Early Childhood Education Commons^™

Exploring Young Children's Encounters With The More-Than-Human: A Multispecies Ethnography, Sarah Kathleen Black

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Foregrounding moments from an early child care centre, this thesis employs a multispecies ethnography methodology to explore the opportunities children from a preschool class have to encounter the more-than-human in the ecological epoch of the Anthropocene. Drawing on a posthuman and common worlds theoretical framework, this thesis works to explore children/more-than-human entanglements that occur in a local, urban cemetery space while challenging practices of human exceptionalism in the field of early childhood education. Participants in the study included one preschool class of 16 three to four-year-old children and the diverse nonhuman residents of the cemetery space. Using a diffractive method …