Round Table

Title: Education & Transition: Rethinking Human-Animal Engagements with(in) a Pandemic

Dragana Mirkovic is a second-year doctoral student and Teaching Assistant at York University. Her work explores children’s inner worlds, focusing on rethinking engagements between spirituality and early childhood education. Kamini Kamdar is a Kindergarten teacher with the York Region District School Board and a second-year doctoral student at York University. Her research includes critical policy studies and pedagogical documentation in early childhood settings. The presentation, Education & Transition: Rethinking Human-Animal Engagements with(in) a Pandemic, turns to explore the call to radically rethink human-animal engagements in order to disrupt human supremacy in education. Focusing on the linkage between common-worlds pedagogies and spirituality, the role of the human is shifted to recognize complex human entanglements with other beings and invite new ways of existing. Consequently, education is reimagined as a project which rests in the messiness of common worlds and takes seriously the complexities of navigating education in a time of transition.