Narda Nelson

University of Victoria, Child Care Services, Pedagogist & Researcher

University of Victoria, Child & Youth Care, Graduate Student

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Narda Nelson is a pedagogist & researcher at University of Victoria Child Care Services & pedagogical communications coordinator for the BC Early Childhood Pedagogy Network (ECPN). Drawing on her background in gender studies, Narda takes an interdisciplinary approach to early childhood with a particular focus on reimagining ethical futures with plant, animal, & waste flow relations in early childhood. She is a PhD student with Western University Faculty of Education & member of the Common Worlds Research Collective.
Supervisors: Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw

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Papers by Narda Nelson

Pedagogical gatherings in early childhood education Mapping interferences in emergent curriculum

Curriculum Inquiry, 2018

In this article, the authors critically and generatively encounter emergent curriculum, drawing f... more In this article, the authors critically and generatively encounter emergent curriculum, drawing from their experiences working as pedagogistas in three different early childhood education centres in Western Canada. The intent is to engage with the concept of emergence as that which can bring ethical and political engage- ments with curriculum and pedagogy; complicating understand- ings of emergent curriculum as simply following the lead of children. The particular interruptive orientations that the authors bring forward include: possibilities for responding to and cultivat- ing the conditions for emergence in ways that disrupt the man- agerial concerns of everyday practice; troubling the co-optation of emergence by human-centred consumptive practice; and unset- tling emergence in conversation with settler colonialism and anti- blackness in the places and spaces of early childhood education.

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Rats, Death, and Anthropocene Relations in Urban Canadian Childhoods

Springer international handbooks of education, 2018

In the Euro-Western intellectual, or minority world, tradition death is often framed as something... more In the Euro-Western intellectual, or minority world, tradition death is often framed as something to avoid in the creation of “optimal” childhoods. Foregrounding a West Coast Canadian early childhood center’s unexpected encounter with a dying rat, this chapter looks at the role ethical frameworks play in shaping uneasy more-than-human engagements to challenge taken-forgranted assumptions about animal death in urban early childhoods and grapple with the limits of ethical engagement. In it, understandings of childhood and nature are situated within the schism of romanticized narratives and challenges of N. Nelson (*) School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada e-mail: nelsonn@uvic.ca # Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 A. Cutter-Mackenzie et al. (eds.), Research Handbook on Childhoodnature, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_45-1 1 a so-called new Anthropocene era, to reconfigure encounters at the intersection of life and death as generative in their ability to destabilize the precepts of a humancentric worldview that orders urban spaces and relations in particular ways. Using a hybrid multispecies ethnographic and common worlding approach, this chapter explores possibilities for cultivating new modes of attention to promote expansive approaches to thinking and doing in early learning pedagogy and practice. How might we resist shoring up colonial and other universalizing narratives when death emerges through everyday encounter? What stories help us matter differently as we continue to world with others in this time of rapid change? This chapter proposes tending to multispecies relations, including those considered uncomfortable, as deeply entangled and consequential to open up new possibilities for ethical responses to living and dying together in these troubling times.

New Obligations and Shared Vulnerabilities: Reimagining Sustainability for Live-Able Worlds

Nordic Studies in Science Education, Nov 26, 2019

Narda Nelson is a pedagogist and researcher with UVic Child Care Services and Pedagogical Communi... more Narda Nelson is a pedagogist and researcher with UVic Child Care Services and Pedagogical Communications Coordinator for the British Columbia Early Childhood Pedagogy Network (BC ECPN). She is a member of the Common Worlds Research Collective and Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory. Drawing on her background in gender studies, she takes an interdisciplinary approach to rethinking young children's relations with plants, animals, and landscape forms.

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Tracing Transit (in)Tensions Between Settler Colonized ECE Contact Zones

Journal of Childhood Studies, Oct 23, 2019

is an early childhood educator at University of Victoria (UVic) Child Care Services and a MEd stu... more is an early childhood educator at University of Victoria (UVic) Child Care Services and a MEd student at UVic. Drawing on her background in psychology, philosophy, and early childhood education and inspired by everyday moments with children, she is interested in the entangled multispecies relationships and encounters that take place in the classroom, playground, nearby forests, and gardens. She is intrigued by how these human and more-than-human assemblages create place and pedagogy in early education. She is also researching what it might mean to practice care and sustainability through these children-more-thanhuman relationships.

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Pedagogical gatherings in early childhood education: Mapping interferences in emergent curriculum

Curriculum Inquiry, Nov 16, 2018

In this article, the authors critically and generatively encounter emergent curriculum, drawing f... more In this article, the authors critically and generatively encounter emergent curriculum, drawing from their experiences working as pedagogistas in three different early childhood education centres in Western Canada. The intent is to engage with the concept of emergence as that which can bring ethical and political engagements with curriculum and pedagogy; complicating understandings of emergent curriculum as simply following the lead of children. The particular interruptive orientations that the authors bring forward include: possibilities for responding to and cultivating the conditions for emergence in ways that disrupt the managerial concerns of everyday practice; troubling the co-optation of emergence by human-centred consumptive practice; and unsettling emergence in conversation with settler colonialism and antiblackness in the places and spaces of early childhood education.

