(Ma)kin(g) Sympoietic More-than-Human Educational Futures

Abstract

This chapter shares stories of creative ruptions, to think and do place-based education differently. We think-with Haraway’s (2016, Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press) idea of sympoiesis as collective making, to situate learners as kin in a mesh of relations with more-than-human worlds. Making-with draws on wisdoms of the past and experiences of the present, to shape educational possibilities for the future. To explore sympoietic thinking within educational assemblages we share two lively elemental encounters of collaborative research creations that involve lake, garden, children, teachers, student teachers and researchers. In these examples we ground the idea of making-with in practical, everyday and lifelong ways within which educators can nurture kinship. Collective making is not straightforward. Sympoietic practices foster creative, inclusive, non-colonising pedagogies, which can be challenging to put into practice, yet position creativity as a powerful and provocative agent of positive change.

Living and Learning with a World of Relations

The authors of this chapter are inspired by living and learning with a world of more-than human relations as kin. Our kin come in ‘all shapes and sizes…’ (Van Horn, 2021, p. 2); we are entangled with multispecies plants and animals, materials, features and phenomena that shape the world. We are informed by traditional ecological knowledges and stirred by Wall Kimmerer’s (2022) wise message, of pedagogical significance, that ‘we’ve forgotten we’re surrounded by kinfolk’. We propose kinship as a verb of relating rather than a noun, where ‘we are not human beings, but humans being’ (Krawec, 2022, p. 124). From this perspective, ‘Earth - and everything within it - including all that creates what we call earth - is a verb’, where ‘all is in motion; all is relating’ (Van Horn, 2021, p. 3). So, we are careful, yet playful with language, and we endeavour to experiment with languages of kinning—generative, yet imperfect, incomplete and in formation.

Relationality is at the heart of our educative practice with children, teachers, and wider communities. In a kinship world view, humans are part of, rather than separate from, the world, and active in transforming how they relate with more-than-human kin. Throughout this chapter we apply the term more-than-human to suggest to readers that humans are always in relation, ‘never outside a sticky web of connections or an ecology of matter’ (Whatmore, 2006, p. 603). The world is not a scene or backdrop, but has potential for dialogue, if we are receptive.

(Ma)kin(g) in a Kincentric Worldview

Our work is positioned within posthumanist perspectives, which disrupt human exceptionalism. A kincentric view is a way of thinking and living with ‘a world of kin, grounded in a profound sense of the connectivities and relationships that hold us together, vulnerable and responsible to one another’ (Van Dooren & Chrulew, 2022, p. 2). A kincentric worldview requires a shift away from anthropocentric modes of living, being, and doing, which privilege humankind. In more relational and inclusive approaches, place is a creative companion that invites multiple engagements in a mesh of ‘intra-action’ (Barad, 2007), and where entities simultaneously co-emerge in new relationships (Rautio, 2014).

In this chapter, we explore ruptions in educational practice that open cracks through which learners might respond differently. Our practices put Chappell’s posthumanising creativity to work to ‘create and generate new ideas, actions, and phenomena’ (2012, p. 496). We implore educators to attune and attend to more-than-human kin in pedagogic practices that shift focus to include all participants, more-than-human and human. Close attention expands dialogue with the world; ‘responsive listening and dwelling-with that lingers, notices the particularities, variances, and nuances of things, and attends to the hesitant, temporal, and transitory’ (Kind, 2021, p. 1). Close engagement with more-than-human kin includes collaborative and collective making: making conversation, making time, making marks, making kin, (ma)kin(g). Our (ma)kin(g) plays with Haraway’s (2016) idea of sympoiesis (or making-with) to create spaces of collective enquiries. Experimentation energises our activities and enables emergence of surprising and unexpected possibilities through sustained proximity with places. This chapter purposefully draws the reader into productive and provocative questions, which may resonate with their experiences and encourage attention to more-than-human kin. Attending to intra-activity is embedded in our creative pedagogic practices—in dialogue, making, following emergence and generating questions.

We wonder:

What might kinning practices look like in a kincentric worldview?

