A new materialist approach to researching children’s imaginative sense-making of concepts around climate change

Our inquiry was inspired by new materialist perspectives, especially, Barad’s agential realism (Reference Barad2003, Reference Barad2007), Lenz Taguchi’s (Reference Lenz Taguchi2010) and Murris’ (Reference Murris2016) thinking on the materially entangled nature of concepts and imagination. The movement of new materialism, which draws on a relational ontology, challenges the over-emphasis of humans and static representations of materials in knowledge production and stresses the entanglements of materials with being and knowing (Barad, Reference Barad2007). New materialist perspectives have increasingly been used in science education, environmental education research and childhood studies (e.g., Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al., Reference Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Malone and Barratt Hacking2020; Jeong et al., Reference Jeong, Sherman and Tippins2021). These perspectives provide ways to think about materials as active agencies that affect children’s thinking and sense-making, opening up new and divergent educational possibilities (Jukes, Reference Jukes2020; Lenz Taguchi, Reference Lenz Taguchi2010). Following this orientation, in this study, we used “material” to refer to both tangible and intangible substances, including books, props, water and carbon dioxide, as well as any substances that are brought forth across time and space through children’s imaginative sense-making processes (see also Penfold, Reference Penfold2019). Using a new materialist approach, we have been able to reconfigure global warming and carbon dioxide as more than abstract scientific concepts. These concepts can also be “in” us (Saari & Mullen, Reference Saari and Mullen2020) and entangle our imagination, emotions, bodies and the ways we act in the world.

Barad’s agential realism (Reference Barad2003, Reference Barad2007) has helped us to research the matter–meaning entanglements of abstract concepts in children’s imaginative sense-making of climate change. Barad’s theory considers entanglement to be a fundamental state instead of separateness as the original state of being (Brown et al., Reference Brown, Siegel and Blom2020). Barad’s book on agential realism (Reference Barad2007) states that “we are a part of that nature that we seek to understand” (p. 26); in other words, we only know about the living world by participating in it. This position points to the inseparability of knowledge and the material conditions that create knowledge, highlighting the vital roles of materiality in thinking and its development. For Barad (Reference Barad2003), materials do not just “support” particular discourses, but they are the actual generative factors in the formation of bodies, conjoining the production of discursive practices. In this perspective, concepts are more than ideational; rather, they are defined by specific material–discursive configurations (Barad, Reference Barad2007). Moreover, in an agential realist account, matter, as well as concepts, bodies and tools, are considered as performative agencies that can enact forces and affect one another (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, Reference Hultman and Lenz Taguchi2010). Performative agency is understood as a quality that emerges in between different bodies involved in mutual engagements and relations; it is an “enactment” rather than a property that someone or something has (Barad, Reference Barad2007). This places the human as part of an intra-active field in which affect is recognised as a precognitive unstructured intensity that passes and registers across human–nonhuman bodies (Dernikos et al., Reference Dernikos, Lesko, McCall, Niccolini, Dernikos, Lesko, McCall and Niccolini2020).

As Barad (Reference Barad2003) writes, “all bodies, not merely ‘human’ bodies, come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-activity — its performativity” (p. 823). Barad (Reference Barad2007) uses the term “intra-action” instead of “interaction” to describe the relationship between the involved human/nonhuman bodies; the agencies without inherent boundaries in between are always in a state of intra-activity with varying intensity (see also Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, Reference Hultman and Lenz Taguchi2010). By framing intra-active pedagogy, Lenz Taguchi (Reference Lenz Taguchi2010) suggests that during a learning activity, children, their imagination and the materials at hand, emerge simultaneously through intra-actions. This perspective positions children and their imaginative sense-making in a continuous state of becoming with the materiality the children bodily encounter. Similarly, Murris (Reference Murris2016) points out how picture books and their materiality (e.g., graphic design, art styles, colour and paper medium) can demand children’s listening and affect children’s imagination, emotion and the ways they inquire about philosophical concepts. Murris (Reference Murris2016) also discusses that, during philosophical thinking with picture books, children do not just explore the meanings of the concepts but also what the concepts could do beyond what is already known. Drawing on these new materialist perspectives, our research brings attention to the performative agencies of materials and how the materials come to matter through intra-actions in the children’s imaginative sense-making related to climate change during the Riddle of the Spirit project.

