EntreMundos/Criss-Crossing Early Childhood Ecological Pedagogy(ies) with Nagualismo as Embodied Inquiry

Abstract

The author identifies as a mixed-race early childhood teacher educator, bridging ecology, culture, and learning situated within a university early learning center located on the unceded territories of Multnomah, Clackamas, Willamette, Chinook, Klickitat, Klamath, Cowlitz and other native bands of the Columbia River. Her pedagogical documentation of critical emergent curriculum is inspired by the United Nation’s call for early childhood educators to re-orientate pedagogical approaches with an image of the child as a global ecological citizen. This interdisciplinary inquiry crisscrosses between UN Global Goals, Remida philosophy, and post humanist pedagogies while centering Gloria Anzaldúa’s (2015) Naguala or shapeshifter metaphor for embodied inquiry. In this investigation, neoliberal interpretations of emergent curriculum are interrupted by drawing on experiences of "pedagogically cultivating conditions of emergence" (Nxumalo et al. 2018, 435) with the creation of an “otherwise” curriculum in an inclusive preschool classroom. Nagualismo as more-than-human theory engages Mexica cosmology in reversing environmental degradation with sustainable consumption and production patterns and becomes deeply embodied by an emergent bilingual child who creatively reimagines the language of his body as shapeshifting into a metal recycler.