Attending to Kinning Practices

‘Relationality is a principle that is sustained and strengthened through practice’ (Tynan, 2021, p. 601). Kinship is rooted in practices of attention. It is a way we can attend to ‘what’s happening’ in spaces by noticing absences and asserting presences (Krawec, 2022, p. 102). As Kimmerer (2023, p. 1) believes, ‘deep attention calls us inevitably into deep relationship,’ and into richer understanding of places. Ingold (2013, p. 1) explains, ‘It is, in short, by watching, listening and feeling - by paying attention to what the world has to tell us - that we learn.’ To bring children directly into relationship with the world through affective, embodied, and sensory encounters is to bring learners into dialogue with more-than-human kin. Embracing a pedagogy that presents the ‘world as multi-vocal, important, diverse, and deserving of respect’ (Blenkinsop et al., 2017, p. 363) is a joyful practice for hopeful futures. We seek to turn up the colour and tune into the world so we can move forward, ‘with a positive energy and an attention to the exploration of alternate possibilities’ (Geoghegan & Woodyer, 2014, p. 219) for responsive educational futures.

Our Pedagogies of Attention (Clarke & Witt, 2017) are ethico-onto-epistemological practices (Barad, 2007, p. 185), that is, an entanglement of ethical caring, doing and knowing. Figure 6.1 illustrates the three foundations of Pedagogies of Attention: to care with places attentively is an ethical stance; to be with places attentively is to cultivate relationships; to know with places attentively is to value different ways of knowing, both literal and lyrical. A kincentric worldview underpins each foundation.

Fig. 6.1

Pedagogies of attention (Clarke & Witt, 2017)

Within our educational context we put these pedagogies to work through field-visiting (Clarke & Witt, 2022), a new way to engage learners in worldly encounters. Field-visiting is a deepening of relations that makes places visible and tells rich narratives that include more-than-human voices. Knowledges emerge from situated, material, and embodied encounters. In entanglement with more-than-human kin Pedagogies of Attention invite children and teachers to engage with the world in practices of kinning, including (Fig. 6.2):

Fig. 6.2

Engaging in practices of kinning

We wonder:

What might unfold when we attend-with kin?

(Ma)kin(g)-with Creative Attention

Pedagogies of Attention are place-responsive, and value diverse ways of knowing. We engage in arts-based practices to dialogue-with worldly kin. In our pedagogies, making-with includes (Fig. 6.3):

Fig. 6.3

Making with

Ingold (2013, p. 6) describes the relationship between thinking and making as an:

… art of enquiry … where the conduct of thought goes along with, and continually answers to, the fluxes and flows of the materials with which we work. These materials think in us, as we think through them.

Making-with more-than-human kin is a radical act of ruption to change and transform knowing, thinking, and being. Our work is attentively creative—making-with new knowledges, generating questions, and finding agential cuts—as learners go field-visiting, attend to provocations, and reveal new combinations, connections, and relations.

To practise this method is not to describe the world, or to represent it, but to open up our perception to what is going on there so that we, in turn, can respond to it. That is to say, it is to set up a relation with the world. (Ingold, 2013, p. 7)

We wonder:

What educative stories unravel when kin yarn together?

Stories of Kinship Encounters

This section explores stories of place encounters as pedagogic intra-actions; opportunities to bring children into dynamic relations with more-than-human worlds in space and time, in generative ways. Our intention is to draw readers into proximity with places and practices, as ‘relationality is learnt from stories’ (Tynan, 2021, p. 597). We share two lively elemental, accounts that involve lake, garden, children, teachers, student teachers and researchers.

Both stories share commitment to creative field-visiting, as examples of emergent learnings—unforeseen and serendipitous engagements and responses—(ma)kin(g)s with place. Collaborative ‘research creations’ combine generative and scholarly practices in thinking-doing-making together, and experiment with relational responses (Springgay & Truman, 2018). The examples bring together a cacophony of materials, ideas, images, and questions. Our stories reveal exchanges of gifts in relational reciprocity; gifts of attention, insights, creative wisdoms, and makings. Through creating collage with Hiltingbury Lake and curating journal pages with Gilbert White’s Selborne Garden, we commit to putting our Pedagogies of Attention to work (Clarke & Witt, 2017). Each gift is an eventful and celebratory story, through space and time, guided by questions of kinship. Our diffractive stories demonstrate growing response-ability—new ways to be attentive and grateful with kinfolk, in ‘… making through thinking …thinking through making…We cannot make the future without thinking it’ (Ingold, 2013, p. 6).

