Abstract
The children’s storybook, the Flat Rabbit, by Bárdur Oskarsson, explores complex ethical dilemmas experienced by the dog and rat after they discover the rabbit flattened on the road. Similarly, in our collective experiences with children and educators in three nature programs across Canada, we take up complex ethical dilemmas experienced by our unanticipated encounters with various deaths in the outdoors, including those of baby squirrels, a raccoon, and an owl. Common world (Latour. The politics of nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) theoretical framing helps in positioning the child as an “indivisible part of the natural and more-than-natural world.” This natural and more-than-natural world provides the impetus for children’s development of understanding and working theories related to sensitive concepts such as death (Mankiw & Strasser. Young Children, 68(1), 84–89, 2013). We identify and examine ideologies and practices around death that continue to occupy early childhood spaces (Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, UK/London, England: Duke University Press, 2016). In reimagining child-nature-animal entanglements, we posit that “staying with the trouble” (Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, UK/London, England: Duke University Press, 2016) disturbs sedimented embodied ideologies so that we might listen and foster a “practice of becoming witness” (Rose & Chrulew. Extinction studies-stories of time, death, and generations. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). We are working toward a more performative, storied, and experimental way of being and learning together with children and animals, “learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth” (Haraway. Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, UK/London, England: Duke University Press, p. 2, 2016).
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Harwood, D., Whitty, P., Elliot, E., Rose, S. (2018). The Flat Weasel: Children and Adults Experiencing Death Through Nature/Culture Encounters. In: Cutter-Mackenzie, A., Malone, K., Barratt Hacking, E. (eds) Research Handbook on Childhoodnature . Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_74-1
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