This article considers the role of early childhood education within these uncertain times of human induced climate change. It draws from feminism and environmental humanities to experiment with different ways of becoming-with the world. By bringing together Donna Haraway’s figure of the Modest Witness and Deborah Bird Rose’s notion of witnessing, the article rethinks what it means to ‘observe’ in terms of ethical response-ability and matters of concern. Data from a multisensory and multispecies ethnography are used to illuminate the observational practices that commonly take place in early childhood settings. The article concludes by employing ‘lively stories’ showing how modest witness(ing) reworks early childhood observations traditionally considered apolitical, distanced, and judgmental towards meaning making as a form of entanglements and open-ended dialogue. Modest witness(ing) attempts to put into practice initial ethical and political pedagogies that early childhood teachers can draw from and begin to address matters of concern in their own settings.

Neoliberalism, capitalist ideas, and the disastrous human-induced state of the environment are evidence of the lack of connection between humans and the earth, calling for a rethinking of the relationships between humans and the planet. As early childhood educators, we wonder about our role in rethinking these relationships and in particular, the relationship between children and planet. In this article, we articulate the actions and positioning of teachers in three different research studies and various contexts (Victoria, AUS; Oregon, USA; California, USA) utilizing Latour’s (2004) ‘matters of concern’ as a framework to rethink engagement and relationality. Each project considers how place can be a provocation that makes visible the entanglement of children, families, teachers, and the more-than-human as a way to rethink pedagogy. The limitations, tensions, and possibilities that occur within and across these entanglements are explored, highlighting how the enacted practices could disrupt dominant early childhood discourses and practices.

Children, educators, and researchers at a child care center in Victoria, Canada and Melbourne, Australia have been collaborating on an early childhood education pedagogical inquiry project that grapples with children’s relations with place and technologies. Resisting narratives of environmental stewardship and instrumental digital education that dominate in the settler colonial contexts of contemporary Canadian and Australian early childhood education, this article shares stories, practices, questions, and tensions generated within the inquiry. After outlining how we think with Facetime on iPhone within a common worlds pedagogies framework, we detail two practices generated in the inquiry: (1) exchanging digital place stories and (2) crafting pedagogical contact zones with place and technologies. These practices, we argue, make visible how our collaboration reconfigures children’s relationships with place and technologies in consequential ways, and risks generating uneasy, unfamiliar, and tentative pedagogies that respond to messy entanglements within digital, more-than-human common worlds.

This paper draws from a series of Place-thought walks that the authors took at an open-range zoo. It practices a feminist common worlds multispecies ethics to challenge the systems that maintain nature-culture divisions in early childhood education. Postdevelopmental perspectives (i.e., feminist environmental humanities, multispecies studies, Indigenous studies) are brought into conversation with early childhood education to consider how zoo-logics maintain binaries and hierarchical thinking. Zoo-logics are related to developmental, colonial, and Western ways of reasoning and being in the world. Two feminist approaches to ethics, (re)situating and dialoguing, are discussed and show how they are necessary for undermining binaries and hierarchies that enable human exceptionalism, white privilege, and phallogocentrism. (Re)situating practices are presented through a lively dialogue based on Emu-human encounters at an open-range zoo. This paper argues that (re)situating and dialoguing pedagogies activate feminist common worldings. Worlding well requires a collective and relational multispecies ethics which are needed in these troubling times.

In response to dominant discourses of quality and an over-reliance on humancentric practice, the Learning with Place framework emerges as an innovative way to rethink practices, structures, and policies within education and beyond. ‘Learning with Place’ views the local Place as agentic, recognising Place as inclusive of local First Nations knowledges and stories, histories and the more-than-human (for example, landforms, waterways, animals, insects, flora, and fauna). Through ‘Learning with Place’, deep relationships with the local Place are generated and these relationships become the catalyst for actions and decision-making regarding caring for/with local Place. This article offers an example of ‘Learning with Place’ in action through an early childhood teacher education program and shares ways in which the framework can be utilised in multiple contexts and disciplines.

As a settler colonial country, Australia has a complex array of histories. These histories are often presented from the settler colonial perspective, rendering Indigenous histories invisible. Each week, I walk with the local park, a group of preschoolers and their teachers. As we walk together with place, we work to reimagine taken-for-granted early childhood practices and generate pedagogies that authentically and respectfully foreground local Aboriginal perspectives. In this chapter, I show how foregrounding Aboriginal perspectives of place has the potential to generate early childhood pedagogies that disrupt settler colonial logics. Working with a common worlds framework (Taylor & Giugni, 2012), I draw together the concepts of place-thought (Watts, 2013) and learning to be affected (Latour, 2004b), utilising pedagogical narration as a tool to make visible the ethical and political responsibilities that are demanded by living in postcolonial Australia.