Anna Vladimirova

In the age of over-consumption, extreme pollution, discrimination, climate disasters and extinctions, education remains a powerful custodian of learning for sustainable futures. Outdoor education is one of the orientations of environmental education that aims to bring young generations of people closer to nature and to a local place. For the very same reason, outdoor learning has been greatly romanticized and might be on a path of serving the ambitions of anthropocentrism. The current study represents a postqualitative inquiry into outdoor education in the early childhood context in Finland with a focus on a conceptualisation of the human body and a place. It comprises three published articles. A synthesis of both empirical and theoretical work across all articles was enabled through thinking with theory, data and researcher’s own body. In a summary of this research, I trace a journey of my inquiry, where I was first charmed by the outdoor learning, romanticizing its adventurous, liberating content and purpose. Drawing on different theories, I diffract philosophical concepts through the data from nature school, forest preschool and my daily routine, starting to question the anthropocentrism of outdoor education. Finally, as I explore how the body is implicated in the alternative ethics of place, I make a proposition, an offer to the field: What if more and more outdoor education praxes were informed by the place-responsive ethics, in which the child’s body is a living response of the place? The relationality of young children and places is traceable in movements of children’s bodies, which explicate the material-immaterial complexity of a thinking place. Conceptual transformation might not only complement the praxes of mainstream outdoor education and smoothen the road of multiple species toward irrevocable climate change(s), but also, hopefully, establish new, still fragile, paths to flourishing multispecies futures.

This paper draws on process philosophy to imagine “care” as a collective practice of children and the forest in the context of Finnish early childhood education. By locating care in movement rather than an individual, the author challenges the notion of caring subjectivity and employs postqualitative inquiry to conceptually focus on an impersonal production of care. The author shows how care emerges in the between of children and forest in an outdoor learning environment and highlights what it continually produces. She concludes by discussing the need for a conceptual evolution of “care” in the philosophies of environmental and outdoor education.