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Interdisciplinary Anthropocene debates are prompting calls for a paradigm shift in thinking about what it means to be human and about our place and agency in the world. Within environmental education, sustainability remains centre stage and oddly disconnected from these Anthropocene debates. Framed by humanist principles, most sustainability education promotes humans as the primary change agents and environmental stewards. Although well-meaning, stewardship pedagogies do not provide the paradigm shift that is needed to respond to the implications of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene-attuned ‘common worlds’ pedagogies move beyond the limits of humanist stewardship framings. Based upon a more-than-human relational ontology, common world pedagogies reposition childhood and learning within inextricably entangled life-worlds, and seek to learn from what is already going on in these worlds. This article illustrates how a common worlds approach to learning ‘with’ nonhuman others rather than ‘about’ them and ‘on their behalf’ offers an alternative to stewardship pedagogies.
This article takes the naming of the Anthropocene as a moment of pedagogical opportunity in which we might decentre the human as the sole learning subject and explore the possibilities of interspecies learning. Picking up on current Anthropocene debates within the feminist environmental humanities, it considers how educators might pedagogically engage with the issue of intergenerational environmental justice from the earliest years of learning. Drawing on two multispecies ethnographies within the authors? Common World Childhoods' Research Collective, the article describes some encounters among young children, worms and ants in Australia and Canada. It uses these encounters to illustrate how paying close attention to our mortal entanglements and vulnerabilities with other species, no matter how small, can help us to learn with other species and rethink our place in the world.