This interdisciplinary book considers mourning as an ongoing and relational encounter which holds educative power for early childhood educators. The book challenges widely held medicalized views about mourning where the desired outcome of grief is for the mourner to let go and detach from the deceased through an individual's linear-staged recovery process. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Daoist philosophy, posthumanism, and decolonial, affect, and feminist new materialist theories, this book explores mourning in relation to a wider definition of education and what we learn from it beyond the scope of the curriculum. These ideas are then applied to early childhood education, both at a personal level (individual grief) and at a collective level at global, human and non-human, past, present and future. Shil Bae presents multispecies and multicultural narratives in a range of formats including arts, poetry, Daoist fables, Eastern worldviews, and photos.

Shil Bae is a researcher and teacher educator in early childhood education and philosophy of education. She holds a PhD in Education from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.