“Rain, Rain, Go Away!” Engaging Rain Pedagogies in Practices With Children: From Water Politics to Environmental Education

Abstract

Inspired by the popular children’s song “Rain, Rain, Go Away,” this paper explores what it would look like to consider inviting rain to stay in our practices with children. This invitation acts as a provocation for pedagogical practice that has the potential to engage thinking differently about the ways we work with children and youth. Framed from the vantage point of current curricular practices in environmental education, this paper fuses discussions about water (including racialized and gendered politics) with a consideration of the histories of environmental educational practices as they are currently situated within childhood teaching. In pushing ourselves to think about our bodies as watered/weathered, especially in the context of educational practices, we are able to explore new territory that moves us toward a critique of the taken-for-granted ways in which children and nature are continuously conceptualized, and we open up room for dialogue that moves beyond developmental psychology frameworks. Through considering rain and inviting water to stay in our practices with children, it is suggested that these moments provide critical insight into the more-than-human relationship between children and nature that goes far beyond the romanticized understandings that exist today to consider children’s common worlds.