The Grass Is Moving but There Is No Wind: Common Worlding With Elf/Child Relations

• In Event: More Than/Other Than Human Educations: Mentors, Hormone Monsters, Elves, Androids, Gods, and Us

Abstract

Italian children’s author Gianni Rodari (1996) urged us to consider that “everyday things hide secrets for those who know how to see and hear them” (Turner & Wilson, 2009, p 6). Drawing from the post-qualitative research in my dissertation, Animal Magic, Secret Spells, and Green Power: More-Than-Human Assemblages of Children’s Storytelling (Molloy Murphy, 2020), this article mobilizes common worlding pedagogies (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015) to research elf-child relations in an early childhood community. This paper aims to illustrate how children’s common world relations––in this instance, child/elf relations––can constitute matters of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011), concern, and significance for children in their daily lives.

Informed in part by a complex and shifting assemblage of 1970’s animated holiday specials, a cherished classroom book co-authored by an Icelandic elf, (Fróði, 2018), and the specter of the popular commercial figure “Elf on a Shelf,” the 2-5-year-old child participants in this study though with/played with/grappled with elf imaginaries using storytelling as a method of research and knowledge production.

During this study, elf-child relations established within our classroom context were complexified by spending time on nearby land referred to as the Children’s Arboretum. This contested space in the midst of an urban neighborhood is rife with the harshly contrasting landscapes–hundred-year-old tree groves coexist with oil streaked waterways and architectural decay. The children were invited to photograph things they found to be “interesting, remarkable, or important” (May, 2005) at the arboretum, and discovered evidence of elves both living and dead. The children photographed the tall grass of the arboretum’s meadow, signaling the presence of elves to one another with the phrase, “the grass is moving but there is no wind.”

As their teacher and co-researcher, I invited trails and traces of these common world encounters into the school atelier in the form of digital projections of the children’s photographs. There, the children co-produced new stories and ways of mattering with digital materialities and elves. More than mere “screens upon which humans project their intentions, meanings, signs, and discourses” (Bryant, 2011, p. 247), these elusive and compelling figures came to be vital participants in the more-than-human socialities (Tsing, 2013) of our classroom community.

Though entangled with Eurocentric/Euro-Western ideations in ways that deserve interrogation, the children’s process of attuning to elves and other presences made space for decolonial practices of “becoming witness” (Rose & van Dooren) to the land and its past/present inhabitants. By speculatively storying with elves and noticing what they notice (Tsing, 2013), the children learned to slow down, use all their senses, and attend to land and other-than-human presences. The study’s “small stories” (Hohti 2016, Author) of child/elf/land relations, though deeply contextual, carry significance for critical matters of more-than-human justice and planetary care.

Author

• Angela Molloy Murphy, The University of Melbourne