We wonder:

What if we attune and attend to the presence of more-than-human kin

in education spaces and curricula?

Research Creation 1—Collaging with Lake-Kin

Research Creation 1 (Fig. 6.2) is a gathering with Hiltingbury Lake, Hampshire. On a hot July day, we visited with sixty 9- and 10-year-old children, with ethical permission to include their data contributions. This more-than-human entanglement experimented with creative ways learners might be present and participate with multispecies worlds through acts of attention. We share research creations as we introduce assemblages as intra-acting entities in place. We bring readers closer to field-visit happenings through research creations, where data, theory and questions meet each other in unforeseen ways.

Collages are collections of found texts, images and textures that are arranged and re-arranged … to produce new possibilities, new ways of thinking and knowing that have not been previously thought. (Franklin-Phipps and Rath in Kuby et al., 2019, p. 147)

Research Creation 1 (Fig. 6.4) is a collage of photographs, writing, theory, patterns, artwork, questions, and voices as modes of relational kinning. Children co-created connections as generative co-emergent data stories (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016).

Fig. 6.4

Research creation 1a: The always (in)complete collage

Research Creation 1b (Fig. 6.5) is an invitation to access a short film of the collage (via QR code), and entangle yourself, to zoom in on some emergent happenings and provocations. We invite you to get up close, move around, and share moments in place and time.

Fig. 6.5

Research creation 1b: An invitation to attend

The collage is a deep map of multiple layers and dimensions, which presences lake assemblages. It is difficult to contain the collage as an abundance of joy, weavings, wateriness, and knottings spill out to flow through this story:Verse

Verse         Lake as a gathering of relations—assemblages of:       water - sunshine - children - leaf litter - ripples - gulls -    boat - heron - trunk - flowers - grass - ducks - shadows- - rats - anticipation - teachers - tree stumps - and …

We grapple with assemblages as kinning in action, attuning to ‘…relations – vital, wild processes – that are always present yet not always visible’ (Van Horn, 2021, p. 2) in everyday places and worldly encounters. Our enacting of kinship practices may seem a minor act of ruption but is an important step to acknowledging Earth as lively, ‘embracing mystery rather than asserting mastery’ (Macfarlane, 2017).

It is a low-key, ordinary, everyday kind of response that values and trusts the generative and recuperative powers of small and seemingly insignificant worldly relations… These are the kinds of non-divisive relations that many young children already have with the world. They are full of small achievements. We can learn with them. (Taylor, 2017, pp. 11–12)

The field-visit to Hiltingbury Lake exemplifies our situated engagement with everyday places and local more-than-human communities as we, ‘lean a little on the complexity and mystery of the natural world’ (Macfarlane, 2017). However, ‘you cannot demand a relationship’ (Tynan, 2021, p. 599), it takes time, effort, and sensory engagement to connect, build familiarity and respond-with a world of more-than-human relations. Entering into dialogue with entities in a world of kin and being open to the world is not easy. The path is not clear; and we stumble, we encounter tensions, we negotiate differences, we redirect. When we wayfind we attend, create and connect in relationship, rooting our educational stories in the local and in the moment of the here and now. This is a generative dialoguing-with the world.

‘Response-ableness … cultivating collective knowing and doing’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 34), connects kin and strengthens kinship bonds between children and places. Educators have a role in creating and mediating learning spaces where learners come into relationship with place. Humans are not the sole knowledge makers at the lake (Stengers, 2012). Opportunities to learn and think-with the world as kinfolk offer possibilities for collective flourishings. The more we dialogue with the world the more, and the deeper, we learn together.

The reader is now invited to engage with a series of diffractions—where data meet and new insights generate—within place assemblages that, ‘spread thought in unpredictable patterns … productive emergences producing different knowledge’ (Mazzei, 2014, p. 742). The following diffractions are led by three guiding questions: What kinning practices were enacted? How did response-ableness manifest? What thinking of pedagogical significance (ruption) was set in motion?

Diffraction 1 (Fig. 6.6) shares examples of lake-kinning practices in action.

Fig. 6.6

Lake diffraction 1: Kinning practices in action

Happenings in field-visiting spaces were intra-actions between kinfolk. When we attend to hands, bodies, and traces we reveal there is more going on than we might imagine. Here, place-children intra-actions show that ‘… in making new knowledge we will come to inhabit and know the world differently than we did before’ (Somerville, 2008, p. 209).

