Critical examination of human-centered ways of thinking has become topical as complex crises challenge sustainable development. In education research, attention has begun to be paid to relationships and living with multispecies companions. However, recent initiatives to include relational ontology and multispecies insights in educational discourses have mostly focused on animal relations, while plant companions have hardly been taken as an explicit focus (e.g. Tammi et al., 2023). In this presentation I examine the relationships between plants and children in the context of Finnish early childhood education and care (henceforth ECEC). The presentation is based on ongoing doctoral research, which is situated in the intersections of early childhood education, multispecies studies, and critical plant studies. My objective is to critically examine how plants and children relate to each other in educational practices by asking 1) In what ways cultural, historical, and material aspects are present in plant-child encounters? and 2) What kind of histories bring plants and children together in urban multispecies landscapes?

I ground the theoretical background of the research in posthumanist and feminist new materialist literature. I take the standpoint of relational ontologies to see how the relationship between plants and children can be seen through disorienting focus from the child and moving it to plant-child relations. Multispecies approach allows me to emphasize the entanglements of human and other-than-human in various assemblages (van Dooren et al., 2016; Tammi et al., 2023) and critical plant studies to address plants as relational agentic beings (Lawrence, 2022). I view children and plants as participants in landscape assemblages (Tsing, 2017, 2020), that is, gatherings of human and nonhuman becomings in their mutual world-making or worlding (Haraway, 2007). The concept of worlding is used in decentering the ideas of individual identity and self-forming autopoiesis, and in moving towards the idea of becoming-with in sympoiesis: life is interdependent and collaborative co-making, shared becoming with (Haraway, 2007, 2016). Conducting postqualitative inquiry, I orientate my thinking and practices with theory and concepts and read the data through multiple theoretical insights diffractively (see Jackson & Mazzei, 2023; Lenz Taguchi & St. Pierre, 2017; Mazzei, 2014; St. Pierre, 2021).

In this presentation, I will focus on the empirical phase of the research, in which plant-child relations are mapped using multispecies ethnography. I will highlight perspectives on how history, culture, and materiality are present in plant-child encounters and how they bring plants and children together in the diverse landscapes of cities. I will explore what happens when the priority in encounters is not the child but the plant, how to consider plants in diverse encounters, and what questions does conducting multispecies ethnography with plants raise. I will present observations from ethnographic data, reflecting them on selected theoretical frameworks. Inspired by the bag-lady storytelling practice described by Haraway (2004), I present the expected outcomes of this study as narrative vignettes.

The presentation offers insights of how to conduct multispecies inquiry with plants. It also challenges us to think about ECEC environmental and sustainability education from more-than-human point of view. This research has implications beyond the Finnish context. Relational more-than-human perspectives are not prevalent in European educational contexts, which are mostly built on humanities and natural sciences. However, there is a need to review our place in nature as part of a more-than-human world. This presentation may open space for dialogue among researchers and practitioners on how plant-child relations can be (re)considered in education.

I utilize postqualitative research approach in this study. Postqualitative inquiry draw from poststructuralism and onto-epistemological concepts of philosophy of immanence, which are more concerned with what might be thought and done, than what is (St. Pierre, 2021). The onto-epistemology of material-discursive, expressed in Karen Barad´s (2007) agential realism, brings forth the messy entanglements of both the natural and discursively constructed world. I follow these premises and conceptualize childhood as a material-discursive phenomenon emerging through intra-active relations (see Tammi et al., 2023). Furthermore, I use multispecies ethnography to include plants in the world where culture and lives are shared and shaped (see Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010; Ogden et al., 2013). I shape the research design in line with thinking with theory, concepts as method, and diffractive reading (see Jackson & Mazzei, 2023; Lenz Taguchi & St. Pierre, 2017; Mazzei, 2014). Thinking with theory allows me to “plug in” theory to activate thought (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023). I use theoretical concepts to guide my actions throughout the ethnography in (re)orienting my thinking and ethnographic gaze (see Lenz Taguchi & St. Pierre, 2017). As outcomes, I produce stories that emerge from reading the data diffractively through multiple insights (see Mazzei, 2014). Inspired by Haraway (2004), I narrate the outcomes by following the bag-lady storytelling practice. I use the concepts of assemblages, worlding, attentiveness, and relationality in the study. The concepts of assemblages (Tsing, 2011, 2020) and worlding (Haraway, 2007) created the framework, and drawing from Kimmerer (2003, 2024), Tsing, (2011, 2020), Tsing & Bazzul (2022) and van Dooren et al. (2016), relationality was concretized with the concepts of listening, reciprocity, ownership, and disturbances as well as by curious attentiveness towards plants displayed in the use of language and in noticing, observing, and encountering them. Drawing also from the walking-with methodology, I approach the research sites as assemblages which are in constant movement, and as spaces of situated knowledges, shaped by historical, cultural, and material contexts (Springgay & Truman, 2018). I produce data in connection with Helsinki City´s municipal daycare centre. One kindergarten group and one preschool group, a total of 29 children aged 3-6 years, participate in the study in Helsinki region, Finland. The ethnographic field work takes place between September 2025 and June 2026 by walking with children on outdoor excursions, such as in parks and city forests. The data consists of field notes, photos, and video clips.

In narrate the expected outcomes of the research by following the bag-lady storytelling practice (see Haraway, 2004). I present the outcomes through vignettes, which emphasize entanglements and situatedness of knowledge. Through moving the focus from the child to multispecies assemblages and diverse happenings in plant-child encounters, I expect the outcomes to disrupt prevailing narratives about the educational relationships between plants and children. This study has potential implications for ECEC environmental and sustainability education on European and international scale. Conventional European educational approaches to plant-human relations stem from humanities and natural sciences, which tend to focus on human wellbeing and benefits in individual and at a societal level, albeit linking human and planetary well-being together. The situation is similar in Finland. Although the Finnish National Core Curriculum for ECEC highlights the importance of cultivating nature relationship as part of environmental education, it does not reflect ideas of multispecies relationality or more-than-human companionship (see EDUFI, 2022). Disrupting dominant narratives has potential in reframing what counts as valid educational knowledge and in how teachers, institutions, and policymakers understand the phenomena. It may open space for generating new educational practices by transforming theoretical and conceptual recourses to tangible. The study offers a novel standpoint and invites discussion on how to approach environmental education from the standpoint of relational ontologies and more-than-human perspectives in ECEC environmental and sustainability education. Moreover, it strengthens the plant perspective in multispecies research. Thus, the study may help European and international practitioners and institutions to engage in dialogue about curriculum work and pedagogy from a relatively novel paradigmatic stance.

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