Paper short abstract:

Even though adults teach children early on how to deal with non-humans, children develop their own relationships with them. On the basis of a research carried out in Belgium, we will examine whether a common world between adults and children is possible and what adults can learn from children.

Paper long abstract:

Even though adults teach children from an early age how to deal with non-humans, children develop their own relationships with them. On the basis of research carried out in Belgium, we will examine whether a common world between adults and children is possible and what adults can learn from children.

This paper presents the results of a research on children and young people's use of their environment in French-speaking Belgium both in "classical pedagogical" and "alternative pedagogical" childcare institutions (18 months - 12 years). It seemed that tensions and contradictions exist in the relationship to the environment in these institutions, strongly marked by the categories of "clean" and "dirty", and fear. This is particularly true for non-humans.

From ethnographic examples, we will analyse the ontologies underlying the classifications that adults more or less explicitly teach to children and the ways in which they teach them. The second part of the paper will look at children's experience and point of view, some of which are free from the injunctions and imaginary of adults, to understand how children develop their own imaginary about non-humans. Finally, we will consider whether a common world is possible between children and adults, and under what conditions. Throughout the presentation, we will mobilize the contributions of Godelier, Descola and Ingold to explore different notions: the environment, the living, human/nonhuman, and the existing. We will also question kindness and the continuity between the imaginary and the reality, and address methodological and ethical questions crosswise.