Guiding Question—How Did Response-Ableness Manifest?

Making-with engages in inclusive, enacted relationality. Everything is relevant in children’s responses, including perceptions, feelings, inventories, patterns, stories, doodlings, and foldings. Diffraction 2 (Fig. 6.7) is a gallery of creative gifts, which emerged intra-actively between children and place-kin.

Fig. 6.7

Lake diffraction 2: Gallery of creative gifts

Each of the gifts is evidence of time given, attention paid, and processes enacted. Each is a celebration of experience, intra-action, and companionship with kinfolk. ‘Emergence, as a process of wondering and generating … cannot begin with logic but comes from a place of not knowing, informed by intuition and responsiveness’ (Somerville, 2008, p. 209). As a research diffraction, the gallery shares children’s emergent noticings of colour, texture, shape, pattern, detail, and makings with kin.

Guiding Question—What Thinking of Pedagogical Significance (Ruption) Was Set in Motion?

In diffracting happenings at the lake, three ripples of significance (amongst many others) provoked us, set us thinking, wondering, and questioning: kinship as nested; kinship as embodied; kinship as ceremony.

Kinship as Nested

The place revealed tales, which the children were committed to telling—tales of animals, plants, materiality, life, death, and action. Lively stories are inspired by witnessing (Blaise et al., 2017). Diffraction 3 (Fig. 6.8) is an anthology of children’s noticings expressed as tales of the lake.

Fig. 6.8

Lake diffraction 3: Lakeside tales

Multiple tales are nested within the lakeside setting and reveal complex possibilities in this place. As a collection of speculative noticings, gathered and embedded, they draw us closer as place-kin. We can create stronger relationality within educative practices, inspired by children’s lively encounters and their ‘propensity to ascribe liveliness to all manner of things that matter to them in the environment’ (Merewether, 2019, p. 235). We can learn from, and with, children in their world making.

Kinship as Embodied

The place invited tactile engagement. ‘A relational reality… is an affective force that compels us to not just understand the world as relational, but feel the world as kin’ (Tynan, 2021, p. 600). Diffraction 4 (Fig. 6.9) shows collective makings that emerged as a Momigami (Japanese paper-making method) lakeside installation, composed of materials and thoughts, in hessian, paper, words, and natural items. Bodies gathered around to share, peer, lean in, nestle, jostle, and hustle—a moving together in ‘co-motion’ (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. 4).

Fig. 6.9

Lake diffraction 4: A Momigami art installation Iorio et al. (2017)

The art installation brought together place, materials and ideas in a careful weaving together of wordings and placings in intra-action, as ‘emergent workings out of affective material and spatial happenings of curriculum practices…’ (Taylor, 2016, p. 21).

Kinship as Ceremony

We gathered for ceremony—a performance of ritual, sharing, chanting, dancing, and processing—in gratitude and celebration for the ‘right here, right now’. Ceremony ‘helps emphasise and perform the transformative potential between entities rather than focus on entities as separate and individual beings’ (Tynan, 2021, p. 601). Diffraction 5 (Fig. 6.10) is an annotated record of the ceremony in image and words. We invite you to access a short film (via QR code or by clicking here and here).

Fig. 6.10

Lake diffraction 5: Lakeside Ceremony

The children walked slowly around the installation, chanting aloud lines of found poetry, in ‘a moving, sonorous, gestural, textural, material, improvisational’ parade (Kind, 2018, p. 9). This ‘dance of attention’ (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. 5) emerged as a bridge between place and people. Ceremony connects, builds community, and strengthens belonging – both more-than-human and human – in reciprocity. ‘Ceremony brings relationships together’ (Tynan, 2021, p. 601). The curated video documents this event, (re)-immersing viewers in movements and sounds, places and times, and provokes new wonderings.

Tensions at the Lake

Field-visits are full of invitations. Making kin is not always straightforward. Some invitations are not possible to follow. Some invitations are discomforting. Inclusive, non-colonising pedagogies involve conflicts, difficulties, and disruptions. We have to learn to work with, and balance, these tensions to consider how to dwell with oddkin and badkin (Haraway, 2016).

