Somatic worlding: Sensing kinship as early childhood educators

Educators need time and space to explore the interconnectedness of the world. Using autoethnography, I trace my encounters with other-than-human beings and attend to relational ways of understanding the world through the sensorial experiences with Others. Experiencing the world through the senses while experiencing the world as an agentic being, that senses in ways beyond our human fathoming, pushes the boundaries of our ability to know, inviting axiological questions that disrupt colonial ways of teaching and learning. Blurring dualistic positioning of human/nature, and decentring the mind as a site for knowing, somatic worlding suggests a constant becoming through ongoing encounters that disrupt individualistic ideas of the self. Through this disruption, meaningful relationships with other-than-human beings deconstruct developmentalism's logics of belonging. Arts-based research centres Lichens as a co-author in this research.