From laughter to loss: children, ducklings and the geographies of poo in early childhood education and care

This paper examines how poo unsettles pedagogical logics and reconfigures more-than-human relations in early childhood education and care (ECEC). Based on multispecies ethnography in a forest kindergarten in Guangzhou, China, it follows three fragments where ducklings and children became entangled through excrement. First, the smell of duck poo-oriented children’s movements and naming. Calling the animals ‘poopoo-ducklings’, they turned excrement into a sensory marker of both duckness and place. Second, feeding practices linked children, teachers, grass, bowls, and ducklings’ bodies, yet poo reappeared as diarrhoea, exposing care as uncertain. Third, the death of a duckling made poo a material witness to the limits of care, generating uneven responses among children, teachers, and researcher. Together, these fragments show that poo is not marginal waste but an active participant in children’s geographies. It interrupts teaching, reshapes place, and challenges the assumption that care is always benevolent or successful. Centring excrement as both bodily product and spatial marker, the article expands children’s geographies of poo by foregrounding how everyday materials shape sensory experience, care, and ethics in ECEC.