To respond to the complexity of the world in this way, including ourselves with/in it, we need to perceive without looking away, without reducing the world for our comfort. We must actively refuse to exclude or ignore even that which is uncomfortable and difficult, contradictory and painful. (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al., 2020, p. 108)

Our lakeside visit was not without incident. The initial disruption of soil, and the turning to generative ruption, is told through found poetry:Verse

Verse A lively story of Soil and Children On a very hot day of Sunshine We came for Hiltingbury Lake. Yet Soil demanded our attention …. The children sat on dry rich Leaf Litter Becoming soil as outdoor classroom. A welcome place of shade Of Shadows playfully dancing telling stories of Leaves, of Pens, of Paper, of Children Imprinted on Soil floor. Leaf Litter announces its presence entangling-with Child-Pine Wood relations. Leaf Litter searches out encounters with others. Leaf Litter clings, spreads, covers, envelops, disrupts. Soil permeates everywhere. On Trousers, in Boots. Water Bottles, in Hair, over our Hands, under our Nails and in our Bags. Soil interrupts our collective collage responses, intercepts, interferes and travels. Soil clings, holds, grasps, embraces… Tiny particles infiltrating the smallest of spaces. Soil stories grow as Leaf Litter-Children move, touch, smell, feel. As Children become marked and make marks with Soil. Disruption becomes ruption as Earthing, grounding, Co-mingling, Co-composing, Composting, Soil generates happenings.

These lakeside encounters illustrate practices of kinship, and stories of deep knowings with place. Thinking of pedagogical significance was set in motion—of kinship as nested, embodied and ceremony. Hiltingbury Lake became a ‘pedagogical contact zone’ (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020), where children learned in entanglement with place. Responses generated feelings of belonging within a lake community becoming-kin.

We wonder:

What sorts of gifts are exchanged in research creation with more-than-human kin?

Research Creation 2—Journalling with Garden-Kin

Research Creation (Fig. 6.11) is a gathering with Gilbert White’s Garden, Selborne, Hampshire on another hot July day, in more-than-human entanglements. We, as researchers, experimented with ways to be present with multispecies kin through emergent acts of attending and noticing.

Fig. 6.11

Research creation 2 Journal as sympoietic gift

Gilbert White (1720–1793) was a naturalist-clergyman, whose way of relating with nature was ‘reverent and attentive’. White’s days were ‘packed with incident’, he spent a great deal of time in his garden and ‘nothing was too small or humble to escape his investigation’ (Martin, 2021, p. 10). White regarded nature as a subject not a backdrop, with a cast of more-than-human characters as relations (Martin, 2021). His writing was a combination of scientific precision, poetic narrative, conversational anecdote, and his journal is full of whimsy, things that crop up, reminders, and idiosyncrasies (Mabey, 2006).

White’s garden is a place where voices and provocations abound. On the day of our field-visit, it was the hollyhocks that unexpectedly drew our attention, so we went ‘hollyhocking’ for the day. We made journal pages, with garden, as sympoietic gifts:Verse

Verse Journalling is proximity, intimacy, connection. Journalling is a verb of attending, cherishing, conversing, remembering, creating. Journalling takes you deep into noticing minute particulars and nurtures sense of place and spirit.

Our journal (Research Creation 2) is not an art book as such, but a curation of responses in photographic, linguistic, and artistic forms as research creation. As a gift, the journal includes observations, doodlings, speculative thinkings, emergent lines of enquiry, threads followed and new questions that invite further musings.

The journal pages are a deep map of multiple layers and dimensions that presence garden assemblages. There is an abundance of colour, texture, light and flourishings that grow as this story:Verse

Verse         Garden as a gathering of relations - assemblages of:      lawn - sunshine - hollyhocks - researchers - shadows -    bees - robin - poppy seed heads - tulip tree - seats - clouds - gardeners - pollen - blue sky - petals - paper - breeze - scent and …

In this place, we drew on Kimmerer’s ideas of ‘seeing with both eyes’ (2023), a simultaneous thinking with both indigenous and scientific wisdoms, engaging multiple ways of knowing Gilbert’s Garden. At this time and place, a multiplicity of wisdoms intra-acted: hollyhocks turned their flowers to the light, bees sought pollen, breeze carried scent, skin greeted petals, fallen flowers suggested characters and stories, height and aspect allowed faces to meet blooms.

