Becoming-with fire and rainforest: Emergent curriculum and pedagogies for planetary wellbeing

Please join us for the first seminar of the UTS Life-wide Learning and Education (LLE) Research Group for 2023.

In this seminar, Professor Margaret Somerville (Western Sydney University) and Dr Sarah Powell (Macquarie University) propose the concept of ‘becoming-with’ in relation to the experience of the catastrophic fires in the summer of 2019–2020 in Australia, and their implications for research into young children’s response to bushfires, and their learning about bushfire recovery, which resulted in the development of an arts-based project to explore emergent curriculum and pedagogies for planetary wellbeing. They draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s theorising that ‘the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities’; and ‘Spatio-temporal relations’ as ‘not predicates of the thing but dimensions of multiplicities of events as encounters’ to theorise how ‘becoming-with’ fires enabled the development of emergent curriculum and pedagogies in an early learning centre, which can ultimately contribute to planetary wellbeing.

Presenter biographies

Margaret Somerville is a Professor of Education at Western Sydney University. She is interested in alternative and creative approaches to research and writing, with a focus on relationship to place and planetary wellbeing. Her research has been carried out in collaboration with Aboriginal communities, educational practitioners, and doctoral students.

Sarah Powell is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Arts at Macquarie University. She works with preservice teachers to prepare them to engage children in the Arts and be creative in their practice. She teaches Music and Dance in education, and her research focuses on the power of singing with children, creativity, and using arts-based practice to explore meaning-making.