Teaching Weathering: Children’s Literature and the Renewal of Humanities Pedagogy
Children’s literature offers a vital
space for rethinking how we teach in an era marked by political division,
ecological instability, and technocratic pressure. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work
on affect, Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, and contemporary theories of
weathering, this article argues that texts for young readers—often marginalised
within literary studies—provide rich resources for navigating crisis. Through
close readings of The Heart and the Bottle, The House That Once Was,
Zillah and the Rainbird, and Where the Forest Meets the Sea, the
article examines how children’s books engage themes of grief, ecological
haunting, trauma, and temporal entanglement. These texts resist simple moral
instruction, instead cultivating affective attunement and inviting readers to
dwell in uncertainty. Rather than treating children’s literature as merely
developmental or imaginative, the article positions it as a site of ethical and
cultural theory. By incorporating such texts into university curricula,
especially in literature and education programs, it advocates for a pedagogy
grounded in wonder, vulnerability, and relational knowledge. Children’s
literature, I argue, opens new possibilities for teaching with care and
imagination in a fractured and unstable world.
Keywords: Children’s
literature; affect theory; ecological humanities; pedagogy; weathering