Immersing yourself in stories through imagination enlivens children's agency as storytellers and change agents in their own immediate environment. ECHOing research group
researches and develops pedagogy that supports and strengthens young children's ecological imagination. The starting point is that children's ecological imagination is formed at the interface of personal experiences of nature and culture – stories, science and art.
Storytelling offers holistic approaches to teaching and sustainability thinking, in which the child is allowed to act as a researcher, narrator and change agent in his or her own immediate environment. Story-based pedagogy enables children to experience and immerse themselves, as well as to wander imaginatively and undisciplinedly in the terrain between fact and fiction. We also use these principles in our research, where we utilize playful pedagogical materials that we have developed to support storytelling. The materials support children's physical, emotional, sensory, moral and scientific exploration of their environments through stories.
Our research, which uses traditional and digital storytelling, shows that children’s ecological imagination is often intertwined with reflections on the diverse relationship between humans and nature. Seven-year-old Mari tells how she thinks “nature also needs people. When a tree is a little lonely in the forest and some people are chopping down those trees… then the trees need some friends. Then it can grow and grow, just like a human being from a baby grows into an adult.” Mari’s story focuses on the experiences and rights of plants, trees and animals.
The children who participated in our study have also been interested in considering the causes of climate change and nature loss in their stories. However, these serious stories often playfully and undisciplinedly move on the border between the experienced and the imagined. For example, in the children's stories, the physical and emotional experience of building huts in the forest led to reflections on whether people could live in treehouses in large trees, instead of cutting them down.
Trees and forests have gained prominence in recent research, which shows that the world of trees consists of diverse interactive networks. Trees live and grow close to each other, communicate with each other through their roots, and can even warn and help other trees around them survive in dangerous situations. Also in the stories of the children participating in our study, trees appeared as interactive beings that feel and communicate things, intertwining themselves in diverse ways with human worlds.
So what happens when we recognize the possibilities of stories and critically consider which and whose stories, including imaginative stories, get heard in our society?
By creating space for storytelling through playfulness and imagination, we also create unpredictable stories and opportunities for change for children, educators, and the environment.
ECHOing research group
Jenny Byman, Jenny Renlund, Chin-Chin Wong, Kristiina Kumpulainen
