What is the role of river rocks to disrupt the nature/culture divide within a child’s physical literacy journey?
SHARED BY KATHRYN RILEY
What is the role of river rocks to disrput the nature/culture divide within a child’s physical literacy journey? Affected through the microblog by Tonya Rooney, Mindy Blaise, and Affrica Taylor that explored the impressions of river rocks, I wonder: What is the role of river rocks to disrupt the nature/culture divide within a child’s physical literacy journey? From a Western lens, river rocks might be seen as an instrumental tool that children pragmatically negotiate to develop a sense of balance and body control across wet, slippery surfaces. As a descendent of the amiskwaciwiyiniwak (Beaver Hills people) and the Papaschase Cree, Dwayne Donald (2012) wrote that rocks are seen as Elders who connect to ancestral pasts and to all other beings. Thinking-with Donald’s Indigenous métissage (Land and story-based approaches to curriculum informed by relationality) and Karen Barad’s (2007) diffractive way of understanding (a learning from ‘otherness’), river rocks are both a source of physical challenge to attest movement competence and confidence and animated within relational reciprocity. As river rocks disrupt flows of water, they de/re/territorialize currents so that new flows of water form together; they are akin to the hyphen between Indigenous/Western knowledge systems, and thus, child/rock relations emerge across boundaries and borders of entangled/differentiated worldviews.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Donald, D. (2012). Indigenous Métissage: A decolonizing research sensibility. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 25(5), 533-555. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2011.554449
This image is part of the physical literacy (PL) resource in the Nature’s Way-our Way initiative; a culturally rooted, interdisciplinary, and community-based initiative designed to enhance, implement, and evaluate PL and Land-based learning resources in Indigenous (First Nations and Métis) and non-Indigenous early childcare centres across Saskatchewan, Canada (artwork by Lexa Specht).
