Rate My Professor Tracy Young

Dr. Tracy Young, BECs, MEd, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Southern Cross University and Course Coordinator for Early Childhood Programs at the Melbourne campus. With over 30 years of experience as an environmental educator and early childhood teacher, her career spans classrooms, communities, and universities, shaped by a deep commitment to ecological justice and more-than-human relations. Tracy brings a deeply relational approach to her work in research and initial teacher education. She is committed to animal activism and integrates early childhood education, environmental education, and human-animal studies through a critical posthuman and post-qualitative lens, contributing to broader understandings of early childhood education in relation to both human and non-human entities. Her research aligns with UN Sustainable Development Goals and she is available to supervise Masters and Doctoral projects in early childhood education, environmental education, multispecies inquiry, and related post theories and methodologies.

Tracy Young's academic interests encompass early childhood education, multispecies education, human-animal studies, environmental education, childhood studies, philosophy and environmental education, curriculum and pedagogy theory and development, childhood animal relations, nature pedagogies, and sustainability. Her PhD constituted an intergenerational inquiry involving children, parents, grandparents, and the animals in their family homes and the early childhood settings the children attended. Key publications include 'Planty Childhoods: Theorising with a Vegetal Ontology in Environmental Education Research' (2024), 'Bewildering the Legacy Effects of Gail Melson’s Wild Things' (2024), 'Making Kin: Exploring New Philosophical and Pedagogical Possibilities with Children' (2023), 'Disruptions of Post-Qualitative Education Research: Tensions and Possibilities within Child-Dog Companionships' (2022), 'Posthumanist Learning: Nature as Event' (2020), 'Nature by Default in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability' (2016), 'Troubling Intersections of Childhood/Animals/Education: Narratives of Love and Loss', and 'Childhoodnature Animal Relations: Section Overview'. She employs qualitative and post-qualitative methods such as narrative inquiry, ethnographic, speculative, and embodied research praxis. Tracy is a lifetime member of Environmental Education in Early Childhood (EEEC), a committee member with EEEC and the Australasian Animal Studies Association (AASA), and a general member of Small Matters at the University of Oulu, Finland, and the Sustainability, Arts Research Lab at Southern Cross University.