Reggio Emilia Inspired Philosophical Teacher Education in the Anthropocene: Posthuman Child and the Family (Tree)

In this paper, we give a flavour of how, against the odds, Reggio-Emilia-inspired pedagogical documentation can work in reconceptualizing environmental education, reconfiguring child subjectivity and provoking an ontological shift from autopoiesis to sympoiesis in teacher education. Working posthuman(e)ly and transdisciplinarily across three foundation phase teacher education courses at a university in South Africa, we situate our teaching within current environmental precarities. We show how we stirred up trouble in and outside our university classroom and provoked our students to “make kin” with children, each other, other animals, and the more-than-human, but also to stay with the trouble, that is, to learn to be truly present in colonized spaces.