This research aims to explore the interfaces of Philosophy for/with children method (e.g., Murris et al., 2017) and artistic sustainability project. In the era of polycrisis, novel ways of knowing and being are acutely required. The decline of democracies, the erosion of human rights, and the exacerbation of climate change pose serious challenges to education and societies: how to foster a more sustainable future? This research investigates the potential of combining the Philosophy for/with children method, artistic practices, and sustainability education to foster democratic methodology and collectively explore novel ways of knowing beyond traditional Euro-, West-, and adult-centric knowledge.

Our transdisciplinary research project Art of knowing through (un)learning (2025-2028) combines dance art, educational sciences, and philosophy. In our experimental approach, we conduct nature and dance workshops with children and adults across different age groups in forests. Utilising ethnography and philosophical workshops, we explore what following children, play, and trees do to our knowing, being and (un)learning. The project explores and extends embodied qualitative methodology (Ellingson, 2017) and embodied knowing. It aims to foster caring, playful and imaginative ways of being amid the socio-ecological crises.

Philosophy for/with children (Murris et al., 2017) has been an influential global movement that takes children’s perspectives seriously and engages children in philosophy and careful thinking. Although the movement is not fully unified, it has often emphasised learning through rational deliberation and argumentation. While this is important in our era of spreading disinformation and decline of democracies, we seek to complement and experiment the philosophy for/with children in an embodied and informal way, carried out in forests and cultivating embodied, interconnected and relational ways of being, knowing and observing.

The theoretical framework of this paper draws on feminist new materialism (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2023), care ethics (Tronto, 1993) and theorising of imagination and play (Murdoch, 1992; Joseph, 2024; Vygotsky, 2004; Ferholt et al., 2023). These are combined with an investigation of the possibilities of moral imagination and loving attention, which are approached through the moral philosophy of Iris Murdoch and decolonial feminism of Maria Lugones (e.g., Lugones, 2010). Our theoretical framework combines typically distinct fields in a novel way, striving to envision more just and sustainable futures. Attentiveness to injustices and more-than-human perspectives are important thread in our approach. Concerning children, this research resists structural discrimination against children (e.g., childism, Adami, 2023) which typically leads to neglecting children’s views. Here, especially the research on playworlds (Ferholt et al., 2023; Rainio et al., in press) is used to theorise and practice ways for joint action and collaborative creative inquiry across generations and age groups.

Our work is carried out in Finland and the United States, but the results bear significance to European and global audiences, as the global crises we face require joint action across borders. In this presentation, we focus on the preliminary results of the workshops in Finland. In science, transdisciplinarity and especially art (Rouhiainen, 2017) offer perspectives to interrupt our usual ways of doing research and knowledge, which have not hitherto been able to stop us from acting in unsustainable ways. Hence, we suggest novel and perhaps risky ways of trying to establish different ways of doing.

This research draws on qualitative embodied methodology (Ellingson, 2017). However, we strive to novel transdisciplinary methodology development, where we experiment, for example, on the Thinking at the Edge -method (Schoeller, 2023). We will do collaborative autoethnography (Chang et al., 2013) and philosophical workshops, where we utilise the philosophy for/with children approach (e.g., Murris et al., 2017). During the workshops, we utilise ethnography to observe what happens in the group and for ourselves. We will construct a collective research diary and field notes during one year. The dance and philosophical workshops act both as a method and as data for us. Philosophy for/with children is approached with novel perspectives by incorporating play, dance art and embodiment in the understanding of philosophy. The play, dance and forest workshops in Finland will take place approximately once a week for three voluntary multi-age groups in winter, spring, summer, and autumn term 2026. We will aim for 16 workshops during one cycle of seasons. During and after the nature dance workshops, we plan to carry out semi-structured interviews with selected participants. We are especially interested in: what can we (un)learn from listening to children and trees as experts in developing the embodied methodology that builds on play? How can we practice and develop these different ways of embodied knowing in dance? In the conference, we will present our initial findings from the ongoing workshops.

We expect our transdisciplinary collaboration to offer new methodological insights as we apply and investigate novel perspectives drawing on the Thinking at the Edge method, Playworlds and Philosophy for/with children in an embodied and extended community of inquiry, taking seriously children, forests and trees. Past research describes the notoriously difficult nature of doing inter- and transdisciplinary work (MacLeod and Nagatsu, 2018), so we expect to shed more light on the problems, tensions and insights of doing this kind of transdisciplinary work. As described in embodied qualitative methods, it is important to document the "messy sides" (Ellingson, 2017; Hofmann et al., 2024) of research as well. We will write the results as journal articles and provide guidance for educators based on the results. We believe that our results contribute to bringing interesting and timely insights to both art and sustainability education, emphasising the potential of dance and embodiment in (un)learning. These insights will offer perspectives on living amid polycrisis and creative openings for imagining more just and sustainable futures.

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