The Riddle of the Spirit project

The Riddle of the Spirit project was part of a four-month study with 62 children (38 boys and 24 girls, 7–9 years old) conducted in a primary school in Finland. The project was organised collaboratively by the authors and four elementary school teachers, based on the Riddle pedagogical materials. Riddle materials (Wong et al. Reference Wong, Kumpulainen, Sintonen, Sairanen, Byman, Renlund, Erfving and Hintsa2020) were developed by the authors with artists, designers, children, teachers and educators and included instructions for a series of activities, props and a riddle created by the authors. The riddle, inspired by Baltic Finnic myths about nature spirits, invited the children to help Ukko, a thunderstorm spirit who had lost his climate control power, which affected the livelihood of humans and other nature spirits. This myth-inspired story engages children’s climate imaginaries with the ancestral heritage of ecological knowledge from Karelian, Finnish and Sámi traditions (Byman et al., Reference Byman, Kumpulainen, Renlund, Wong and Renshaw2023; Wong et al., Reference Wong, Kumpulainen, Kumpulainen and Sefton-Green2020). Using the story as an imaginative invitation, the children were guided by teachers and researchers to rethink phenomena related to climate change through narrative, playful and multimodal activities with arts-based and sciences-based materials. Overall, the aim of the Riddle project (Wong et al., Reference Wong, Kumpulainen, Kumpulainen and Sefton-Green2020) was to fuel children’s imagination, creative thoughts and expressions regarding human–climate relations through narrative and multimodal imaginary ingredients. At the primary school, the teachers and children found the project, its pedagogical materials and the imaginative approach to learning about climate change new and different from the usual classroom activities in environmental studies.

More specifically, in this article, we focused on “Ask the Spirits” activity, the goal of which was to invite the children to explore and make sense of scientific concepts around climate change through open-ended small group inquiry. The pedagogical materials used in the activity included props, such as graphics of spirits communicating messages in a pretend-play spiritual language, the Dictionary for translating the language and the Hint Paper for expressing thoughts, as well as books with scientific information about climate change which were selected by the researchers (see Figure 1). In the analysis, we investigate how the props and books performatively intra-acted out in the children’s imaginative sense-making of global warming and carbon dioxide.

Figure 1.

Ask the Spirits activity card, which combines props, including the spirit’s secret messages, the Hint Paper, and the Dictionary, and books with scientific information about climate change (Wong et al., Reference Wong, Kumpulainen, Sintonen, Sairanen, Byman, Renlund, Erfving and Hintsa2020).

During the Ask the Spirits activity, the children engaged in semi-guided small group inquiry, exploring ideas collectively and building narratives about concepts related to climate change. The activity started by inviting the children to “ask” nature spirits for hints to find out the reasons why Ukko the thunderstorm spirit has lost his climate control power. First, using the Dictionary prop, the children decrypted the spirits’ secret messages, which revealed terminology prepared by the researchers, such as “global warming,” “carbon footprint,” “carbon dioxide,” and “greenhouse gases.” Then, the children explored these concepts by consulting books and educational videos and discussing them with peers, teachers and researchers. During the 30-minute activity, the teachers and researchers assisted the children with their inquiry. The children expressed their ideas on the Hint Paper by writing and drawing, and shared their thoughts with the class.

Overall, during the entire Riddle of the Spirit project, five research sessions were conducted with the children at the school (one session per week and each session lasting for two hours). The Ask the Spirits activity was organised as part of the first research session. The research materials for the analysis consisted of 11.2 hours of video recordings of children’s engagement during the Ask the Spirits activity. Other research materials supporting the analysis included photographs of the artefacts produced by the children, two transcribed group interviews with teachers, and the researchers’ field notes.

Following the ethical research guidelines of the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (https://www.tenk.fi), parental permission was obtained for the child participants to join the study and its data production. The children were also informed about the study and could withdraw from the data production at any time. To protect the participants’ confidentiality, all names presented in this article are pseudonyms. The photographs of the children and adults presented in the figures have been edited with photo filters to conceal the recognisable details of their identities.

