ECHOing Ecological Imagination: Children’s Storying with Nordic Folktales and the More-than-Human World
Date: Tuesday, May 6, 2025
Time: 1 – 3 PM
Location: Multipurpose Room, PCN 2012
Join us for an interactive presentation by a Canadian-Finnish ECHOing research team, led by Professor Kristiina Kumpulainen (LLED, UBC), as we explore how children engage in imaginative storytelling with Nordic folktales, forest elves, and pre-modern Baltic Finnic myths. Using mobile augmented storying and speculative arts-based methods, our research investigates how children narrate their entanglements with the more-than-human world across time and space, fact and fiction. Grounded in posthuman and relational scholarship, this work draws on ethnographic fieldwork with 7–9-year-old children in a Finnish elementary school. Through video interviews, digital artefacts, and creative outputs, we analyze how children’s stories blend local experiences with cultural memory and global concerns—such as climate change—demonstrating care, agency, and hope for more sustainable futures. In this session, we invite you to join us in speculative, arts-based experiments as we imagine new storying practices and pedagogical possibilities in the Anthropocene. Come ready to reflect, co-create, and envision what ecological education can be when rooted in imagination, play, and relational knowing.
Jenny Byman is a doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Through a two-year-long ethnographic study, her research explores speculative fabulation as a pedagogical method to address children’s storying across ecosystems. Her research extends the emerging research field of speculative approaches by delving into the transformative power of storying that emerges in a specific situated context when children story with Nordic folktales about elves, pre-modern Baltic Finnic myths and with invertebrates and amphibians lifeworlds in an ordinary Finnish primary school classroom.
Jenny Renlund is a doctoral candidate at the University of Helsinki in the Faculty of Educational Sciences. Her research interests include multiliteracies, digital literacies, multimodal and multisensory education, arts-based methodologies, arts and environmental education, as well as the role of affects and aesthetics in education. Renlund has a background in visual arts and her research combines academic and artistic practices throughout the processes of inquiry. Her work is grounded in posthuman and new-materialist perspectives, as well as ecofeminist scholarship.
Chin Chin Wong is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research foregrounds storying, imagination and multiliteracies as a holistic approach to children’s climate change education. Through investigating a project called Riddle of the Spirit, Wong’s research shows that such an approach can create transformative opportunities for children to speculate with places and materials, dwell into and linger on the uneasy side of climate change in individual, creative and affective ways. With a background in design studies, Wong’s research also addresses teachers’ design creativity in pedagogy and material agency in meaning-making.