Introduction

Place has emerged as a central construct in educational thinking, practice, research, and policy (e.g., Greenwood, 2013; Nxumalo, 2019; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015; Somerville, 2010; Peterson & Friedrich, 2022), and for good reasons! As Somerville (2010) reminds us, we are always writing from the multiple and contested places we inhabit (and occupy). Writing on the unceded traditional territories and lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, that are now known by the colonial name Vancouver, Canada, I am keenly aware of how we are already intimately and ethically implicated in the stories we tell about place. For example, reflecting on the impact of colonization, Canadian scholar Sandra Styres (2011), of Mohawk, English, and French descent, powerfully reflects on the nearly lost Indigenous pedagogies of Land as first teacher derived from a long tradition of land-centered Indigenous culture. In light of, and in response to, the heightened awareness of the impact of colonization and displacement on Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, the rapidly growing environmental crisis, and drawing from recent calls in early childhood education scholarship to center place in childhood studies, policy, and practice (Duhn, 2012; Nxumalo, 2019; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015), this book pushes against a narrow understanding of place as a backdrop for child/human action and early education and/or to an understanding of place as a neutral, innocent apolitical construct. As an inherently relational concept (Ingold, 2008), this book emphasizes how place is inescapably political. Place provokes critical questions about belonging, identity, history, language, culture, colonization, racism, exploitation, and the survival of humans and more-than-human entities. This book explores these complex relations with place, highlighting how the intimacy of these relationships holds a unique potential to transform our understanding of early childhood education and its purpose. Attending to place compels us to move beyond the (mis)conception of the separated/autonomous individual by illuminating how local stories of children’s and educators’ relations with place not only vividly and experientially connect us to our common world but also motivate collective acts of caring for the world.