A relational analysis

In the analysis, we sought to understand the role of materiality in the children’s imaginative sense-making of climate change. Our analysis of the research material was inspired by postqualitative perspectives (Le Grange, Reference Le Grange2019; Ulmer, Reference Ulmer2017), mostly based on the relational materialist approach by Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (Reference Hultman and Lenz Taguchi2010; Lenz Taguchi, Reference Lenz Taguchi2011), as well as more-than-representational methods in visual data analysis (Fassbender, Reference Fassbender2021; Lorimer, Reference Lorimer, Coleman and Ringrose2013) and a cartographical mapping approach by Rousell (Reference Rousell2021). These approaches enabled us to turn to and map creatively the materiality of the children’s imaginative sense-making. This relational analysis supports the de-centring of humans in knowledge production, highlighting the embodied and affective dimensions in imagining the concepts around climate change.

The relational materialist approach (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, Reference Hultman and Lenz Taguchi2010) motivated us to reflect on our researcher roles with the research materials, and the way we analyse materiality. Analysing the materiality of children’s imaginative sense-making is challenging because of our habitual ways of seeing materials as passive substances, seeing sense-making as humans’ mental capacities and seeing concepts as static representations (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, Reference Hultman and Lenz Taguchi2010). The relational materialist approach urged us to be aware of the way we foreground children’s sayings and doings in the analysis as a reflection of what the materials can do with the children (Lenz Taguchi, Reference Lenz Taguchi2011). To turn our attention to the agentic roles of materials, we repeatedly viewed the video recordings to become affected and to sense the possible entanglements between bodies within intra-actions, which would shape the imaginings of climate change (Fassbender, Reference Fassbender2021). Every viewing of the footage was seen as a particular encounter with the research materials, and something new always emerged, such as thoughts, feelings and questions (Lorimer, Reference Lorimer, Coleman and Ringrose2013).

We chose two specific episodes for the relational analysis because of the children’s rich exploration of the scientific concepts that involved unexpected connections between the classroom materials, the children’s emotions, their embodied imaginings and past experiences, as well as popular culture and global discourses related to climate change. The cartographical mapping approach (Rousell, Reference Rousell2021) and the more-than-representational methods (Fassbender, Reference Fassbender2021) helped us to visually analyse the video recordings of the episodes and pay attention to how the children expressed their imagination with bodies. These two episodes, with five children, namely Silja, William, Rami, Mattias and Morris (pseudonyms), were chosen because their material engagement affected us by evoking questions and curiosity (e.g., How did the concepts of global warming and carbon dioxide, the children and the materials used in the activity intra-actively emerge in these moments of imagining? What affected them to do so, and what potentials did this involve?). There was an indeterminacy in the episodes that pushed us further to investigate the role of materiality in the children’s imagination about climate change.

To grasp the material–discursive intra-actions that emerged in the episodes, we produced mappings with an arts-based cartographical approach (Rousell, Reference Rousell2021). Rousell (Reference Rousell2021) describes mapping as an open-ended process that “can be entered, altered, extended, intensified, and reconfigured in ways that carve out new trajectories for thought and experience” (p. 581). A map of matter-meaning entanglements can reconfigure the affective conditions of episodes, amplifying the relationalities that potentially unfold in children’s imagination. In our analysis, we produced visual maps with images and sketches to bring out the material entanglements of global warming and carbon dioxide in the children’s imagination. We used the mapping as a method to understand what matters have acted out in the children’s imagination, and how these matters could have conjoined the children’s sense-making of the scientific concepts. Making the maps helped us to delve into the relations between concepts, children, adults, pedagogical props, books, polar bears, the sea, water, oxygen and other matter. Mapping also helped us to de-centre language-driven and scientific representational thinking and address children’s “seemingly nonsense” improvisational expressions (Wohlwend et al., Reference Wohlwend, Peppler, Keune and Thompson2017).

The material entanglements of global warming and carbon dioxide in the children’s imaginative sense-making

Our inquiry focuses on the question: How does materiality come to matter in the children’s imaginative sense-making related to climate change? We examined two episodes of material–discursive intra-actions during the Ask the Spirit activity. Episode 1 illustrates how diverse objects and matter, including books about global warming, sea, water, oxygen, plants, people and cinema films, acted out in the imagination of two children, Silja and William, when exploring global warming with their teacher Alma. Episode 2 illustrates how in a group with three children Rami, Matias, Morris and a researcher Alisa, a book passage about carbon dioxide, the substance of carbon dioxide in the air and the children’s sensing bodies intra-actively produced the children’s realisation of the existence of carbon dioxide. Through mapping these specific events, we could show how the materials emerged as performative agencies, intra-acting with other matter and conjoining the children’s imaginative sense-making of global warming and carbon dioxide.

