The politics of children's engagement with sticks

In Nordic research on childhood and early childhood education, children’s agency and participation are cross-cutting concerns. In this paper, we wish to contribute to research discussions of children’s participation in the context of nature-related educational activities through an exploration of the relational micro-politics (Kokko et al., 2024) of children’s engagements with sticks on playgrounds and in forests.

The theoretical framework of the paper combines a theoretical interest in children’s material engagements (Harwood & Collier, 2017; Malafouris 2016) with theoretical attention to politics in children’s lives (Elwood & Mitchell 2012; Jørgensen 2021; Kokko et al. 2024; Rautio 2013).

The analysis is based on fieldnotes from observations and video recordings of children engaging with natural landscapes, beings, materials and weather in the context of early childhood science, nature and sustainability education. The empirical material has been collected as part of the NAVADA project (2023-2028), an ongoing design-based R&D project evolving around cooperations between researchers and Danish early childhood education institutions. In collaboration with researchers, pedagogical design and develop, experiment with and evaluate new designs for play- and learning environments. In many designs, educators experiment with ‘letting go of adult control’ in educational situations, allowing more space and time for children’s explorations and for the agency of non-human nature.

Collective analysis of situations arising from these ambitions brought attention to children’s embodied and emplaced engagements with materials, objects and tools in outdoor environments, and to the role of sticks in these relationships. We discuss the relational and sensuous politics of sticks and children in forests, how children an sticks get caught in adult politics of space, and the ways in which sticks form part of children’s negotiations of knowledge.