A Case for Relational Sustainability: Textiles, Early Childhood, and Sustainable Futures Both Manageable and Imaginable

Abstract

This chapter considers how a group of early years learners (ages 3 to 5) and their relationships with the textiles both present and added into their classrooms might lend insight into practices I have termed relational sustainability. For this to be successful in our classrooms, it must be both manageable and imaginable. Classroom practice that foregrounds how this particular global competency (sustainability) can function within minute curricular decisions and relationship-forward teaching methods is of great utility to the classroom teacher wishing to engage sustainability in ways that feel manageable and imaginable. Dwelling in the particulars of a months-long research project in one East Coast Canadian preschool classroom (called Gather Round) that was invited to think alongside classroom textiles, this chapter highlights themes from the study that emerged and are relevant to educators wishing to engage with the global competency of sustainability. Further, this chapter situates how it is a learner’s relationship to sustainability (or “relational sustainability”) that transforms curriculum into practice. The chapter closes with discussion questions educators might use to bring this work into their own practice in ways that centre relational sustainability that are both manageable and imaginable.