The article situates the "queer synthetic curriculum" within the emerging field of common worlding waste pedagogies, which reject traditional environmental sustainability approaches in early childhood education that focus solely on waste management. The authors argue that typical "reduce, reuse, recycle" initiatives merely move waste "out of sight and out of mind," maintaining capitalist consumption patterns while failing to address our complex relationships with waste materials.
Unlike traditional approaches that attempt to separate humans from waste, this curriculum deliberately immerses children in plastic's excess. For two years, the classroom contained only plastic materials: hundreds of bottles scattered across the floor, hanging from the ceiling, stuffed into a crocheted whale stomach, and plastic bags transformed into yarn balls. The researchers documented children's responses through photographs, field notes, and reflective discussions.
The documented stories reveal how plastic's excess became noticeable to children as it disrupted familiar classroom routines and spaces. Children incorporated plastic bottles into songs, found ways to navigate the crowded floor, experienced plastic's stickiness on their fingers, tangled and untangled with plastic yarn, and encountered the uncontainable nature of plastic in a whale's overstuffed belly. These encounters created opportunities for children to form new relationships with plastic that acknowledge its persistence, invasiveness, and toxicity.
The authors draw from Heather Davis's concept of plastics as "multigenerational toxic progeny" and artists' work with plastic excess to develop pedagogical approaches that neither demonize nor glorify plastic but instead support children in exercising curiosity about the materials that surround them. The goal is not to teach children about plastic's problematic nature but to create conditions from which new possibilities for relating to plastic might emerge.
While the authors acknowledge there are "no guarantees" in such pedagogical work, they suggest these experiences might invite children to respond differently to plastic in the future—to grow up with, rather than indifferent to, the plastics that surround us all.
For environmental education practitioners, this study offers several important insights:
- Consider moving beyond traditional waste management approaches that distance children from waste materials
- Create opportunities for sensorial, embodied encounters with environmental materials
- Make excessive consumption visible rather than hidden
- Use arts-based approaches to engage with environmental challenges
- Focus on creating conditions for new relationships rather than prescribing specific understandings
- Acknowledge that we are already entangled with plastic and must find ways to live with it
- Embrace pedagogical risk and uncertainty rather than predetermined outcomes
The Bottom Line
This 2024 study explores innovative pedagogical approaches to addressing the overwhelming presence of plastic in children's environments through a "queer synthetic curriculum" developed with toddlers (18-24 months) in an early childhood center in Canada. In response to what the authors call the "plastic waste crisis," they intentionally brought excessive amounts of plastic into the classroom to disrupt children's taken-for-granted relationships with plastic materials. Over a two-year period, researchers and educators turned the classroom into a sea of plastic bottles, bags, and other plastic items, creating conditions for children to experience plastic's unruliness, persistence, and excess directly rather than maintaining waste management's typical "out of sight, out of mind" approach. Through six stories of children's encounters with plastic excess—singing with bottles, jumping with bottles, brushing against hanging bottles, experiencing plastic's stickiness, crocheting with plastic bags, and filling a whale's stomach with bottles—the authors document how these encounters provoked discomfort, inconvenience, and unfamiliarity, thereby making the normally invisible presence of plastic visible and potentially transformative.