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This paper examines the child–environment–researcher aesthetic encounters that emerged through a post-qualitative methodological approach called rhizomatic patchworks. Rhizomatic patchworks is an arts-based analytical process grounded in relationality, when posthuman theories and children’s storying provoked the researchers’ material and digital experimenting and thinking, manifesting in visual-textual assemblages through digital art. Drawing from an ethnographic research project on children’s digital storying at a Finnish primary school, we illustrate how the rhizomatic patchworks processes made us attentive to the various ways aesthetic dimensions entwined and became part of the children’s and our own relating with local environments. Aesthetic encounters emerged across intertwining events and modes of children’s storying and the researchers’ theoretical thinking and digital artmaking practices, allowing us to sensuously engage in frictional, troubled, and complex intersections of children’s stories and environments. Our article shows how rhizomatic patchworks can offer educational research creative, transformative and embodied ways to attend materially and digitally to the more-than-human phenomenon of aesthetic encounters in environmental education and discusses the ethical challenges and potentials of this methodological approach.

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.

Based on an ethnographic study in a Finnish primary school, we explored lingering as both a pedagogical approach and a methodological concept for multispecies education research and practice. Through this conceptual thinking, we "re-turned" to the multiplicities that unfolded from noticing rhythms, enterings and different lifeworlds to show how children's lingering encounters developed into speculative inquiries about how invertebrates and amphibians generate polyphonous affects and temporalities. In our study, children's "attuning-with" clay, waste materials, photographs, and stop-motion animation opened up the unfamiliar worlds and temporalities of invertebrates and amphibians, involving active silences, slow rhythms, and awkward becomings. Overall, the study highlights that children's attuning-with the uncertainties of today's socioecological world create new avenues for thinking about multispecies relationalities.

Although sensuous and embodied engagement is an integral part of child--environment relationalities, the intersections of aesthetics, children and environments remain scarcely addressed. As a response, this study develops a concept of 'aesthetic flux' to delve into the sensuous dynamics of matter and bodies in the context of a storying workshop in a forest with first graders in a Finnish primary school. An arts-based, post-qualitative methodology guided our analysis of video recordings from the workshop, resulting in visual-sonic montages that draw attention to the intense movements and sounds of children, soap bubbles, air, a research camera and trees. Thinking through the concept of aesthetic flux, our study experiments with the abundance, indeterminacy and potentiality of sensuous dynamics where bodies (human and otherwise) become together and linger. Thus, our study reconfigures aesthetics as a creative and unpredictable force that materialises in both embodied and conceptual ways in environmental education and research with children.

Drawing on a relational ontology and scholarship of new literacies, we investigate the materiality and performativity of children’s augmented storying in nature. Our study is situated in a Finnish primary school in which a novel, augmented reality application (MyAR Julle) was utilized as a digital storytelling tool for children (n = 62, aged 7–9), allowing them to explore, interact, and imagine in nature and to create/share their stories. The data corpus consists of their narrations of their augmented stories in nature, their augmented story artefacts, and video/observational data from their construction of such stories in nature. Narrative analysis reveals how the children’s augmented storying in nature was performed through playful, affective, and sensuous, identity, cultural, and critical literacies, which were imaginatively constructed into being at the nexus of their sensed reality and fantasy. These literacies make visible human–material–spatial–temporal assemblages during which the children played with/through the augmented character Julle, felt and sensed with/through Julle, and re-storied their experiences, cultural knowledge, and identities with/through Julle. They also engaged in critical thinking with/through Julle. The study contributes to knowledge on the meaning of materiality in children’s storying in, with, and for nature and the educational possibilities of augmented storying for children’s (eco)literacies.