Fire as Unruly Kin: Curriculum Silences and Human Responses

Humans have ambiguous relationships with fire. The ability to control fire has been part of shaping human development and human society as well as the characteristics of Australian ecosystems, but bushfire is also a threat to all forms of life. The chemical process of combustion is also complicit in the Anthropocene and climate change, which threatens life as we know it. The current Australian curriculum generally ignores fire, and this needs reconfiguring. In this chapter we disrupt the traditional curriculum and argue for becoming-with fire as a pyro-pedagogy for teaching and learning with this unruly kin.