Aesthetically emplacing ECEC sensitivity and slowness in the forest: Toward learning together with the world

The presentation showcases an ongoing small-scale 2-year participatory research project that set out to investigate how the concept of ‘care’ could support ECEC institutions in articulating their pedagogical work with forests. Together with one crèche and one kindergarten, who reached out to the researcher after having read about the project in a professional magazine for pedagogical staff, different forms of participatory and collaborative inquiries into pedagogical forest activities were initiated. Already from early on in the empirical part of the project, it became obvious that those ECEC staff members who were particularly interested in participating also were the ones struggling the most with articulating the kind of learning that took place in the forest, a learning that transgressed the formally intended outcome of the official teaching agendas in Denmark. These participants therefore came to shape the following co-research question in dialogue with the overall research project’s focus on care: How can ECEC institutions make pedagogical sense of the learning that takes place in a forest? Could concepts such as ‘slowness’ and ‘sensitivity’ take a central role in communicating the relevance of what is experienced by children and staff in the forest?
Fellow observant participation was complemented with ongoing situated reciprocal interviews between researcher and the staff members, always mediated by their relation to the children’s impressive expressions, in order to approximate first empirical-conceptual findings. In a nutshell, these findings suggest that particular conditions must be in place to allow for the kind of learning the staff wished to articulate: Both staff members and children must be allowed to have a high degree of agency over the project’s framing, for instance regarding its temporal unfolding (‘slowness’) and its experiential qualities (‘sensitivity’). These conditions seem to make it possible to emplace the forest in a particular way, as a site for aesthetic learning together with the world. The presentation will discuss these empirical-conceptual developments by connecting them to a feminist ethics of care and to common worlding research.