Returning Learning

Reviews / Votes

This book is a gift for all early years teachers; it is a gift they have been waiting for, as they ponder how to make a positive contribution to the troubled world the children are growing up in. Blom offers a way of thinking-in-being, where teachers, and the children they teach, are not outside nature, or opposite to nature. The children are not growing up in that world, but as that world; indeed we are, as humans, not superior to nature, or separate from it, or above it; we are, all of us, nature.

--Professor Bronwyn Davies, Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne and Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University

Blom begins this book positing that "there is a desperate and urgent need for monumental changes to education systems" and I think that is correct. So where better to start than from the beginning, accompanying young children and their human and more-than-human educators as they re-turn themselves into earthy relationality. A must read for those teaching, thinking, and seeking in the direction of monumental change.

--Professor Sean Blenkinsop, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University and Co-Director, Imaginative Education Research Group (IERG)

In this fascinating and challenging book, Blom takes cues from posthumanism, postqualitative inquiry, and non-representational theory in advancing a novel approach to educational research called transqualitative inquiry. But it doesn't stop there! Blom then takes us on a 'diffractive journey' through a series of data entanglements that demonstrate how transqualitative inquiry can be put to work. The result is a 'deep dive' into the intricacies of everyday classroom practices and happenings which privileges the voices of the teachers and the nonhuman, and thus the 'response-ability' of teachers to their students and the planet. As an important transdisciplinary text, this book is highly recommended for postgraduate research students in education but also researchers in cognate disciplines like cultural geography, cultural studies, anthropology, environmental psychology, and even nursing.

--Associate Professor Candice P. Boyd, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Australia