Children Sensing Ecologically : Becoming Bird

This book explores the relationship between a young child, a grandmother, and a dog in a loving and walking-with relational experience of sharing sensorial ecological encounters.

Drawing on short videos of Wren in the first 3 years of her life as she goes about her everyday activities with Poppy her dog and Meme her grandmother, it engages theoretically with ecofeminist, posthuman, indigenous approaches to childhood. The insights of revisiting shared places or ecological niches are not documented as chronological or linear activities but framed as conceptual events: nesting in the large wooden bed, imaginary play with found objects in the cupboard of curiosity; foraging in the garden and forest; following tracks and traces on the earth, bark, and pathways. The book is novel as it endeavours to imagine children’s ecological learning before adult humans intervene with intentional teaching.

Malone argues that this teaching can disconnect and extract children’s rhythms of the natural world. It provides insights into new and seldom asked questions about being human: Are children born with a non-anthropocentric sensitivity? Do child bodies as knowing biological and ecological beings, learn from sensorial encounters what it means to be human? And where does the learning of anthropocentricism begin?