Tracy Charlotte Young

Southern Cross University, Faculty of Education and Social Work, Lecturer-Researcher

Monash University, Faculty of Education, Post-Doc

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My doctoral research explores the complex relations with children, animals and environments providing spaces of ethical inquiry that trouble how 'Animals 'are politically constructed, socially connected and culturally reproduced in early childhood education. Post theories engage (re)imaginations that become enmeshed with the theoretical, political and methodological movements of the study, travelling with memory, events, data, practices and narratives of human/animal/environmental relatings. The question of animality and environmentality are constant personal and professional companions leading the way to critical posthuman ontoepistomologies.

Current academic research, teaching and learning is enriched through experiences as teacher, early childhood director, curriculum developer, workshop facilitator, author and educational consultant.
Supervisors: Dr Jane Bone, Monash University and Professor Amy Cutter Mackenzie, Southern Cross University.

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Douglas H Clements

University of Denver

Jo Klanovicz

Universidade Estadual do Centro-Oeste

John Barry

Queen's University Belfast

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Banu Bargu

UCSC

Giulia Sissa

Ucla

Elena Loizidou

Birkbeck College, University of London

Dr.Subramaniam Karuppannan

Open University Malaysia (OUM),

Eva Botella-Ordinas

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Karen Wohlwend

Indiana University

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Awards and grants by Tracy Charlotte Young

2014 - VAEE Frank Fisher Scholarship. 2014 - 2015 ARC Scholarship. 2010 - Barbara Creaser Memorial Lecture Award. 2008 - 2009 Jean Denton Memorial Scholarship. 2007 - Swinburne University of Technology Synergy Grant.

Papers by Tracy Charlotte Young

Handbook of Comparative Studies on Community Colleges and Global Counterparts

Springer International Handbooks of Education, 2017

By foregrounding childhoodnature experience and its ongoing influence, Significant Life Experienc... more By foregrounding childhoodnature experience and its ongoing influence, Significant Life Experiences (SLE) offers a formative field of research for consideration by childhoodnature researchers. The first part of this chapter summarizes key findings and insights from previous SLE research and, as a contested field, aspects that have been challenged. In the second part, we introduce the nine chapters; here, a collection of contemporary studies interweaves the fields of SLE and childhoodnature through time and space. Together the studies in this section supports previous findings and affords new understandings of how childhoodnature is experienced and how this influences environmental behavior. In the third part we group the chapter findings into five childhoodnature insights: embodied experience, nature as family, cultural participation, childhoodnature loss, and developing methodologies. The studies reaffirm that SLE in childhoodnature can be a combination of continuous or single experiences, but that self-awareness within experience is significant. Further, SLE are often sociocultural in character involving cultural participation. Authors have also demonstrated the value of exploring the notions of SLE and childhoodnature with educational professionals. In the final part, we raise issues for future consideration, not least the need for longitudinal research and the advancement of child-framed approaches in these fields. We contend that there is an urgent need for more research in disadvantaged and culturally diverse contexts as a response to the contemporary realities of, and changes to, childhoodnature in the Anthropocene. Importantly, we appeal for a paradigm shift to bring childhoodnature experience into the heart of all education systems.

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Childhoodnature Animal Relations: Section Overview

Springer international handbooks of education, 2020

All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten': what questions matter to children and young people in environmental education research?

St Kilda and Balaclava Kindergarten Wins Gold for Being Green

Every child, 2010

St Kilda and Balaclava Kindergarten was the first early childhood centre to achieve five stars fo... more

The frontier of sustainability in ECEC practice

Why do young children need to know about climate change

Every child, 2007

This article is an excerpt from a paper written in consultation with ECA Victoria's Environm... more

Healthy biodiversity is no luxury: it's the foundation of all life on earth: exploring biodiversity and conservation in Early Childhood Practice

A project by Early Childhood Australia Sustainability Interest Group, Victorian Branch, 2010, in ... more A project by Early Childhood Australia Sustainability Interest Group, Victorian Branch, 2010, in the United Nations International year of Biodiversity. This poster and fact sheet provides support for early childhood services to explore plant and animal diversity and actively implement strategies to improve biodiversity in playspaces, in addition to increasing children's ecological literacy. The Australian Context Australia is one of only 12 'megadiverse' countries and its native biodiversity is of global significance. It is estimated that there are more than one million species of plants and animals in Australia. Of particular significance is the high percentage of Australian species found only in Australia (45% of birds, 84% of mammals and 89% of reptiles). Australia also has a great diversity of ecosystem types, ranging from alpine to coastal, estuarine, wetland, arid and semiarid, woodland, grassland and forest landscapes (DEC, 2004). Natural habitats are amazingly complex and multilayered. To describe the dry interior of Australia as 'featureless' or 'empty', is to see only the surface. When we look beyond our stereotypes of the nature aesthetic it becomes apparent that even a desert or dry bushland is full of change and complexity. Another term for that complexity is biodiversity. In essence, mimicking nature and natural habitats will help protect the biodiversity of the local area (Grant, 2003).

