Our pedagogy is guided by our commitment to honour, think and walk with “the ‘Dish with One Spoon Territory’ treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee. This treaty calls us to share the territory and protect the land in the spirit of peace, friendship and respect. Our commitment to this treaty works to unsettle settler-colonial practices and relations that often live invisibly within our systems and everyday lives. Our commitment calls us to acknowledge and activate our ability to respond and act as implicated treaty people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, living on stolen land. To think with the Indigenous knowledges of this territory, we write our manifesto in a language of verbing with the intention to move, to unsettle, to activate.
Fooding pedagogies stay with the movement, transformations and affect of more-than-human food relations. While we state our commitments with tentativeness, we firmly stand for and in resistance to particular relations and logics specific to our context in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. For us, fooding pedagogies invite us to engage in:
Rethinking how we enact fooding relations and trouble the neoliberal orientations of productive and consumptive relations = consumerism and disposability. We think with consumptive relations to notice the ways we engage in production and consumption, as producer and product, consumer and consumee, and that call us to act from a place of creativity, gratitude, reciprocity, and relationship to the more-than-human world.
Composing and composting each other’s thinkings, beings and doings, and thereby troubling modernist, neoliberal individualism. Reimagining subject formation without clearly defined boundaries, as a symbiotic becoming with, inextricably linked in commons, always in reciprocal relation with the more-than-human world.
Noticing the dis/harmonious, ethical relations in which we are response-able to how we enact our pedagogical commitments and dispositions. In doing so, questioning the legitimation of dominant practices and the active erasure of other stories and worlds. We walk in questions and call ourselves in question in the name of vulnerability, compassion and gratitude.
Cultivating a disposition of caring that calls us to resist complacency and maintenance of the status quo and to attend to the ways in which we are all active and constantly making political decisions. Marinating in the tensions and attending to the indigestion of how we are always already non-innocently entangled, implicated and response-able in partial, unknowable stories.
Disrupting our inheritances of human/child-centered practices in early childhood education, by retelling our stories of fooding and lifedeath relations and what it means to be palatable, digestible, consumable in our messy interconnectedness with the more-than-human world.