In this article, I share small stories of young people’s pedagogical encounters with water. I share these stories as illustrations of pedagogies that welcome young people into caring relationships with more-than-human life. So, why do the ways in which young people are welcomed into relationship with the more-than-human matter? In my work, I spend a lot of time with young people and educators in everyday place-based encounters. An important orientation of this work, both pedagogically and conceptually, is trying to figure out what it might look like to learn with place, and its more-than-human inhabitants, in ways that disrupt settler colonial and anti-Black inheritances. These inheritances include Euro-Western human exceptionalism, which manifests in myriad ways in place-based education, including as a normalized understanding of the natural world as intrinsically separate from, and lesser than, humans (Bang et al., 2014; Nxumalo, 2019). This separation shows up, for instance, when nature is described in ways that construct it primarily as a mute site for young learners’ meaning-making and their universalized cognitive, physical, and socio-emotional developmental progression (Nxumalo, 2019; Taylor, 2017). This is not to suggest that there are not important benefits that derive from pedagogical encounters with the natural world. However, my concern here is with two interconnected key issues that arise from the dominant focus on developmental outcomes.