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Unruly Voices

Routledge eBooks, Apr 8, 2020

Doing pedagogical intentions with<i>Facetiming Common Worlds</i>(and Donna Haraway)

by Narda Nelson and Sherri-Lynn Yazbeck (she/her), MEd ECE

Global Studies of Childhood, Jan 27, 2020

Working with stories of children’s relationships with place and technologies from an early childh... more Working with stories of children’s relationships with place and technologies from an early childhood education pedagogical inquiry research project in Melbourne, Australia and Victoria, Canada, this article takes up the concept of “pedagogical intentions” to consider how educators and researchers might cultivate intentional teaching practices relevant to the complex worlds we inherit with children. We think with a common worlds pedagogies approach to extend conceptualizations of intentional teaching held in dominant Euro-Western early learning frameworks in Melbourne and Victoria. After situating our understanding of pedagogical intentionality as an ongoing, purposeful, answerable practice of shaping and caring with everyday pedagogical relationships, we share three stories of how we activate our Donna Haraway–inspired intentions with children. By questioning how our pedagogical intentions inform our work, we assert that sharing and putting at risk our intentions is a necessary practice for thinking collectively with children, more-than-human others, and technologies within early childhood education.

Facetiming common worlds: exchanging digital place stories and crafting pedagogical contact zones

Children's Geographies, Feb 3, 2019

Children, educators, and researchers at a child care center in Victoria, Canada and Melbourne, Au... more 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.

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Rethinking Nature-Based Approaches in Early Childhood Education: Common Worlding Practices

Journal of Childhood Studies, Jun 8, 2018

Narda Nelson is a master's student in the School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria,... more Narda Nelson is a master's student in the School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria, located on the traditional territories of Lekwungen-speaking peoples. Drawing on her background in gender studies, Narda takes an interdisciplinary approach to rethinking young children's relations with animals, plants, and landscape forms. She works as a pedagogista with UVic Child Care Services, with a particular interest in thinking with processes of rot (compost), death, and waste-flows as a conduit for promoting sustainable and ethical futures with children.

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Doing Twitter, Postdevelopmental Pedagogies, and Digital Activism

In education, Dec 21, 2022

In this article, we interrogate how we might manifest early childhood education's Twitter purview... more In this article, we interrogate how we might manifest early childhood education's Twitter purview as a space for thinking with postdevelopmental pedagogies. Accordingly, we pay attention to the ethics and politics that shape our Twitter practices, asking how these activate postdevelopmental provocations. In this sense, postdevelopmental pedagogies refer to processes and questions that interrupt the assumptions, objectivity, universalism, and technocratic instrumentalism of child development that so often pervade ECE practice, including much of the #earlychildhoodeducation content. Anchored in the two Twitter accounts that we coordinate, we outline four practices for doing Twitter with postdevelopmental provocations: counterpublics, counter-narratives, and counter-memory, collectivity, and digital feminist activism. We then work through two examples, showing how we draw these practices into our decision making as we craft tweets to activate postdevelopmental questions. We conclude by offering forward questions that educators, pedagogists, researchers, and activists might carry into their own Twitter practices.

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Living Speculative Pedagogies as Boundary-Crossing Dialogues

Journal of Childhood Studies, Nov 13, 2020

is deputy director of the British Columbia Early Childhood Pedagogy Network (ECPN) and lead resea... more is deputy director of the British Columbia Early Childhood Pedagogy Network (ECPN) and lead researcher and pedagogist at University of Victoria (UVic) Child Care Services. Her work is rooted in feminist material theoretical perspectives, which she explores in her books Gender and Care with Young Children: A Feminist Material Approach to Early Childhood Education (2019) and the edited collection Feminist Research for 21st-Century Childhoods: Common Worlds Methods (2019), chapters in edited books, and articles in various journals. Denise is a member of the Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory and the Common Worlds Research Collective.

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Dis/orientating the Early Childhood Sensorium: A Palate Making Menu for Public Pedagogy

Journal of Childhood Studies, Jun 16, 2022

Alex Berry is a PhD candidate with the Faculty of Education at Western University on the lands of... more Alex Berry is a PhD candidate with the Faculty of Education at Western University on the lands of the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Lunaapeewak, and Attawandaron peoples in Ontario, Canada, and a pedagogical facilitator in Cuenca, Ecuador. Her research is interested in how collective artistic processes may propose new ways of relating with plastic waste materials in Ecuadorian Andean early childhood spaces.

