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Becoming-with fire and rainforest: Emergent curriculum and pedagogies for planetary wellbeing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2021

Margaret J. Somerville*
Affiliation:
School of Education, Western Sydney University, Locked Bag 1747, Penrith South, NSW2750, Australia
Sarah J. Powell
Affiliation:
School of Education, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW2109, Australia
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: margaret.somerville@westernsydney.edu.au

Abstract

In this paper we propose the concept of ‘becoming-with’ in relation to the experience of the catastrophic fires in the summer of 2019–2020 in Australia, and their implications for research into young children’s response to bushfires, and their learning about bushfire recovery, which resulted in the development of an arts-based project to explore emergent curriculum and pedagogies for planetary wellbeing. We draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s theorising that ‘the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities’; and ‘Spatio-temporal relations’ as ‘not predicates of the thing but dimensions of multiplicities of events as encounters’ to theorise how ‘becoming-with’ fires enabled the development of emergent curriculum and pedagogies in an early learning centre, which can ultimately contribute to planetary wellbeing.

Type
Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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