A thousand play tales: exploring the possibilities for/of childhoodnature play in an urban forest school.

Abstract

This thesis narrates a post-qualitative inquiry that explored how ‘childhoodnature’ play (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al. 2020) emerges during more-than-human encounters in an urban forest school. Childhoodnature is a posthuman concept that identifies children (and all humans) as part of nature. Provoked by concerns relating to the environmental crises, this thesis was curious about how hope-full, vital nature relations between more-than-humans might emerge with/through childhoodnature play. Concurrently troubled by childist, neoliberal, developmental approaches in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), this thesis sought to research with children as knowledge creators.

A post-qualitative approach was developed to investigate the dynamic, messy, unpredictable nature of play and to create opportunities for humans (adult researcher, practitioners, children) and the more-than-human world (animals, plants, weather, park) to become playmates through research assemblages. An urban forest school became the research site where the researchers engaged in a ‘deep hanging out’ (Somerville and Powell, 2019) over a year. We engaged in ‘shared play’ (Hogarth, 2018), a term used to describe research as play and play as research. We found different ways to generate data including drawings, paintings, talking, writing, re-enactments, collages, photographs and videos (see Figure 1). We shared our data experimentations in an exhibition entitled ‘stories of play’ and worked with these stories to co-created ‘play tales’, several of which are shared in this thesis.

This thesis highlights the slowness, curiosity, playfulness and care that is required for relational pedagogies and illuminates what Karen Barad terms ‘ethico-onto-epistemology’ (2007), the inseparability of ethics from knowing and being. The play tales suggest that childhoodnature play can be simultaneously silly, serious, digital, imaginary, embodied, nomadic, dynamic, complex, relational ‘and, and, and’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002). Through this thesis, I assert that childhoonature play opens possibilities for posthuman children and more-than-humans to co-create alternative worlds.

Date of Award	11 Dec 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Elisabeth Barratt Hacking (Supervisor) & Ceri Brown (Supervisor)