The increasing emphasis on speech and language in early childhood education (ECE), based on a developmental approach to learning, assumes the ideal child should acquire specific skills and knowledge by certain stages. This creates challenges for early childhood and arts educators supporting young children’s development whilst acknowledging that young bodies do not develop in a linear fashion (Murris, 2016). For nonlingual children particularly, a developmentalist approach overlooks the myriad expressions that occur beyond words, where not-speaking is a complex entanglement of environmental, microbial, pheromonal and affective relations.

Drawing on multispecies encounters with nonlingual children, this presentation explores the potential of moving education beyond individual accountability and deficit models of human progress. By attuning to subtle registers of movement, atmospheres and sense-based ecologies, we become curious for onto-epistemologies that seem more relevant to the innovative pedagogies and research of arts education in the post-Anthropocene. In co-creating with arts, animals and early education methods, we share sensorial approaches that acknowledge the entanglements of other-than-human elements and find new ways to co-construct dynamic, multispecies languages with the potential for knowing differently.

We explore the tensions and fruitful connections arising at the intersections of arts and ECE through two studies in the UK and Finland. First, an experiment with ‘artful sensing practices’ with non-lingual children in a Yorkshire (UK) art gallery, which mobilised wordless expressions with lycra dancing and multispecies movements (Churchill Dower, 2025a). Second, a multispecies research encounter with microbes, animals and unexpected intra-actions in a school zoo in Helsinki (Tammi & Hohti, 2020). We attune to entanglements through inexpert experiments that help us to dismantle mastery, fostering multimodal, multisensory, and multispecies ways of knowing and challenging assumptions about differently capable bodies.

In this presentation, we pay attention to the heterogenous porosities, cracks, common worlds and alternative landscapes in multispecies inquiry that disrupt and enrich expectations of childhoods. We invite a curiosity, an exploration of what could be possible if prior knowledge and judgements about expertise or developmental stages are laid aside. We seek new languages, not made up of words, objects and bodies, but of co-constructed movements, pheromones and sensations. We ask whether speculative methods (Haraway, 2016; Springgay & Truman, 2018) and sensing practices (Manning, 2020) (Churchill Dower, 2025b) might open more-than-human ecological spaces for creating more inclusive languages.

Through artful sensing practices, we invite an attuning to registers of difference that move within a web of relations not often visible through conventional educational methods. We consider if it is possible for educators to teach without words, and how a multispecies sensing practice might present differently across UK and Finnish settings. Through the outcomes of these two geographically and culturally distinct studies, we consider the commonalities, connections and interdependencies of multispecies relations (van Dooren et al., 2016) and conceptualise new onto-epistemologies for arts and early childhood education. In doing so, we shift the educational bullseye from knowledge acquisition to ways of knowing and reconfigure arts education and childhood studies methodologies to foreground multispecies ecosystems where difference is not othered from without but always, already within (Barad, 2007).

This research engaged a speculative arts-based method called Artful Sensing Practices (ASPs) (Churchill Dower, 2025a) which allow nonlingual children to express themselves differently through movement-based improvisations that enable a close attunement to multispecies expressions. Over a six month period, data co-creation took place during movement sessions in an art gallery in West Yorkshire, UK. Six neurodivergent children and their families were invited to engage in movement play activities with various materials such as lycra sheets, feathers, ribbons, wool, sticks and paint, inviting synaesthetic (multisensory) responses (Massumi, 2002) which allow children to ‘feel’ their world without needing to articulate it. With the consent of all participants, video data were collected using Go-Pro cameras and analysed using a ‘video data sensing’ method (Caton, 2019). Here, insights emerged not through a single observation but from multispecies intra-actions between the data set, researcher, participants, materials and movements of the video editing software, animating as much of the sensory experience as possible. Data analysis focussed on the improvisational dance of almost imperceptible movements, intensities and forces that are always vibrating, exchanging and responding (Manning & Massumi, 2014; Tammi & Hohti, 2020) beyond words. As part of a larger multispecies ethnographic research study co-author, Hohti, spent five months with a group of young people, other animals, and school staff in a large educational greenhouse located in a school in southern Finland. During the fieldwork, the greenhouse was inhabited by dozens of bigger other-than-human animals, insects and birds as well as tropical plants, flora and fauna. Around 20 students, appointed as caretakers of the animals, took full responsibility for feeding, cleaning, and taking care of the animals. During the fieldwork, the authors took an ethnographic approach, adopting storytelling as the primary way of writing fieldnotes and analysing the stream of stories told by the children and the teachers about the inhabitants of the greenhouse (Tammi & Hohti, 2020). The authors spent time in the greenhouse listening, wandering around, making contact with the other-than-human animals and plants, taking photos and videos and chatting with the caretakers. Putting these data to work through collaborative writing allowed theoretical concepts and further empirical events to blend in in a rhizomatic manner. The storied materials proved to be an engaging way to talk about the findings to the child research participants, leaning on Haraway’s (2016) insistence that stories do things: “it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with”.

The author developed ASPs in her PhD to show that not-speaking is not a problem. This research demonstrated how reducing the pressure to speak by attending to the myriad nonlingual ways of multispecies knowing increases children’s participation in their worlds. This has significant implications for including marginalised voices in mainstream education and health settings as well as family life. In engaging stakeholders from diverse communities to co-produce ASPs specific to their lingual contexts, this research generated broader understandings of how sensing practices can reframe and support lingual diversity with marginalised families and how to scale the practices for wider pedagogical application. In a similar way, the co-author analysed the phenomenon of touch to discuss care and knowing within child-animal relations. From observations of caring hands and the material-discursive dimensions involved in stroking, the research revealed ways of knowing and not-knowing that are non-innocent, relational, and perform a complex worlding dance that always takes more than two. In both studies, sensing practices meant attending to an infinite number of almost imperceptible micro-movements, including the virtual movements of intensities, forces and affect. They highlighted the precarious dance across multiple participating bodies that demands continuous exchange and response in a complex world of material, microbial and speculative connections. These studies problematised notions of individual response-ability and raised vital concerns on the politics of regulation, essentialism and unequal power relations. Despite different pedagogical, curriculum and policy frameworks across two European countries, both studies demonstrated how sensing pedagogies offer a generative catalyst for learning differently that can often be overlooked through a western educational or pathological lens. This has implications for educational theories and methodologies by pushing the boundaries of anthropocentric, developmental pedagogies, and recommends that educators embrace more risky and uncertain understandings of care and touch as complex ways of knowing about the world.

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