Ursula Stenger/Oktay Bilgi - Making the Complexity of Realities Tangible
Channel: Allgemeine Erziehungswissenschaft an der HU Berlin
Date: 2023-02-06

Prof.in Dr.in Ursula Stenger/Dr. Oktay Bilgi (Köln, GER)

Making the Complexity of Realities Tangible. 
Ethical-Ecological Aspects of Collaborative Constitutions of Reality in the Context of Early Childhood Education and Care

Keynote on September 15th, 2022 as part of the 6th International Symposium on Phenomenological Research in Education: Realities. Phenomenological and pedagogical perspectives. Introduction by Prof. Dr. Malte Brinkmann.

Prof. Brinkmann's homepage: https://hu.berlin/aew_eng
Blog: http://paed.ophen.org/?lang=en
Symposion on Phenomenological Research in Education: https://hu.berlin/sym_phen_ed

Abstract:
Time-diagnostic signatures such as the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or Chthulucene prob-lematize anthropocentric conceptions of reality(s) that focused exclusively on humans and their formation (Haraway, 2018, Braidotti,2018). Reality-constitutions, for example, accord-ing to anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, is not the exclusive preserve of humans. To build new ways of living together in the ruins of the Anthropocene, we must engage in “cross-species world-making processes” (Tsing, 2021, p. 39). 
We take the call not to think of meaningful reality(ies) exclusively in human catego ries as an occasion for phenomenological explorations of collaboratively produced pedagogical realities. To this end, we pursue the question of how early childhood educational settings can be constituted as interweavings of natures-cultures, materially-discursively-physically and collaboratively, i.e., through different cooperations of entities, forces and conditions, as het-erogeneous assemblages made pedagogically experienceable. To this end, we draw on theo-retical frameworks that, contrary to ontological duality-models, focus on the strong connect-edness of human and non-human aspects in the constitution of pedagogical realities. Exem-plary of this query are concepts from the theoretical discourses of posthumanism, such as entnglements (Haraway 2018), or common worlding (https://commonworlds.net). Another productive theoretical perspective is offered by leib-phenomenological approaches (Mer-leau-Ponty 1994/Nancy 2000; 2004), which sensitize to the constitutive role of perception modes that are more than cognitive, or primarily oriented toward difference, to the emer-gence of multi-species places, and focus on processes in the "in-between" of materialities and bodies of  diverse living beings, e.g., as "in-betweenness-of leib" (Merleau-Ponty 1994).  
Exploring pedagogically significant realities phenomenologically, i.e. with an open mind, can help to (partially) reveal the polyphonic ambiguities of more than human constitutions of reality as well as to search for possibilities of making them experiencable educationally and didactically. 
This lecture draws on results from the BMBF project RaumQualitäten [qualities of (educa-tional) spaces] on living spaces , in which children, professionals, and non-human living be-ings build places, which are characterized by diverse practices and experiences on the border between the familiar and the new, between what was and what is emerging in new lifelines. Using the example of nature experiences in early childhood, it is thus possible to show how the interplay of bodies, relationships, stories, and boundary processing can create multi-layered realities that can foster (com-)passion for and responsibility toward more-than-human worlds (see also Stenger, 2022). This lecture thus discusses the importance of the constitution of experiential modes of realities for an ethical-ecological perspective in early childhood.