The Tales of Death and Kindergarten: Becoming in Dark Encounters [COVID-19 Edition]

Abstract

For speculative pragmatism, aesthetics is an ethical practice of becoming with the world. Considering educational practice, we might say just the same. But an educational practice is not ethico-aesthetical by its nature – the challenge is to think and live it in an ethico-aesthetical manner. Acceptance of this conclusion goes easily with stressed importance of vitality, movement and creativity of thought – but what about death? Is death even allowed in educational practice? As this paper is written during the emergence of a pandemic, the question goes even further: could education and aesthetics even be of any concern if the danger of death “do us part”? This paper was meant to unfold between memories from an ethnography research in kindergarten and resonate concepts from affect theories – but it exploded unpredictably in resonance with the COVID-19 outburst. Yet, it remained an attempt to tackle the haunting feeling left behind from ‘dark’ encounters with different appearances of death. Hopefully, an encounter with this paper might open a crack in the understanding of educational practice, as well as this moment in history, as a much-needed place for patience and rethinking of the human endeavor as a work of art.   Article received: April 16, 2020; Article accepted: July 1, 2020; Published online: April 15, 2021; Original scholarly paper