This symposium is based on ongoing work by members of a broad international research group spanning contexts from the United Kingdom, Finland and Australia. The group was awarded a competitive grant by the Australian Research Council (ARC) to investigate the way children name their worlds by considering multi-modal literacy and sustainability learning in early childhood settings (Naming the World, 2016-2019). The first symposium by the group was held at the annual meeting of the Australian Association for Research In Education (AARE, Melbourne 2016). This symposium is a continuation of both a method of working together in dispersed locations and of bringing initial results of the project to be discussed publicly.

The seven members comprising the symposium are each engaged in ongoing empirical work in altogether six early years education locations in the three countries. Experiences, insights, questions and materials are shared via multiple online platforms as well as exchanged as email conversations. The conversations are analysed according to patterns of thought, common themes and subthemes. Three main strands emerged from the analysis of early exchanges, forming the basis of the individual presentations for this symposium: connecting with literature, connecting with the world, and connecting with children. These are framed by the overarching theme: world-naming. The presentations and discussion will focus on the possibilities for transforming educational research through the notion of human entanglement in the fate of the planet (Carter, 2004; Grosz, 2008). The approach is post-qualitative drawing on Patti Lather’s ‘blue print for post-qualitative research’:

Out of mutated dominant practices through a convergence of practices of intensity and emergence, both practice and objects of a field are redefined and reconfigured this is our critical project that is not about individual but collective procedure, a very social enterprise where we start where we are (Lather, 2013, condensed, 640-641).

The three papers follow and describe the group’s thinking and empirical insights with respect to the three main strands identified in the initial exchanges of ideas and materials. The first paper outlines the potentialities of the term ‘emergent’ when applied to how young children come to name their world. The second paper focuses on research practice to explore ‘curious practice’ as a post-qualitative methodology to investigate what kind of data emerges, or perhaps rather: how does data shape the research encounters and what new knowledges emerge in educational research with a curious practice methodology? The third paper discusses how places of intensity and vitality for the children come about and how these might relate to literacy and sustainability learning. The methodological challenges that have emerged from ‘being-with’ children are highlighted.

Carter, P. (2004). Material thinking: The theory and practice of creative research. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Publishing. Grosz, E. (2008). Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth (Wellek Library lecture series at the University of California, Irvine). New York: Columbia University Press. Lather, P. (2013). Methodology-21: What do we do in the afterward? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26, 634–645. doi:10.1080/09518398.2013.788753