Reconfiguring the natures of childhood Affrica Taylor

Reviewed by: Erica Burman, Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester, UK

We have long been accustomed to seeing developmental psychology being treated as the discipline through which sad and simplistic discussions of nature vs. nurture are played out, and the repetition of the same tired old tropes around this have seemed endless. But this book marks a new turning point in critical, feminist early childhood education studies. It combines historical analysis of the current dominant models informing early childhood with new social theory, drawing in particular on posthumanist ideas, and especially inspired by Donna Haraway's queering of human/non-human (and more specifically human–animal) relations. The author mobilises her social geography background to build on current calls to contextualize (rather than abstract) childhood, and this is done not only conceptually – in terms of locating the cultural-political context of the hegemonic early childhood models – but also in indicating alternative vistas. The fact that Affrica Taylor writes from an Australian context and presents examples from various school and community contexts (as well as domestic contexts) helps to frame these alternatives with and through a postcolonial sensibility. Her textual examples – including from Australian children's storybooks – also address the child-nature trope through and with questions of connection, not only to the very specific land and sea questions but how these also traverse settler colonization and images of unpeopled, empty lands that worked to legitimate its appropriation from aboriginal peoples. Ambitiously, early on she claims to be reconstructing, rather than deconstructing, models of childhood, although this rather strong (and perhaps problematic) claim becomes somewhat modulated during the text's narrative into a call for their urgent reconfiguration in the light of ecological as well as human insecurities.

The book is centrally organized around the theme of how, and why, nature and childhood have come to be so intertwined. And this is really what marks the book as so interesting and unusual. Taylor traces the history of the various meanings ‘nature’ has come to acquire – as essence, as force and as material world, and argues that these unhelpfully combine to limit and even oppress and foreclose how we could and should think about childhood. The ‘should’ is important – there is a normative call here, that echoes Haraway's cross (companion) species and ethical posthumanism, to envisage better approaches for more sustainable models of living. And Taylor usefully highlights how those models that treat children as environmental stewards of our planetary futures, along with all the other tropes to get our (in the overdeveloped world) over-closeted children active out into the countryside, are merely recapitulating older themes that privilege the human over nature in exclusionary ways (both for most humans, as well as animals and plants and ecological systems). Instead, she argues, we need to destabilize the nature–culture binary that dominant conceptions of childhood work to secure, and instead build models that deal in naturecultures and commonworlds. In this political move Haraway's methodology of queering is very much in evidence – that is here dealing less with questions of sexuality, or even gender, than troubling dominant cultural-political systems of classification and hierarchisation. This is not to say that the analysis of gender and sexuality is absent but rather that, as with recent discussions of intersectionality (a term that Taylor uses sparingly as it is not her dominant frame), such interventions have extended the remit of what feminist analysis can be and shown how these notions always also involve other key axes and positions (of age, class, culture, etc.).

The book covers a lot of ground in a remarkably concise way. Its five-chapter (plus short conclusions) structure is divided into two halves – Part One (The Seduction of Nature) outlining the problems and Part Two (Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood) indicating ways forward. We start with Rousseau and the origins of the romantic notion of the child as (needing to be) connected to nature. (Taylor notes, fascinatingly, that in actual practice Rousseau was not exactly a successful parent, putting his own two children in foundling homes). Froebel and Montessori's distinct contributions are also discussed in some detail, as precursors to more current initiatives (such as Forest Schools) that – in the very act of calling for children to be returned to or educated by nature – reproduce the very binary they seek to dismantle. Disney's Bambi and Pocahontas are analysed in relation to their portrayal of varieties of wild childhoods, and shown to be no better than their tamer predecessors – with an analysis that is particularly attuned to the erasure or paternalism afforded indigenous peoples.

Having convincingly outlined the problems, the second half tries to put forward alternative resources for reconceptualising and reconnecting children with material, common worlds. There is some theoretical exposition, which is competent and accessible (and also – in typical Haraway style – ‘modest’), and in subsequent chapters various examples are elaborated. These include some variously successful new Australian children's books, a biographical example from the author of co-habiting, or sharing her house, with a wombat – the latter as an example of relevant but unexpected ethical challenges that can and do arise if we but allow ourselves to notice them. There is also a long account from the author's own work in a school in Alice Springs, and analysis of some contemporary artwork (with pictures). While the children's books she discusses address seaplants and fish, the rest of the examples concern human–animal relations (and while the author has written about some of these examples previously, (Taylor and Guigni 2012; Taylor et al., 2012), refreshingly there is little overlap. The book finishes with a call for a pedagogical shift that attends to children's relations in common worlds, their emplacement in common worlds, to use collective inquiry and to elaborate what she calls common world's pedagogies.

This is an elegant, clever book whose modest size and claims belie the scale of its project. It is about children, and how we place children in nature. But beyond that its central argument concerns the urgent need to reconfigure human–nature relations in order to envisage possible joint futures. Its address is wide (though as situated within the Contesting Early Childhood series it has a readymade audience from those who have followed its various innovative texts with great interest). But this book is not only for an early education or teacher training audience. Notwithstanding the rather scant reference to any critical (or feminist) developmental psychologists (Walkerdine's Mastery of Reason alone gets a mention, and there is a rather dismissive reference to Vygotsky as going in the right direction but not far enough), this is exactly the kind of text we should use in undergraduate and postgraduate psychology courses to help disrupt the unhelpful and multiple child-nature elisions and oppositions that pervade modern western culture, and to help us think otherwise. Her call to reconfigure early children's common worlds as ‘natureculture worlds’ (xxiii) is part of the broader project of envisaging ways of ‘learning with others to practice an expanded and worldly form of inclusion’ (xxiii). Significantly, and here the book merely alerts us to what is surely a key consideration for us all in the future, the kind of relations that Taylor envisages are not necessary equal, nor without conflict; there is no place of innocence, for children or anyone else; but at least, as Taylor highlights, we can be better equipped to think about this.