Bodiesnature in Daycare: guidelines for teaching with babies

Abstract

What can babies teach us with their affections? This and other questions permeate the reflections in this article. Using Cartography as a methodological approach, the research followed the affections expressed by babies and young children in the encounters between bodies and nature in the backyard of a public daycare center in Rio de Janeiro. Inspired by Spinoza, Stern and Haraway, the discussions are based on the understanding of the inseparable nature of body and mind, and on the responsiveness between different ways of being Nature. The analyses indicate that it is through affections, or encounters between different bodies, that we come to know the world and produce others. Babies experience other ways of existing, becoming-with other bodies in a composition of self and other.