- 28 nov. 2021
- 4 min läsning

The Story of Another Brick

After a year of intentional “walking the land” in the forest I have developed a relationship with this being, Nature, that is more than the sum of all its parts. I sense the loss of the clear cut areas as if it was a limb that had been removed. I sense emptiness, ignorance and innocence of the young planted trees where the Swedish Forestry Commission is “rejuvenating the forest”. The mother trees stand dotted, isolated from each other, acting as teacher and warden to the same-aged pupils in her mono-culture class.

Just as the bricks and windows do not make a school, neither do the trees make a forest. They create a physical space for the forest or the school.

My travels have allowed me to see the insides of many EY settings and schools. Some have had extravagant, beautiful and richly decorated buildings and interior design, others have been almost barren, most find themselves somewhere in between. What makes a school a school is not the building or the wall decorations but the life, intra-actions (Barad, 2007) and sense-abilities that occur within; like the complexity of a true forest.

In early years settings I have found it is much easier to create this rich complexity of an old forest, especially in settings that focus on equity, children being allowed to evolve at their own pace, and play, learning, teaching and understanding being interwoven as I share in the Original Learning Approach, and mixed ages. Schools, on the other hand, have the same feel as a plantation. Teachers isolated from each other in different classrooms, responsible for teaching and caring for rows of children “planted” in the same year.

As an EY educator in Sweden we are usually a small team of adults, and frequently a group of mixed age children, if not for the whole day, then at least part of the day. The young saplings can tap into multiple wisdoms - not just multiple adults, but also the multi-age groups provide a cognitive mycellium web of support, information and inspiration.

The third teacher, the non-human/more-than-human educator of the EY setting, is another multilayer of intra-action. The space is designed with resources that expose the children to new experiences that allow them to grow strong and seek out their own learning light. In schools, at best, the space is designed to excite the learner, but there lacks permission and temporal space for them to actually engage with it.

Sit down.

Do as you are told.

Do not interact with the space that asks you to interact.

The curriculum does not permit the teacher to allow each child to mature at their own pace.

In the forest each tree, each plant, each animal, each mineral, has its own story - a beginning, a middle, and an end. Some started aeons ago and will end in a time beyond our perception, others began yesterday and end today. A forest is not considered mature here in Sweden until many of the trees are over the age of 70. My pet rabbit became a mature adult before the our planet had completed one revolution, and after seven revolutions he is now considered an old bunny. This fascinated a group of seven year old girls busy stroking him in the garden. They were amazed that they could be the same age as my rabbit and yet maturity wise be so far apart. The girls looked at the one year old child also playing in the garden and dwelled for a moment on how this toddling, babbling-barely-words, seeking-to-know human creature would be an adult if he had been a rabbit.

The school classroom has no space for such diversity of maturity. Every child must grow at the same rate, and those that want to seek out the learning-light faster are frequently put in the shadows; while those needing more time in order to grow strong are hothoused to keep up, developing spindly trunks that will likely struggle to support their future branches.

The classroom is a clearcut, that gets turned into a plantation when the children sit in their rows. The multiplicity that allows each child to thrive in the early years struggles to exist in the classroom, just as diversity struggles to exist in a clearcut forest.

Bringing school-like academic strategies into the early years will probably not close the gap, it is, though, more likely to increase the gap and also increase bias, stereotypes and the single story of a monoculture (Adichie, 2009).

The power of play and imagination are yet more threads interwoven into the early years multiverse. Threads that are seldom valued in schools and society at large. The Moomins, in all their strange otherness, are like the threads of play. Knotting the imagination with reality as threads leading from what is known to what is going to be known.

Knotting threads has been a part of my practical knowledge-building of the forest, the Moomins and Indigenous Knowledge. While the Moomins might be literary imaginings they represent a realm of the simultaneously large and small that children can inhabit in their play. The physical knotting was a way for my hands to provide me with knowledge. Play is a beyond academic way for children to gain knowledge through their body, senses, spirit and mind. The strangeness of a more-than-theory/academic learning has othered it, so that play can be colonised and placed in reservations or "national parks" to protect it,

and also protect the norm from it.

Just as nature reservations protect old forests in order to plunder the rest of nature. Just as Indigenous Peoples are given areas of land (when in reality they belong to the land and not vice versa), not because it is the right thing to do, returning the land from the grips of the coloniser, but in order to control so the grip is not lost from the rest of the land. And as I have seen in my own local forest... the authorities are far from shy about twisting words and clearcutting chunks of a national park forest under the label of rejuvenation. Just as companies seeking to mine, drill etc fail to acknowledge the true owners of the land and walk in and do as they please in the name of profit.