and expertise augments to support collectively transformative practice within their network, their place and wider community. We conclude that a sense of belonging is foundational to the emergence of such relational agency in networks. Tools such as the ‘gardening tools’ and the RAF offer possibilities for addressing the challenges of how to support collaboration between government, early years professionals and communities to work holistically in the best interest of all children and their families.

School gardens are becoming increasingly recognised as important sites for learning and for bringing children into relationship with food. Despite the well-known educational and health benefits of gardening, children's interactions with the non-human entities and forces within garden surroundings are less understood and examined in the wider garden literature. Using a relational materialist approach (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010) that considers the material artefacts that constitute a learning environment, this article examines children's interactions with the animate and inanimate life forces through three specific garden photographs. The photos belong to data derived from a study that examined food, ecology and design pedagogies in three Australian primary schools. This paper argues that children's interactions with the non-human materialities of a garden are a vital dimension of gardening practice. The agential powers of gardens have great capacity to mobilise and inform children's inhabitation of food gardens.