Guiding Question—What Kinning Practices Were Enacted?

Garden Diffraction 1 (Fig. 6.12) shares examples of garden-kinning practices in action:

Fig. 6.12

Garden diffraction 1 Kinning practices in action

Happenings in the garden were intra-actions between kinfolk; ‘It was the collective and collaborative which we wanted to nurture, creating a relational space of investigating and creating together; constructing, making, and composing understandings’ (Somerville, 2008, p. 8). When we attend to hands, bodies, and traces we reveal there is more going on than we might, at first, imagine.

Guiding Question—How Did Response-Ableness Manifest?

Making-with engages in inclusive, enacted relationality. Like White himself, within the broader horizon of the garden, we watched narrowly, in relation. Responses included doodling, playing with colour, tracing, naming, smudging, rubbing, imagining, photographing, drawing, sorting, noting, and magnifying. Garden Diffraction 2 (Fig. 6.13) is a gallery of creative gifts, which emerged intra-actively between researchers and place-kin (QR Code or click here). Each shows a desire to get closer; to get to know hollyhocks.

Fig. 6.13

Gallery diffraction 2 Gallery of creative gifts

Each of the makings is evidence of time given, attention paid, processes enacted. Each is a celebration of experience, intra-action, and companionship with kinfolk. As a research diffraction, the gallery shares our learnings with colour, texture, shape, pattern, scent, change, pollination, and makings with kin.

Guiding Question—What Thinking of Pedagogical Significance (Ruption) Was Set in Motion?

In diffracting happenings with the garden, these buds of inspiration (amongst many others) provoked us, set us thinking, wondering and questioning: kinship as temporal; kinship as attuning to multiple voices; kinship as reverence.

Kinship as Temporal

The place revealed notions of time. This garden is a legacy of thinking, making and being; a combination of past and presence, past and present; of formality and wilderness. We are regular visitors to this place, meeting one another in different garden moods, throughout the year. For:

… becoming kin… consists of repeated intimacies, familiar encounters, and daily undoings and transformations that are dependent on visitations and conversations within a smaller circle of place. (Van Horn, 2021, p. 9)

Garden Diffraction 3 (Fig. 6.14) is a play on garden time and resonating oices (QR Code or click here)

Fig. 6.14

Garden diffraction 3 Journal page of temporal connections

This diffraction helps us to wonder about rhythms and patterns of time and place in the company of hollyhocks. It holds echoes of ancestors—more-than-human and human—noticing the past, with thick attention to the present. This summer encounter is one of a repetition of meetings: ongoing cartographies of stems, blooms, eyes, footsteps and… It shares commitment to ongoing hollyhocking practices and speculative fabulations for possible futures.

Kinship as Attuning to Multiple Voices

The place reveals and values the voices of hollyhocks as summer companions.

Earth language is never monological; always relational, it is a call to enter into encounters, to be co-present and engaged. We know that nonhumans communicate in multiple registers, and perhaps it is necessary, therefore, to be able to listen in multiple registers. (Rose, 2013a, p. 107)

Garden Diffraction 4 (Fig. 6.15) plays with voices in the moment (QR Code or click here).

Fig. 6.15

Garden diffraction 4 Journal page of speculative Hollyhock voices

This diffraction animates garden-kin in speculative voicings, suggesting pedagogical openings for others to attend to, and think with, hollyhocks. To amplify a voice is to hear differently, grow relations, and build understandings of hollyhock worlds. (Ma)kin(g) together transforms hollyhock–human relationships, in sympoietic processes of mutual becoming, ‘we become-with each other or not at all’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 5).

A kincentric approach requires us to listen to and dialogue with more-than-human kin. However, building relations is always a political act. There will always be an element of ‘directional selectivity’ (Hannah, 2013, p. 35) as you consider who and what you pay attention to, whose voices you dialogue with and whose voices you ignore.

Kinship as Reverence

The etymology of journalling originates in daily prayers, as records of day-to-day living. So, with this place, we engaged with kinning practices as ritual and with reverence. These included: meeting hollyhocks, recognising uniqueness in each, noticing softness of petals, radial patterns of colour, glow of pollen, hum of bee-kin visiting, collecting fallen petals, holding with care, responding with journal pages that celebrate relations. Garden Diffraction 5 (Fig. 6.16) is a gesture of reverence, and a gift of deep respect (QR Code or click here).

