Re-storying anthropocene childhoods through non-innocent encounters with microbes

This chapter explores environmental education-otherwise with a specific focus on microbial life. By taking seriously the unruly agencies, non-innocent histories, and intimate hauntologies provoked by microbial childhoods we propose new pedagogical possibilities. An arts-based research-creation project with four-year old children in North London created opportunities to dismantle developmentalist logic that persists in disciplining young child bodyminds. By activating Haraway’s SF philosophy, Ettinger’s wit(h)nessing - alongside monist philosophies - speculative, affectively charged encounters are cultivated as ways to refuse the moralising, anthropocentric scripts that tend to surface in conventional mainstream early childhood environmental education. Through our project of environmental education-otherwise microbes assume the role of provocateur, pedagogue and storyteller. As such they unsettle adultism, activate post-pandemic hauntologies, and expose the falsehood and fragility of human exceptionalism. As children improvise, dance, story and engage in worlding and wit(h)nessing practices they generate alternative imaginaries that pose a direct challenge to the sanitised, risk averse logics of contemporary schooling and deficit narratives framing the ‘covid generation’. By attending to microbial contamination and sympoietic entanglement, we propose environmental education-otherwise is vital and necessary to offer a radical alternative that embraces precarity and insists upon the political necessity for becoming-with the more-than-human in the ruins of the Anthropocene.