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In this study, we investigate how digital storying creates opportunities for children to attend to their emotional experiences in and about nature. Following relational ontology and socio-cultural theorising, we focus our analysis on the temporal–spatial entanglements of children's emotional experiences. Our inquiry draws on a case study of two children at a Finnish primary school. Liam and Vera engaged in digital storying in their local forest using an augmented storycrafting app, MyAR Julle. The data were collected during two storying workshops by means of observational field notes, video recordings, interviews with the children and digital artefacts. The results illustrate how engaging in the narrative plot of a fictitious augmented character invited the children to create necessary open-endedness in the activity which further stimulated their storying. The children's experiences were imbued with emotions and distributed across human and non-human actors. The children's digital storying not only communicated their personal emotional experiences in local surroundings, but was also grounded in broader societal narratives, such as climate change and forest conservation, with considerations of the future of the planet. The results suggest how digital storying offers a pedagogical method for early environmental education that builds on children's emotional experiences.

Drawing on Donna Haraway's notion of speculative fabulation, in this study the authors investigate how a pedagogy grounded in mythical nature spirits, children's imaginative explorations and storying activities created spaces for children to explore socio-ecological worlds. Their inquiry draws on an ethnographic case study of three children (aged seven to eight) in a Finnish primary school who participated in a cross-curricular unit framed by a set of pedagogical materials called ‘The Riddle of the Spirit’. Their inquiry shows how speculative fabulations emerged into performing spaces, in which imaginary fabulations of humans, spirits and places created alternative narratives about more-than-human relations. Such fabulations emerged when the children became spirits, when the spirits were transformed from kings to queens, and when trees that humans had cut down could be revived and returned to the forest. Thus, the authors’ inquiry suggests that myths embedded in storying activities can offer unexplored educational opportunities to invite children to attend to and imagine socio-ecological worlds.

This study brings empathy to the centre of literacy practice by investigating children's augmented storying as it was related to empathetic encounters across the human and more-than-human worlds. The study applies sociomaterial theorising that defines empathy as relational and emergent across human-material-spatial-temporal assemblages. The empirical study was situated in a Finnish primary school in which children used an augmented story-crafting tool (MyAR Julle) to explore their local environment and to create and share their stories. The findings show how empathy emerged situationally across the children, other human beings, materials, technology and the natural world. The empathetic encounters of the children's narratives were more than romantic or smooth encounters, instead competing and in tension with one another, calling moral reasoning and agency. The study shows the potential of sociomaterial theorising to change the way we think about children's encounters with the world, using empathy as a framework.

This study investigates and maps students' maker literacies as they relate to digital competence. The study builds on sociocultural theorizing and on the scholarship of digital literacy that defines maker literacies as social practices that entail making and remaking artifacts and texts using various materials and technologies. Through a detailed multimodal analysis of video data from an ethnographic case study of students' (N:11) interaction in an elementary school's makerspace in Finland, our study presents and applies a framework of analysis for maker literacies and discusses how the school's makerspace enhanced the students' digital competence across operational, cultural, and critical dimensions. The study shows how the makerspace context afforded the students ample opportunities to engage in the operational dimension of maker literacies. However, there was less engagement in cultural and critical literacies. The implications of these findings for students' digital competence in makerspaces are discussed.