Everyday preschool life unfolds within spaces shaped by the relations of those immersed in them. These spaces are not neutral settings, but carriers of meanings continuously produced and negotiated by the participants through everyday activities and engagements.

In research on human–environment relations, a distinction is commonly made between space and place. Drawing on humanistic geography, space is understood as openness characterised by physical movement, while place refers to those parts of space that have been endowed with meaning, value and subjectivity through lived experience (Tuan, 1977). From this perspective, places are not defined solely by their physical properties, but by the meanings and interpretations that emerge through everyday practices and relations.

Within educational research, place is approached as a relational and socially constructed phenomenon that is integral to educational experience rather than as a purely physical setting. Place-conscious perspectives emphasise that educational processes are always situated and that places both shape, and are shaped by, the practices, emotions and relations unfolding within them (Gruenewald, 2003; Schroder, 2006).

More recent perspectives extend these approaches by questioning their anthropocentric assumptions and by attending to more-than-human dimensions of educational situations. Informed by actor–network theory (Latour, 2010), education is increasingly understood as a network of relations involving human and more-than-human actors, including material objects, spatial arrangements and everyday practices. From this viewpoint, place becomes an active participant in educational processes rather than a passive backdrop.

Building on these perspectives, place-conscious perspectives intersect with insights from embodied and multimodal theories of cognition, which emphasise that meaning-making is grounded in bodily action, sensory engagement and situated interaction with the environment. From this viewpoint, children’s engagements with place are not primarily articulated through verbal reflection, but emerge through movement, gesture, rhythm, touch and interaction with material elements of their surroundings. Multisensory experience thus constitutes a fundamental mode through which young children perceive, express and communicate meanings of place, particularly in early childhood settings where cognition, action and perception remain closely intertwined.

The methodological focus on the Mosaic Approach and Child-Led Tours carries an international and inclusive potential. By relying on embodied, multisensory and multimodal forms of communication rather than verbal language alone, the research design enables the participation of children from diverse linguistic, cultural and educational environments

Accordingly, the presentation explores selected empirical moments from an ongoing qualitative study with children aged 3-6. The guiding research question asks:
How are meanings of place communicated and made accessible through children’s embodied and multisensory forms of engagement in preschool settings?
Rather than offering a comprehensive account of children’s relations with place, the focus is on illustrating how meanings emerge and are shared through multisensory communication within the research process.

Methodology plays a significant role in this study, as it reflects the values underpinning the research and aligns with a theoretical understanding of children as competent social actors embedded in cultural contexts and capable of interpreting and influencing their environments (James & Prout, 1990; Punch, 2002). This epistemological stance informs the adoption of participatory and child-centred research practices within contemporary childhood studies. The study is grounded in the Mosaic Approach (Clark & Moss, 2005), a complex multi-method research strategy developed to support participatory inquiry with young children. Within this framework, children are positioned not merely as research participants, but as active contributors to the research process and, in some instances, as co-researchers (Alderson, 2001; Bakhtiar et al., 2023). As Punch (2002) emphasises, research with children benefits from diverse and interactive modes of communication that extend beyond verbal language, enabling children to express meanings through action, images and engagement with their material environments. The Mosaic Approach combines observation, conversations with children, children’s photography, child-led tours, map-making and interviews. This combination of methods enables participants to share their knowledge and experiences in multiple forms and supports the inclusion of children with varied communicative repertoires. Drawing on Clark’s (2005) research with very young children in preschool settings, the approach recognises even the youngest participants as credible sources of knowledge about the meanings they attribute to everyday situations and institutional spaces. The empirical core of the study consists of Child-Led Tours conducted in 2025 and 2026 in preschools in Poland with children aged 3–6. During these tours, children act as guides, directing attention to places and objects that are meaningful in their preschool everyday life. Meanings are communicated primarily through embodied and multisensory forms of engagement, including movement, gesture, making photographs and interactions, rather than through verbal articulation alone. This methodological focus allows the researcher to attend to embodied forms of communication while maintaining a relational and ethically grounded research stance.

The study has generated rich and diverse empirical material illustrating how places are experienced, communicated and made meaningful in preschool everyday life. The findings indicate that children produce multiple, heterogeneous and highly individual multisensory representations of place, rather than a single, shared image of preschool space. Each account reflects the uniqueness of children’s embodied perspectives, shaped by personal experiences, relationships and modes of engagement with their surroundings. The material highlights that meanings of place emerge through relations built both within places and with places, as well as through memories and associations evoked by interaction with material objects present in preschool environments. Objects, textures, smells and spatial arrangements become active mediators of meaning, triggering affective and sensory responses that are central to how children experience and communicate place. As a result, preschool space ceases to function as a universal or homogeneous setting and becomes differentiated into places that are individually experienced and interpreted by participants of preschool everyday life. These places are marked by children’s presence and perceived through personal, embodied and multisensory lenses. Importantly, the findings demonstrate that children communicate meanings of place primarily through multisensory and embodied forms of expression, engaging all senses during child-led tours. Verbal accounts are frequently accompanied - or replaced - by gestures, movement and sensory invitations, such as encouraging the researcher to smell, touch or closely examine objects. Such moments reveal how multisensory communication constitutes a key mode of meaning-making in early childhood and underscore the importance of research methodologies capable of capturing these embodied forms of expression.

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