LECI seminar: Researching and enriching children's ecological imagination for sustainable futures

On March 4th 2022 Jenny Byman, Jenny Renlund, Ching Ching Wong, and Kristiina Kumpulainen will present their research in the LECI seminar entitled "researching and enriching children’s ecological imagination for sustainable futures"

The Learning, Culture and Interventions (LECI) research community is happy to invite you to its next research seminar on "researching and enriching children’s ecological imagination for sustainable futures”. For doctoral students to note, this seminar is part of the SEDUCE doctoral courses (SED-916) and you will gain study credits by attending.  

When:  

Friday 04.03.2022 at 9:00-10:30  

Where:

https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/61525981394?pwd=blE3QlF6Vnc2OXRpWUFUNE93NE5Wdz09 

Meeting ID: 615 2598 1394 

Passcode: 994657 

Presenters:  

Jenny Byman, Jenny Renlund, Ching Ching Wong, Kristiina Kumpulainen 

Abstract:  

In this LECI seminar, we will share our ongoing research work on children’s ecological imagination. Considering the urgency to cultivate human capacity to imagine ecologically just futures and to solve ecological challenges, our research holds that it is necessary to increase research knowledge about children’s ecological imagination, and equally to find ways how it can be empirically operationalised and educationally supported. To these ends, our research generates novel theoretical, methodological and pedagogical knowledge about children’s ecological imagination at the intersection of cultural nature stories, arts-based methods and augmented storytelling technology. We build on multilayered theoretical discourses grounded on sociocultural theories on imagination, posthuman theories, place-based environmental education, and media and communication studies. This interdisciplinary approach allows us to inquiry into how narratives of literacy, art, science and technology potentiate spaces for children’s ecological imagination. Further, this approach guides our inquiry into children’s ecological imagination as a relational entanglement across the human and non-human worlds fueled by affective, embodied, sensuous, symbolic, moral and cultural intensities. In sum, our research will generate new research knowledge about the ways in which stories, storytelling and augmented reality technology create potential animated means to immerse children in ecological imagination, and to address ecological issues and challenges. It will also advance our understanding on how children’s storying can become a potential ‘voice’ in, with, about and for the environment, and how such stories can also travel and become that of others, generating intergenerational dialogue, care, action and hope. 

Our research includes collaboration with researchers from Finland, Australia, Canada and China, and it is supported by the Academy of Finland, KONE Foundation, Nessling Foundation, Australian Research Council, University of Hong Kong Seed Funding for Strategic Interdisciplinary Research Schemes, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada. 

For some more information see:  

https://blogs.helsinki.fi/echoing-project/

You can also find our latest post ‘’At The Well Blog’’ (KONE foundation)

Kind wishes, 

Kristiina and Anu 

Coordinators of LECI research community