Worldmaking With Children, Place And The More-Than-Human

Making Sanctuary in Complex Times

Abstract

ABSTRACT

World-making (or worlding) is an active ontological process. The notion of world-making reminds us that we are in a constant state of becoming as we bring forth worlds of action and meaning. We are, all of us living beings, engaged in world making (Koenig et al., 2024, p.218).

This article explores worldmaking as a pedagogical and ontological process through a long-term, arts-based inquiry with a kindergarten community on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, Australia. Drawing on creative walking, mapping, and mark-making, the project foregrounds children’s capacities to generate culture, co-create knowledge, and propose ways of being-with Place. In contrast with dominant early childhood education narratives that position children as vulnerable and in need of training and future-readiness, or counter-narratives that portray children as vessels of purity and innocence, this research turns us toward a notion of sanctuary (Akomolafe, 2019) as a complicated and sometimes messy picture of children generating worlds of hope amid ongoing place-based legacies of capitalist resource extraction. By reconceptualising the kindergarten philosophy statement, educators proposed how renewed ideas might be lived-with in everyday practice. Through stories of practice, encounters with lizards, neighbourhood walks, and layered engagements with Country, this work positions Place (and materials) as pedagogical contact zones (Hamm & Boucher, 2017). The project contributes to postqualitative and research-creation methodologies, showing how arts processes produce openings for belonging, reciprocity, and transformation, and asks: how might we live-with children as active worldmakers in times of ongoing colonial and ecological disruption, and how might we make (and find) sanctuary as home in an imperfect world (Biesta, 2019).