Episode 1: How books, props, cinema films and water came to matter in the children’s imaginative sense-making of global warming

After decrypting the message from the “spirit language” into Finnish, Silja and William started to explore the concept of “global warming” (ilmaston lämpeneminen). This concept seemed to be new to the children, and they were not certain about its spelling or pronunciation. The teacher, Alma, checked their progress several times and brought them relevant books to read (Figure 2). With the books, the Dictionary prop, pencils and the Hint Paper, a narrative about global warming emerged with concepts such as temperature, sea level, floods, water, plants, polar bears and human survival.

Figure 2.

With the books and props, various matters, such as plants, people, oxygen, Earth, water, whales and the Titanic film, came into Silja’s and William’s inquiry of global warming.

We analysed the 30 minutes of Silja’s and William’s inquiry about global warming and produced a mapping (Figure 3) to speculate on how matter intra-acted with their imaginative sense-making. Thinking with Barad (Reference Barad2007) and Lenz Taguchi (Reference Lenz Taguchi2010), we understand that the children’s conceptual exploration of scientific concepts is inseparable from their bodily participation with materials in the activity. Children, their imagination and the concept of global warming and materiality do not pre-exist each other, rather they are co-emergent through intra-actions (Lenz Taguchi, Reference Lenz Taguchi2010). All the materials and bodies involved, including the pencil, the props and we the researchers who participated in the activity, played a part in intra-acting the children’s imaginative sense-making about global warming.

Figure 3.

Mapping the materiality of Silja’s and William’s imaginative sense-making of global warming.

By mapping, we understand that Silja’s and William’s inquiry about global warming would expand, along with the changing material conditions of the activity. When Silja and William explored rising sea levels, the materiality of the Dictionary prop intra-acted with the scientific narrative in the book and with Silja’s body, becoming a whale’s head and translating Silja’s sense-making of rising sea levels and global warming into embodied movements. Through this specific intra-action, the material–discursive significance of the Dictionary prop changed, and along with other material agencies, became a unique way of making sense of rising sea levels. Simultaneously, through the event of writing, the Hint Paper and the pencil intra-acted with William’s body and the ongoing discussion and came to matter by exercising their agencies in co-producing William’s imagination of fluctuating temperatures, dying plants and flooding.

Our mapping unfolds how diverse matters from the children’s everyday lives became part of their sense-making of global warming. At the beginning of the inquiry, when Silja heard the phrase “global warming”, she briefly mentioned the film, the Hobbit (“hey, in the Hobbit there were these…”). Similarly, when William was wondering about how floods occur when sea levels rise, he quickly thought of the Titanic film. In William’s improvisational expression, the ship, the sea and the film became agencies performatively constituting his imagining of global warming. These unexpected associations of films evoked us as researchers to speculate about what material–discursive significance the films might bring to the children’s imaginative sense-making of global warming. Thinking about the Titanic film, the scene of an enormous ship sinking into the dark ocean surfaces in our imagination. The imaginings of the hopeless scenario of drowning people in the film aroused our awareness of what seawater could do to humans in situations such as floods and tsunamis caused by global warming. Considering this possibility, the Titanic film with its material–discursive forces could conjoin William’s imaginative sense-making of the rising sea levels and the destructive power of floods. This resonates with the perspectives of Rousell, Cutter-Mackenzie, and Foster (Reference Rousell, Cutter-Mackenzie and Foster2017) on speculative fiction and its ability to open up new spaces for thinking, feeling and acting differently in relation to climate change. The authors wrote that speculative fiction, such as science fiction fantasy, fairy tales and myths, could give room to children’s critical and creative thought experiments and to respond to climate change in individual and affective ways.

After the recess, an image of a running tap in the book provoked Silja and William to continue their discussion about the significance of water (Figure 4). Then, “without water, humans and plants won’t live” was written as a meaning of global warming on the Hint Paper.

Figure 4.

While reading about water in the book, the agency of water emerges through Silja’s and William’s imaginative sense-making of global warming.

When Silja and William were reading about water in the book, a “chain” of relational links was imaginatively formulated with scientific knowledge of natural phenomena and water was recognised as being vital for plants and humans. At this moment of imagining, water materially resonated as part of the children’s bodies and plants’ bodies. Imagining themselves as “bodies of water” (Neimanis, Reference Neimanis, Åsberg and Braidotti2018) could also change the ways the children thought about water and their entangled relationships with it. Imagining the interdependence between water, plants, oxygen and humans, the children might have recognised that global warming was not just a matter of melting glaciers or the extinction of polar bears but also a threat to other earthly inhabitants.

