Unsettling environmental and place-based literature for young children

Abstract

This portfolio seeks to trouble and unsettle the pervasiveness of settler colonialism, White supremacy, and anthropocentrism in young children’s environmental and place-based literature through the creation of a picture book for young children. While critical discourse surrounding these entanglements has begun to emerge across the field of early childhood environmental and place-based education, literature for young children that depicts human relationships with the more-than-human world has been slow to take up these conversations. The result is the need for works for young children that both “unsettle” the hegemony of these social forces and re-centre the narratives that have been and continue to be erased through White settler constructions of young children’s relationships with the more-than-human world. This portfolio consists of three tasks: 1) A literature review; 2) A written and illustrated children’s book, Blanket of Stories, Blanket of Snow that was informed by the concepts of a layered “palimpsest” or “pentimento”; and 3) A brief critical reflection on my personal experience throughout the process as well as the tensions and possibilities I foresee in the field of children’s environmental and place-based literature going forward.