Welcome to the Living with Waste collaboratory

This blog, part of the SSHRC-funded project Rethinking the R’s: Transforming Waste Practices in Early Childhood Education, contributes to the Climate Action Childhood Network.

The site documents our pedagogical explorations with plastics and food waste with a group of young children in London, Ontario. Tapping into the sensorial and affective possibilities of the arts, we are inviting children to join us in keeping waste ‘in mind and in sight’.  The aim of our research is to investigate new directions for early childhood education that rethink management approaches (reduce, reuse, recycle) and refigure young children’s relationships with waste.

Publications

MacAlpine, K. and Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (Submitted). Restorying Young Children’s Relations With Plastics Through Excess: Common Worlding Waste Pedagogies. Pedagogy, Culture, and Society 

Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. and MacAlpine, K. (in press). Queer Synthetic Curriculum for the Chthulucene: Common Worlding Waste Pedagogies. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.  

MacAlpine, K.*. (with Johnstone, H., Minten, L., Sparkes, L., and Grigg, B). (2020). Inviting plastic waste into the early childhood classroom: A response to the plastic waste crisis. eceLINK, 4(1), 35-44.  

MacAlpine, K. (2021). Common Worlding Waste Pedagogies [Blog Post]. Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory. Retrieved: https://www.earlychildhoodcollaboratory.net/common-worlding-waste-pedagogies 

MacAlpine, K. (January 13, 2020). How might close encounters with bubble-wrap in an early childhood classroom trouble governing binaries of safe/unsafe and care/careless? [Blog post]. Common Worlds Research Collective. Retrieved: https://commonworlds.net/how-might-close-encounters-with-bubble-wrap-in-an-early-childhood-classroom-trouble-governing-binaries-of-safe-unsafe-and-care-careless/ 

MacAlpine, K. (April 28, 2019). Does exaggerating plastic’s presence in the classroom transform children’s relations with plastics? [Blog post]. Common Worlds Research Collective. Retrieved: http://commonworlds.net/does-exaggerating-plastics-presence-in-the-classroom-transform-childrens-relations-with-plastics/