The Materiality of Children’s Imaginative Sense-making in Climate Change Education

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, we discuss our investigation of children’s imaginative sense-making and its materiality in climate change education. Drawing on a new materialist approach, our research contributes to knowledge about the material significance in children’s sense-making related to climate change. During a project called Riddle of the Spirit in a Finnish primary school, we invited children to explore the concepts of global warming and carbon dioxide through narrative, playful and multimodal activities. Inspired by postqualitative methods, our relational analysis, based on video materials, maps and examines two episodes of children’s small group inquiry. Our findings unfold the material–discursive intra-actions, through which a prop turned into a whale’s head, the Titanic film appeared, and water and carbon dioxide became important to children’s bodies. With these specific events, the study illustrates how various materials conjoined and came to matter in the children’s sense-making of the concepts.