At-tending to microbes: multispecies engagements through science and art

One widely shared aspect that characterises environmental education approaches today is the effort to escape the perceived anthropocentrism of educational theorising by becoming more attentive to the nonhumans that populate the world. The notion of attention is central to this concern, yet previous theorisations have not given sufficient attention to how theoretical concepts of attention translate into concrete educational situations. Moreover, there are two sets of literature on attention that rarely reference each other despite considerable similarities, one in the field of educational theory and the other in multispecies studies. We build on the work of Tim Ingold to put forward the notion of ‘attending’ in an effort to bring together these two literatures in theoretical terms. We then turn to a one-year project attending to particular multispecies others – microbes – in a daycare setting to show how attending to the nonhuman might take place in concrete educational encounters. In recent research, microbes have emerged as an important multispecies other due to their close entanglement in human bodies and human everyday lives. Yet they also present challenges for education, given that they are not visible to the naked eye. We combine observational data with Tim Ingold’s interpretation of the terms ‘doing’ and ‘undergoing’ to illuminate the dynamics between educational activities and the characteristic ‘exposure’ to the nonhuman that comes with attending. Our analysis adds detail to previous theorisations of attention by making more explicit the connections between broad theoretical concepts and everyday educational realities.