This article considers the role of early childhood education within these uncertain times of human induced climate change. It draws from feminism and environmental humanities to experiment with different ways of becoming-with the world. By bringing together Donna Haraway's figure of the Modest Witness and Deborah Bird Rose's notion of witnessing, the article rethinks what it means to 'observe' in terms of ethical response-ability and matters of concern. Data from a multisensory and multispecies ethnography are used to illuminate the observational practices that commonly take place in early childhood settings. The article concludes by employing 'lively stories' showing how modest witness(ing) reworks early childhood observations traditionally considered apolitical, distanced, and judgmental towards meaning making as a form of entanglements and open-ended dialogue. Modest witness(ing) attempts to put into practice initial ethical and political pedagogies that early childhood teachers can draw from and begin to address matters of concern in their own settings.

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This article shares two research projects in the United States and Australia where children and teachers lead their local communities towards living well in precarious times. Rooted in the image of ‘children as citizens of the now’, the research projects offer innovative pedagogies as a way for children to generate meaningful relationships with community and local places. Specifically, children, families, teachers and researchers bring questions and curiosities from their everyday lives that activate teaching and learning with and from the world through the concepts of slowing down, noticing and engaging with multiple perspectives.

As teachers, researchers, caregivers, and people who take care of young children, we are often in conversation with children. These conversations are complex, filled with child and adult interactions. Further, both the child and the adult hold various levels of power, and work as a group within the interaction. As an artist and early childhood educator, these considerations are central to the author's own rethinking of adult-child conversations as aesthetic experiences. Through the observation and documentation of several adult-child conversations with three preschoolers, the author attempts to understand when an adult-child conversation is an aesthetic experience, as well as to negotiate the power present within the interaction. Further, the author discusses the implications of the experience on her own practice and future research.

Arts are an expectation in early childhood classrooms -traditionally, visual art, music, drama, and movement. The variety of understandings of art and aesthetic experiences shape approaches to arts education, particularly with young children. Attempts to define the aesthetic experience refer to the presence of an object, most commonly a work of art. The object becomes central to the human response within the aesthetic experience. Through the analysis of data documenting conversations between a child and an adult, the author have previously proposed childadult conversations as aesthetic experiences. In this article, she re-examines excerpts from child-adult conversations from her research, negotiating the possibility of naming child-adult conversation as art, in order to recognise child-adult conversation as an aesthetic experience. This article continues the conversation around thinking of conversation as art, and the art of conversation -an integral component of pedagogy with young children.