Slaughtering a cow in early childhood education: Pedagogic meetings with destruction as change

Abstract

This article explores the concept of change in education through an examination of the entangled processes of destruction and creation made visible during a Norwegian kindergarten’s tradition of participating in a cow-slaughter in its local community. The article offers a methodological exploration, activating the theoretical perspectives of relational ontology, plasticity and critical animal studies. We present the event as a narrative and analyze it through these three perspectives, with special attention paid to unintentional change and change as an ontological concept. The discussion illuminates how children grasped destruction as change through creativity and play, and how ethical complexities are entangled with education, animal-based food production, traditions, play, and research.

Fugitive Futures and Knowledge Brokering: Adding Value, Habits, and Trust in Early Childhood Education and Educational Research

“…Our call for affective embodied and embedded knowledge processes for fugitive futures aims to engage in multiplicity, and resisting fixity, to side with the child in knowledge creation. I want to build further on our published article (Aslanian & Moxnes, 2021) about kindergarten children's engagements with a cow that has been shot and killed on a traditional family farm and, together with the children, slaughtered. In the article, Moxnes and I explored this experience as a pedagogical meeting with change in early childhood education and care.…”