Minor moments of more-than-human encounters: Rethinking climate change education in early childhood

In the context of intensifying climate crises, early childhood education is increasingly positioned as a site for cultivating the capacities, sensitivities, and solidarities needed for more sustainable futures (Spiteri & Pace, 2023; UNESCO & MECCE, 2024). Yet dominant approaches to climate change education continue to privilege cognitive, anthropocentric, and developmental framings, emphasizing knowledge transmission and individual responsibility while overlooking children’s relational and ecological entanglements. This paper offers a critical re-imagining of climate education in the early years through posthuman and feminist new materialist perspectives (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016; Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2019). Drawing on ethnographic research into minor moments—everyday encounters between children and more-than-human entities such as wind and trees—the paper argues that ecological knowledge and climate resilience are already emergent within children’s ordinary play worlds. These moments of curiosity, care, loss, and response-ability (Haraway, 2016) often remain unnoticed within human-centered developmental frameworks. By foregrounding practices of noticing (Tsing, 2015) and orientation (Ahmed, 2006), the paper attends to how educators’ ways of looking, turning toward, and responding shape what counts as climate learning. The paper explores how posthuman and feminist new materialist approaches to play open new pedagogical orientations for climate education, shifting attention from what children should learn about climate change to how they already live, sense, and negotiate ecological conditions. This approach frames climate education as an ongoing practice of attunement, care, and “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016), grounded in shared vulnerability and situated, more-than-human relations.