Children’s Moral Imagining of “More-Than-Human” Relations Through Augmented Storying With Place

• In Event: Learning With Place and Nature in Posthuman Environmental Education

Abstract

Drawing from an ethnographic multi-sited case study with children and their teachers in a Finnish elementary school, we explore how augmented storying with place created opportunities for children’s moral imagining of relations, choices, and actions with nonhuman others. The findings reveal how augmented storying with place moved the children’s storying from seeing and naming human and nonhuman relations to imagining what these relations could be and to creating pathways to what these relations should be. The children’s narratives reflected complex thinking and feeling and sophisticated deliberations regarding relational agency, care, activism, and justice. To conclude, we consider how augmented storying with place created a context for moral imagining and supported children’s consideration of sustainable kin relations with the more-than-human world.

Authors

• Kristiina Kumpulainen, University of British Columbia

• Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur, University of British Columbia

• Jenny Renlund, University of Helsinki

• Chin Chin Wong, University of Helsinki

• Jenny Byman, University of Helsinki