OISE at AERA 2026: A chat with Professor Fikile Nxumalo
At the intersection of place, environmental education, childhood, race in early learning contexts, Dr. Fikile Nxumalo’s research is breaking barriers – and earning awards.
Nxumalo, an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching & Learning, focuses on reconceptualizing place-based and environmental education in an era of ecological precarity. She will be bringing her scholarship, and a boatload of energy and curiosity, to the American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting this April.
Nxumalo’s scholarship is rooted in insights from Indigenous knowledges and Black feminist geographies – a perspective reflected in her 2019 book, Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education.
Her work has received significant recognition. She has been awarded the 2026 Scholars of Color Mid-Career Contribution Award from AERA's Critical Issues in Curriculum and Cultural Studies SIG – a highly competitive honour which will be bestowed on Nxumalo at a ceremony during the AERA summit. She also recently earned a BRN IGNITE Grant 5.0 from the University of Toronto Black Research Network – for her important work in environmental education in South Africa's K-3 classrooms.
We spoke with Professor Nxumalo about her scholarship and this AERA award, in a conversation that we have shared below. To learn more about the sessions she will take part in at the annual meeting, visit this page.
What does it mean to be recognized by the AERA in this way at this point in your academic journey?
Nxumalo: It’s wonderful to receive a mid-career award in recognition of my contributions to critical curriculum studies scholarship! It’s particularly meaningful to me to receive an award that specifically recognizes transdisciplinary scholarship because a critical aspect of my work has been to create openings for pedagogical and curricular approaches that circumvent dominant disciplinary framings of early childhood education and environmental education. This transdisciplinary work is at the heart of my efforts to contribute to reconfiguring education by centering relational, reciprocal and more-than-human approaches that also challenge colonial and anti-Black human-centrisms.
For those unfamiliar with your pedagogy and research interests, how would you describe your research questions and the methods you use to answer them?
Nxumalo: Broadly my research is asking how environmental and climate change education and research with and for young people and marginalized communities can be transformed (at multiple scales, including the everyday) such that it supports socio-ecological thriving while disrupting coloniality, anti-Blackness, and anthropocentrism in education, particularly within current conditions of a changing climate. I inquire alongside this central question in multiple ways. For instance, currently I am co-designing land-based and dialogic research with Black-Indigenous communities in South Africa on what it can look like to develop climate-responsive school gardens that learn from Western climate science while centering Indigenous and Local Ecological Knowledges. I have recently worked with Black communities to share their dreams and desires for young children’s environmental education classrooms in the City of Toronto, working with a desire-based, Black ecologies framework.
How crucial has The Childhood Place Pedagogy Lab been in shaping your research questions and creating an environment for this kind of research?
Nxumalo: I feel so lucky to have worked with past and current brilliant students and postdoctoral researchers in the Lab that have been and continue to be invaluable in sustaining and growing the research. For instance, in collaboration with South African teacher participants, the team has led the development of curricular Indigenous calendar materials for the children in our project in South Africa. This warmly received work has in turn germinated new inquiries, such as on anti-colonial collaboration across geographies and on possibilities to disrupt colonial inheritances and temporalities in seasonal pedagogies.
What are some research outcomes that you would like to achieve, in the short-term and long-term?
Nxumalo: Both in the short and long term my goals are to grow my community-centered climate change-responsive research in South Africa and Eswatini which are also the places where I am from and where most of my family lives. For instance, I am thrilled to have recently received a University of Toronto Black Research Network Ignite grant to support a convening on growing a research program on Black ecologies in education with South African colleagues.
What is it like to exchange ideas at the AERA summit? Do you have any specific goals for this year?
Nxumalo: Despite the large size of the conference, I have generally found AERA to be a nourishing space to share in-progress work and receive insights and feedback from colleagues. I also appreciate the informal spaces for connection so I would say a goal for this year is to have a good balance of attending sessions and making time for informal dialogues with new and old connections. This year I am also presenting on a Presidential session on climate justice education – I am really glad that this important topic has been the subject of presidential sessions for a few years now.