World-building with children: Speculative orientations for climate pedagogy in early childhood education

This article explores speculative world-building as an orientation for climate pedagogy in early childhood education. Moving beyond dominant approaches that centre individual behavioural change or position children primarily as future environmental stewards, we propose approaching climate education as an entangled reality to be felt, questioned, and reimagined together with young children. Drawing on a month-long research project conducted with approximately forty preschool-aged children and eight educators at a child care centre, we share how curated pedagogical encounters involving multimodal art-making, living organisms, and salvaged materials opened generative space for speculative what if? questions to emerge. Pedagogical encounters included the co-construction of a cardboard box city, a collaborative felting practice led by a local textile artist, and sustained engagement with worm ecologies and newly hatched chicks. Informed by critical childhood studies and science fiction studies, we offer three orientations for speculative world-building in early childhood education climate pedagogy that emerged through the project: salvaging, felting, and hospicing. Rather than fixed principles promising predetermined outcomes, these orientations may function as ethical catalysts for a collective reimagining of pedagogy in times of climate emergency.