During this practicum, my mentor educator and I took children on regular walks. Our original idea behind thisdecision was simple and straightforward: to get to know the neighbourhood. However, at the beginning, our walk feltsomehow rushed and mindless. We followed a fixed route and rarely paused to acknowledge moments of curiosity – a rustling sound in the bushes, something interesting on the ground, or a handful of leaves. It felt like we were walking in the neighbourhood without being in it, and this lack of holistic presence of ourselves left me questioning the meaning of the walk. I wanted to disrupt such thoughtless practices. I reflected on the pedagogical commitment that I crafted in the first year of the ECE program – reframing the idea of learning – for I mainly wanted to explore the role of the relationship in the children’s learning process. Despite my desire to challenge how we took the walk, I struggled to follow such commitment to practical actions. Then, I reconsidered the underlying purpose of our walks and realized they could be more than exploring the neighbourhood but fostering relationships: the togetherness with the land and each other. Taylor & Guigni (2012) talk about using “relationality” rather than relationships as relations are “generative encounters with others or shared events that have mutually transformative effects”, through which “we become, and continue to become who we are”. Placing this learning into the context of our walks, it became clear that I needed to create conditions for those encounters to happen. Reflecting further, I turned to the BC Early Learning Framework, which emphasizes that strong relationships are nurtured through respect, time, care, and understanding. This inspired me to rethink our approach to the walks and realize that the first step is to allow time and space for children’s ideas and curiosities to emerge naturally. I modified my pedagogical commitment to focus on slowing down, paying attention, creating conditions for working collectively with ideas, and co-constructing knowledge together. I shared these thoughts with my mentor, and together, we planned changes to allow the walks to be more intentional: to have a route but not a clear destination, to lead the walk but not lead the talk, to listen to children’s stories, theories, worries or any that may come forward, to pause for wonderment/thoughts and welcome complexities. We hope to use the walks to learn with children about the place we were in as an interconnected part of the rest of the world rather than a bounded neighbourhood.
By slowing down, listening, and paying close attention, we gathered new findings on our walks. The first curiosity we encountered was footprints. The children found some footprints along the way and began to tell stories about whose footprints they were. One child brought the idea of footprints back to the art room, using the paint and brushes to play hide and seek. Below was my narration during that time:
… Thick lines, dots, drips, finger scratches, soon children’s recreation became rounds of games of hide and seek on the paper. One must be careful not to leave any traces by using colours that would blend into the background colouring… The “doggie” footprint we saw during the walk became dense yellow, orange and red dots. Chased by the “monster” – curved red lines – the doggie ran into an orange “bush,” where he hid and waited. He moved along the bushes, leaving traces only if you really pay attention to them – those scratched lines by fingernails – and when he sensed that the monster couldn’t locate him, he finally jumped out and continued walking down the road.
Once the idea of footprints was introduced, I encouraged the children to look for more when we were on the road. That is how we found all kinds of other traces. In the children’s eyes, the traces were sometimes left by bears, bikes, trucks, or monsters. One child told a story about a bear wandering in the neighbourhood and looking for food but was chased by a man on the bike, so the bear had to run back to where he lived – the mountains “over there”. Slowly, they became interested in more than just looking for traces – they started to leave behind their own footprints and traces; they watched carefully how their own traces were hiding in the shadows; they studied themselves in the shadows and how shadows could leave behind traces. It seemed to me that they were capable of extending their observations and building theories upon them. With time, our walks became more than just footprints or traces. Even though I had taken photos, written down their words, narrated the encounters, printed out the documentation and posted them on the wall, I was still looking for a way to allow those observations and theories to come together and interchange, and that was when my practicum instructor suggested using the map as the agent of bringing ideas present and together. Guided by this suggestion, I did some readings on the ECPN webpage, and came across the Pedagogical Narration of “Mapping Place” by Pippa Bowley and Frances Smyth, where they worked on a pedagogical project that explores collaborative map-making with children under their commitment to disrupt hyper-individualism (ECPN, 2021). Inspired by such a project and idea, I started to approach our walks with mapping together with children.