Fig. 6.16

Garden diffraction 5 Journal page as a record of garden reverence

This diffraction celebrates hollyhocks as garden-kin in their moment of summer glory. As Morris (2022) observes, ‘Each act of creativity is a form of prayer if the heart is in the making’. Through journalling, and celebrating beauty, we amplify kin relations and create openings for future flourishings. On another visit to the garden several months later we shared the journal with the garden as an act of reciprocity and gratitude. Together, in proximity, we marked passing of time, seasonal change, promises of fresh growth, and new wonderings.

These garden encounters illustrate practices of kinship, and stories of deep knowings of place. Thinking of pedagogical significance was set in motion—of kinship as temporal, multi-vocal, and reverent. All that was in assemblages became pedagogically significant. Responses generated feelings of belonging within a garden community becoming-kin. We will visit again.

We wonder:

What does gifting generate?

Kinning Practices Entangle and Implicate

Our kinship encounters with both lake and garden, entangled and implicated us. Being implicated is ‘a commitment to life: to exploring the living world in its beauty and its challenges and to making a stand for flourishing, for inclusive possibilities’ (Van Dooren & Chrulew, 2022, p. 10). Bryan (2022) identifies the need for pedagogical models that illuminate the complex layers of worldly relationships; her Pedagogy of the Implicated (2022) prompts critical reflection on one’s own positioning as an implicated subject, whose everyday non-innocent actions affect more-than-human kin.

We put our Pedagogies of Attention to work as field-visiting, through engagement with arts practices as pedagogical experimentations that have potential to transform relationships. A relational pedagogy is an affirmative ruption:

Don’t give up on the world.

To refuse to turn away

to remain true

to the lives within which ours are entangled,

whether or not we can accomplish great change (Rose, 2013b, p. 9).

To turn away, to disavow, to forget.

All are modes of abandonment

That must be resisted in times of colonisation and extinctions.

when living beings and their ways of life

are under threat on mass.

(Van Dooren & Chrulew, 2022, p. 10)

As ‘place-lings’, (Van Horn, 2021) we are implicated with locality. We are committed to a kincentric worldview and propose making-with as generative practice.

We wonder:

What relations might arts-based kinning practices craft?

(Ma)kin(g) More-than-Human Educational Futures

In cultivating (Ma)kin(g) within education we suggest a shift from individual, human-centred approaches to pedagogies of kincentric, collective, co-creation with field-visiting spaces. In this chapter, research creations of lakeside and garden happenings are sympoietic (art)efacts created as post-qualitative responses to place (Ma)kin(g)s. They are both incomplete and mark the beginnings of ongoing kinship happenings.

Relational pedagogy does not end when we leave a place. Relationships and implications continue in dialoguing, making, new thinking and transformations. Pedagogies of Attention call us to attune to different voices, engage in new relationships with more-than-human kin, and ask fresh questions. This is the work the world needs right now, a radical yet gentle activism (Burnard, 2022) that brings learners close to the world (St Pierre, 2017), through small, yet significant, actions. A kincentric worldview offers possibilities to reimagine local areas as meeting places of lively entities; possibilities that disrupt contemporary feelings of alienation, disconnection, and separation. You are never alone in a more-than-human world.

Sympoiesis is a creative practice that fosters inclusive, non-colonising pedagogies. Making-with the world can be challenging to put into practice, yet positions creativity as a powerful and provocative agent of positive change. As celebrations of specific local encounters these are not intended to be a ‘how to’ guide or a script to support teachers to go a-kinning when field-visiting. ‘It would be contrary to the spirit of postmodern emergence to try to come up with a list of principles or a recipe through which to describe or enact these ideas’ (Somerville, 2008, p. 212). Instead, our ruption opens a ‘crack in the here and now’ (Anderson, 2006, p. 705) in traditional school place-based practices. We propose a shift to focus on learning for place attention and responses through acts of reciprocity, care and response-ableness. (Ma)kin(g)-with is a radical commitment to generative multispecies relationality for more-than-human and human futures.

We wonder:

What opportunities will you embrace to make kin with the world?