How can educators navigate the pedagogical complexities and ethical tensions of food animal-child relations?

How can educators navigate the pedagogical complexities and ethical tensions of food animal-child relations? Children are presented daily with books, songs, and toys about farm animals, often painting an unrealistic picture of how these animals actually live within the industrial food production system. Given children’s curiosity of the world, questions inevitably arise at meal and snack times in child care settings – how did this cow live? How did this chicken get killed? What impact does the educator’s response – or avoidance – have on children’s relations with other animals? Research on assemblages of food and early childhood pedagogy (e.g., Nxumalo, Pacini-Ketchabaw, & Rowan, 2011; Ritchie, 2015) provides a starting point for thinking through the complex entanglements of culture, economics, politics, food, and early childhood education. How are the current environmental crisis and ethical and social justice concerns about industrial farming practices entangled with early childhood pedagogy about food animals?

References

Nxumalo, F., Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Rowan, M. C. (2011). Lunch time at the child care centre: Neoliberal assemblages in early childhood education. Journal of Pedagogy / Pedagogický Casopis, 2(2), 195-223.

Ritchie, J. (2015). Food reciprocity and sustainability in early childhood care and education in Aotearoa New Zealand. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 31(1), 74-85.

What do common worlding methods put into play, and are we suitably prepared and adequately accountable?

How might thinking with fluid river bodies destabilize neoliberal desires that segment child bodies into convenient and colonial temporalities?