Shared by Catherine Hamm
As I take my morning walk, I notice that Sky Country has changed; no longer a dark grey sunrise but now a brilliant orange! Creek and Park are showing abundance as plants and animals respond to the change from Gulig [Orchid] to Porneet [Tadpole] season (Melbourne Museum, 2020). Barwung (Magpie) is nesting and guards her babies closely. Learning with/from Barwung requires attending to local Aboriginal environmental worldviews that focus on relationships (not exclusively human ones), relationality and circular ways of knowing (Martin, 2016). Place-noticing pedagogies require deep, ongoing connections that generate opportunities to learn with place, not just about places. How can thinking with local Kulin perspectives in the context of my walk, support me to learn with place? How might noticing what calls me into connection during my walk generate ways to understand seasons beyond the arbitrary, inverted allocations assigned from the Northern Hemisphere?
*First Nations Territory
References
Martin (2016) Voices & Visions: Aboriginal Early Childhood education in Australia. New South Wales: Pademelon Press.
Museums Victoria (2020) Forest Secrets. Retrieved from https://museumsvictoria.com.au/melbournemuseum/resources/forest-secrets/
Great provocation Catherine! It is indeed a troubling Spring and you’re doing a fantastic job of reconfiguring that trouble. Thanks for articulating, so beautifully, how ‘place noticing’ in the country of the Kulin Nation facilitates otherwise (southern) ways of learning and knowing. I love how this kind of noticing pedagogy is about paying close attention to where we are and who is there with us – attuning to more-than-human presence in the present. And at the same time, by acknowledging and learning from the collective wisdom from millennia of First Nations’ noticing, it’s also a decolonising act. This is such a great example of a relational and circular pedagogy of time/space convergence that troubles ‘out-of-place’ and ‘top-down’ impositions of Euro-western perspectives. Great stuff! Hope it’s a teaser for a publication so I can read more!