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Orienting toward the otherwise in the Twitterverse: Activating pedagogical commitments with pedagogists and Twitter

Journal of curriculum and pedagogy, Mar 17, 2023

Doing Twitter, Postdevelopmental Pedagogies, and Digital Activism

in education

In this article, we interrogate how we might manifest early childhood education’s Twitter purview... more In this article, we interrogate how we might manifest early childhood education’s Twitter purview as a space for thinking with postdevelopmental pedagogies. Accordingly, we pay attention to the ethics and politics that shape our Twitter practices, asking how these activate postdevelopmental provocations. In this sense, postdevelopmental pedagogies refer to processes and questions that interrupt the assumptions, objectivity, universalism, and technocratic instrumentalism of child development that so often pervade ECE practice, including much of the #earlychildhoodeducation content. Anchored in the two Twitter accounts that we coordinate, we outline four practices for doing Twitter with postdevelopmental provocations: counterpublics, counter-narratives, and counter-memory, collectivity, and digital feminist activism. We then work through two examples, showing how we draw these practices into our decision making as we craft tweets to activate postdevelopmental questions. We conclude by...

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Dis/orientating the Early Childhood Sensorium: A Palate Making Menu for Public Pedagogy

Journal of Childhood Studies

This paper shares a multilayered retrospective story of an international exhibit curated for the ... more This paper shares a multilayered retrospective story of an international exhibit curated for the Climate Action Childhood Network Colloquium as part of a commitment among exhibit curators to reveal the complexities of unpalatable climate futures. In the format of a tasting menu, we offer a sampling of the exhibit installations as a menu of potential alterpolitics in the making. Facing intensifying inequitable climate presents and futures, our intention is that this invitation might create openings for the intersection of local and global concerns. We gesture toward collective but tentative responses for thinking climate action pedagogies through the metaphor of a troubling meal.

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Pedagogical gatherings in early childhood education: Mapping interferences in emergent curriculum

Curriculum Inquiry, 2018

In this article, the authors critically and generatively encounter emergent curriculum, drawing f... more In this article, the authors critically and generatively encounter emergent curriculum, drawing from their experiences working as pedagogistas in three different early childhood education centres in Western Canada. The intent is to engage with the concept of emergence as that which can bring ethical and political engagements with curriculum and pedagogy; complicating understandings of emergent curriculum as simply following the lead of children. The particular interruptive orientations that the authors bring forward include: possibilities for responding to and cultivating the conditions for emergence in ways that disrupt the managerial concerns of everyday practice; troubling the co-optation of emergence by human-centred consumptive practice; and unsettling emergence in conversation with settler colonialism and antiblackness in the places and spaces of early childhood education.

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Rats, Death, and Anthropocene Relations in Urban Canadian Childhoods

Research Handbook on Childhoodnature, 2020

In the Euro-Western intellectual, or minority world, tradition death is often framed as something... more In the Euro-Western intellectual, or minority world, tradition death is often framed as something to avoid in the creation of “optimal” childhoods. Foregrounding a West Coast Canadian early childhood center’s unexpected encounter with a dying rat, this chapter looks at the role ethical frameworks play in shaping uneasy more-than-human engagements to challenge taken-for granted assumptions about animal death in urban early childhoods and grapple with the limits of ethical engagement. In it, understandings of childhood and nature are situated within the schism of romanticized narratives and challenges of a so-called new Anthropocene era, to reconfigure encounters at the intersection of life and death as generative in their ability to destabilize the precepts of a humancentric worldview that orders urban spaces and relations in particular ways. Using a hybrid multispecies ethnographic and common worlding approach, this chapter explores possibilities for cultivating new modes of attention to promote expansive approaches to thinking and doing in early learning pedagogy and practice. How might we resist shoring up colonial and other universalizing narratives when death emerges through everyday encounter?What stories help us matter differently as we continue to world with others in this time of rapid change? This chapter proposes tending to multispecies relations, including those considered uncomfortable, as deeply entangled and consequential to open up new possibilities for ethical responses to living and dying together in these troubling times.

Pedagogical gatherings in early childhood education: Mapping interferences in emergent curriculum

In this article, the authors critically and generatively encounter emergent curriculum, drawing f... more In this article, the authors critically and generatively encounter emergent curriculum, drawing from their experiences working as pedagogistas in three different early childhood education centres in Western Canada. The intent is to engage with the concept of emergence as that which can bring ethical and political engagements with curriculum and pedagogy; complicating understandings of emergent curriculum as simply following the lead of children. The particular interruptive orientations that the authors bring forward include: possibilities for responding to and cultivating the conditions for emergence in ways that disrupt the managerial concerns of everyday practice; troubling the co-optation of emergence by human-centred consumptive practice; and unsettling emergence in conversation with settler colonialism and antiblackness in the places and spaces of early childhood education.

Engaging with the messiness of place in early childhood education and art therapy: Exploring animal relations, traditional hide and Drum

How place is conceptualized impacts the way everyday moments and relationships unfold. This paper... more How place is conceptualized impacts the way everyday moments and relationships unfold. This paper explores possibilities for shifting our practices by engaging with an ethic of doing. Drawing on ecofeminist, nomadic, and Indigenous perspectives, we aim to open up space for more accountable, political practices that acknowledge the diverse realities of the children and youth we work with. We present vignettes from our practices to illustrate possibilities for (re)conceptualizing the deeply embedded, normative colonial assumptions in the places we work, and introduce political, contextual, and messy ways of doing in place.

Tracking: Cultivating the “Arts of Awareness” in Early Childhood

Feminist Research for 21st-century Childhoods, 2019

Narda Nelson

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