Enacting arachnean ethics: refusing the ‘thought-out-project’ of early childhood environmental education through arts-based praxis

This paper weaves a web that makes visible ways of thinking and being that lie outside institutionalised regimes of knowledge and power that typically shape life in contemporary reception classes in English primary schools. In an arts-based research project concerning multispecies flourishing with four-year-old children we read minor encounters through Fernand Deligny’s philosophical praxis to disrupt normative ideas about child development and environmental education. A series of threads are introduced from everyday encounters that surfaced as part of the project to provide sticking points with which to think otherwise about multispecies relationalities and refusing the ‘thought out project’ of contemporary schooling. The threads that are pursued concern: an imperative to challenge human exceptionalism and invest in ways to unlearn; the urgent need to question the primacy of language, representation, knowability and to focus upon what and who gets excluded when it is left unquestioned; recognising the power of noticing, attuning, and registering the wonder to be found in the everyday; and finally, taking seriously what can be learnt from valuing and attuning to neurodivergent ways of encountering the world through heightened sensitivity to affective and atmospheric forces. These threads do not necessarily resurface in predictable or consistent ways rather traces of each persistently vibrate throughout this paper and enable a mapping of the generative potential of refusing the ‘thought out project’.

© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided theoriginal work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been publishedallow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.