This episode shows how the materiality of the present activity intra-acted with other agencies across time and space, and new meanings emerged through children’s imaginative sense-making. The book, water and dying plants intra-acted with the children’s imagination and their bodies, resulting in the children’s speculation about how water as a vital substance could become scarce (“climate is warming, all the water dries out”; “water is used a lot”). In the activity, water was not a specific inquiry topic suggested by the teachers, but engaging with the concept of global warming brought forth water as an important intra-acting agency constituting the children’s imaginative sense-making. This also reflects the unpredictable and indeterminate nature of intra-action (Barad, Reference Barad2007; Lenz Taguchi, Reference Lenz Taguchi2010). As Barad (Reference Barad2007) wrote, “it is through specific agential intra-actions that a differential sense of being is enacted in the ongoing ebb and flow of agency” (p.140). This highlights the dynamic and transformative potential of intra-actions in bringing forth unexpected matter and meanings in children’s imaginative sense-making (see also Lenz Taguchi, Reference Lenz Taguchi2010; Wohlwend et al., Reference Wohlwend, Peppler, Keune and Thompson2017).

As Saari and Mullen (Reference Saari and Mullen2020) point out, the overbearing event of global warming has its dark, mysterious and uncanny dimensions that can make us feel anxious and uneasy. Similar to Silja and William during the Riddle of the Spirit project, many other children in our study expressed concerns about the destructive consequences of climate change, human’s pollution to the environment and the well-being of the Earth. For example, one group of children discussed the challenges of building houses, finding food and producing electricity without harming the environment and causing pollution. The children also pondered that the spirit Ukko would not like humans using plants and animals as resources. These events show how the concepts of climate change and global warming can also “haunt” children, their emotions and imagination about human–animal–environment relations.

Episode 2: How the book, the substance of carbon dioxide and children’s bodies came to matter in the children’s imaginative sense-making of carbon dioxide

Analysing this episode, we produced a mapping (Figure 5) to consider the material–discursive intra-action between a book passage about carbon dioxide, the substance of carbon dioxide, and the children’s and the researcher’s bodies.

Figure 5.

Rami’s, Matias’ and Morris’ inquiry of carbon dioxide.

Listening to Alisa reading out about carbon dioxide as an undetectable gas from the book, Rami, Matias and Morris together imagined carbon dioxide with their sensing bodies, driven by feelings of surprise, awe and curiosity. Even though the children were told that the gas was undetectable, they were still trying to sense it, imagining that carbon dioxide was “here” materially entangled with their bodies and that they had been touching, tasting and breathing it without knowing. With the book information and the carbon dioxide gas in the classroom, the children became aware of the close connections between their bodies and carbon dioxide and realised that the Earth was full of this gas.

Similar to Episode 1, the book and its scientific description as performative agencies acted out material–discursive forces, evoking the children’s curiosity and embodied imagination of carbon dioxide. The undetectable nature of carbon dioxide was so surprising and mysterious to the children that it was actively “inviting” the children to sense it. We also noticed other embodied imaginings during our research with the children, for example when the phrase “carbon footprint” and the image of a footprint in the book invited another group of children to speculate this concept as an actual footprint, which people and animals could physically print with their feet. With the information from the book, the children considered how traffic and pollution are connected to carbon footprints and, simultaneously, they drew out a picture of humans’ and rabbits’ footprints in the snow.

With a new materialist approach, in this episode, we understand that the words and images shown in the book and the substance of carbon dioxide have strong performative agencies in intra-acting the children’s imagination of carbon dioxide. In agential realism, Barad (Reference Barad2003) wrote, “knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part” (p.829). Thinking about this, the children knew about the existence of carbon dioxide as much as carbon dioxide made itself intelligible to the children through exercising its material–discursive agencies and making a difference in the children’s imaginative sense-making. The children’s realisation of carbon dioxide as part of their bodies might become another layer of meaning, potentially leading to a deeper and more personal way of understanding the gas, as well as its role in climate change. This also resonates with previous research (Seiki & Gray, Reference Seiki and Gray2020; Thomas Jha & Price, Reference Thomas Jha and Price2022), which demonstrates the importance of children’s embodiment in scientific learning.