SANTANA COLLABORATORY: CUENCA, ECUADOR
‘Collaboratory’ is a hybrid term between collaboration and laboratory. This term emphasises our research site as an emerging, dialogic space that is foregrounded on methodological commitments that enable possibilities for rigorously experimental knowledge-making processes.
Our research with Santana school is situated in the Andean city of Cuenca, on lands originally belonging largely to the Cañari peoples. This blog offers snapshots into the pedagogical processes happening at Santana’s early childhood program, ‘Nivel Inicial’. What we have encountered throughout this project is that, in order to think differently with plastics, our work with Santana has required a radical rethinking of the purposes and processes of early years education. Mapping the tensions, flows and rhythms of this project, we use this site as a contact zone for thinking through our daily inquiries and pedagogical decisions as ongoing processes of curriculum-making as we pursue conditions that might create and sustain new relations with plastics.
This project is part of the The Climate Action Childhood Network , an international collaborative partnership created by members from the Common Worlds Research Collective to generate insights about how young children, early childhood educators, and researchers learn together to engage with a complex array of collective challenges related to climate change.