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Visit to Australia: Dr Jane Goodall

Connections and disjunctions: Hum(an)imal becomings in early childhood

This inquiry grapples with the relations of animal species, people and environments. Human and ot... more This inquiry grapples with the relations of animal species, people and environments. Human and other animal species engage with each other in a multitude of complex ways and these earthly entanglements have always been present, motivated by both necessity and choice. As we become ensconced in the geological epoch known as the 'anthropocene', increased human population, global economies and advanced technologies speed up capitalist production and consumption. Animal species, including children dwell in these systems and education perpetuates these cultural-politicalhumanist structures as normal and just. This inquiry seeks to question how knowing children and animals helps us to inherit and respond to the complex and messy legacies of the anthropocene with possibilities for (re)imagining the institutional structures of early childhood education and childhood. These questions intensify as environmental forces escalate for all Earth dwellers, demanding new ways of thinking, new ways of knowing and new becomings. Theoretically this thesis roams through the complex terrain where children and animals dwell. Theoretical borders are tested that traverse humanist, ecofeminist, critical posthumanist realms playing with old and new ontologies, looking for pedagogical resistance, anarchy and places without violence. This theorising also deploys postqualitative methodologies with methods that assemble as data events, narratives and concepts that gravitate towards paths of discovery that engage new ways of opening to the inquiry. Specifically, 'post' methodologies and theories are engaged to pay ontoepistemological attention to the teaching and learnings of children's relations with animal species in their homes and education setting. The participants of this research consisted of three generations from four families, and the teachers in the early childhood education setting that they attend. Data was generated over six-months in written, audio and visual formats and this formed the basis of the analysis. Researching human-animal connections and disjunctures illuminates how speciesism is enacted in early childhood, discovering what these relatings do and how species are shaped and reshape in the process of their becomings. There are broad possibilities here Publications during enrolment Young, T. (2015). Can we see past what we imagine in early childhood education? EINGANA

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Can we see past what we imagine in early childhood in environmental education

The crack where the light gets in: an examination of sustainable education in early childhood education

Childhoodnature Animal Relations: Section Overview

The “animal turn” in academia has been described by researchers like Weil (J Fem Cult Stud 21(2):... more The “animal turn” in academia has been described by researchers like Weil (J Fem Cult Stud 21(2):1–23, 2010) as an increasing scholarly interest in the status of animals beyond that of the utilitarian or agricultural scientific study of animals In the wake of poststructuralist and postmodern decenterings that have displaced the human as a standard for knowledge, theory finds itself in a similar predicament. It cannot avoid seeing the animal suffering around us, but has contradictory foundations on which to judge the good or the right thing to do about it. Responding to an urgent call for concern, those of us working on “the animal question” may only be able, like Red Peter, to make a report, but hopefully such reports will enable us to make decisions (for that is our human prerogative and responsibility) that will, to the best of our imperfect and partial knowledge, enhance the lives of all animals, ourselves included (Weil, 2010, p. 20). T. Young Swinbourne University, Melbourne, V...

Shining an ethical light on egg-hatching programs

Every child, 2015

In this article, three narratives describe deeper understandings of egg incubation practices that... more

Visit to Australia: Dr Jane Goodall

Green products: aerobin

Shifting human-animal positions: The influence of posthuman theorising on educational research with young children

Reconfiguring environmental sustainability education by exploring past/present/future pedagogical openings with preservice teachers

Teaching in Higher Education, Jul 4, 2023

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Retheorising environmental sustainability education for the Anthropocene

Educational Philosophy and Theory, Dec 1, 2022

Making kin: Exploring new philosophical and pedagogical openings in sustainability education in higher education

Educational Philosophy and Theory

Handbook of Comparative Studies on Community Colleges and Global Counterparts

Springer International Handbooks of Education, 2017

Download

Childhoodnature Animal Relations: Section Overview

Springer international handbooks of education, 2020

All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten': what questions matter to children and young people in environmental education research?

St Kilda and Balaclava Kindergarten Wins Gold for Being Green

Every child, 2010

St Kilda and Balaclava Kindergarten was the first early childhood centre to achieve five stars fo... more

The frontier of sustainability in ECEC practice

Why do young children need to know about climate change

Every child, 2007

This article is an excerpt from a paper written in consultation with ECA Victoria's Environm... more

Healthy biodiversity is no luxury: it's the foundation of all life on earth: exploring biodiversity and conservation in Early Childhood Practice

Download

Visit to Australia: Dr Jane Goodall

Connections and disjunctions: Hum(an)imal becomings in early childhood

Download

Can we see past what we imagine in early childhood in environmental education

The crack where the light gets in: an examination of sustainable education in early childhood education

Childhoodnature Animal Relations: Section Overview

Shining an ethical light on egg-hatching programs

Every child, 2015

In this article, three narratives describe deeper understandings of egg incubation practices that... more

Visit to Australia: Dr Jane Goodall

Green products: aerobin

Shifting human-animal positions: The influence of posthuman theorising on educational research with young children

Reconfiguring environmental sustainability education by exploring past/present/future pedagogical openings with preservice teachers

Teaching in Higher Education, Jul 4, 2023

Download

Retheorising environmental sustainability education for the Anthropocene

Educational Philosophy and Theory, Dec 1, 2022

Making kin: Exploring new philosophical and pedagogical openings in sustainability education in higher education

Educational Philosophy and Theory

Disruptions of Post-Qualitative Education Research: Tensions and Openings

Qualitative Inquiry, 2021

This article speaks up for those who are feeling unheard as post-qualitative inquirers. It also s... more This article speaks up for those who are feeling unheard as post-qualitative inquirers. It also speaks with hope, helpfully, to those in positions of supervision and mentorship to help student researchers work across post paradigms, becoming allies with those who are attempting to experiment with new theory, figurative forms, and processes. Addressing some of the tensions we have experienced between traditional qualitative and emerging post-qualitative researchers enables us to specifically name disruptions that block, silence, and misalign. We also share openings as possibilities that remain with the tension and do not offer advice or recipes to follow. This is exactly the type of reductive process that post-qualitative research is trying to circumnavigate. In the hullabaloo, this article is a clarion call for the academy to open up education research and make room for researchers who are unbounded by the invented rules of humanist tradition and familiarity.

Tracy Charlotte Young

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Papers by Tracy Charlotte Young

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