Ghosting Pedagogies
Anna Tsing (2015) reminds us that there are lives and worlds that somehow persevere within the precarity of capitalist ruins and whose stories need to be heard. By storying the particular and peculiar as well as the shadowy and the mythical, ghosting pedagogies trouble the anthropocentric notion of dead spaces by pushing past “the deceptive comforts of human exceptionalism” (Haraway, 2016, p. 212). Ghosting pedagogies focus instead on complex entanglements of both the seen and unseen, the living and the dead, the imaginary and the real. It supports the possibility of telling different kinds of lively, vibrant, and precarious stories of living alongside the more-than-human in times of climate change and environmental degradation.
With children and educators, week after week, we venture out into the ever-eroding forest to bear witness to these (often quite ruinous) transformations. As in many urban cities, this place has witnessed a continuously shifting landscape of developmental encroachment and the resulting effects on the more-than-human inhabiting the enclosed, ever-shrinking forest (eg. Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2018).
The Shadowy
Following a new layer of snow, young children see that their footprints are not the only prints present in the forest; there are many different indents and markings. Rather than labeling the prints as ‘bunny tracks’ or ‘deer tracks,’ we become curious trackers and story the movements of bodies we cannot see.
The shadowy remnants of passing animals provokes a different kind of story about who might live in these diminishing spaces. While the children continue to search for the elusive shadowy creatures, ghosting pedagogies offer a generative space to engage with what, for now, remains consigned to the realm of the imaginary.
By Kelly-Ann MacAlpine
References
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble; Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2018). The common worlds of children and animals: Relational ethics for entangled lives. Routledge.
Tsing, A.L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.