Microscopic matters and multispecies pedagogies: Re-creating professionalism in early childhood education

The global climate crisis demands a transformative shift in environmental education that foster relational engagements with multispecies and the wider ecological world. This transformation requires an expansion of notions of ‘professionalism’ and justice, calling for new knowledges and urgent actions to address the devastating consequences of anthropogenic activity on planetary ecologies. In response, this paper proposes alternative conceptions of professionalism that move beyond humanist thought and individualised educational frameworks. Engaging with the microscopic matter of dust, this study explores how the agency of dust and child–earth relations can reconfigure understandings of professionalism through mapping and microscope encounters. Dust is approached as an agentic material entangled with children's bodies, technologies and ecological systems, revealing connections between professionalism, capitalism, colonialism, pollution and creative ecological microworlds. Situated in a kindergarten in Melbourne, Australia, the research applies multispecies ethnography to disrupt dominant child-centred paradigms and hierarchical separations between humans and the rest of the world. This paper contributes to the re-creation of professionalism by recognising the pedagogical significance of multispecies, material and sensory engagements. It invites educators to move beyond exclusive human agency and toward co-constructed knowledge and experience with multiple others. The study offers implications for early childhood pedagogies that are ethical, speculative and ecologically attuned, foregrounding the need for professionalisms-to-come that be responsive to planetary futures.