Gopher Tales: Re/Storying for Re/Worlding

This article is premised on the idea that storytelling and storytelling pedagogies have material and ethico-political implications for children and those with whom they share the world - in the small moments of their everyday experiences and in how they are read, written, and positioned as inheritors of social worlds and cultural narratives. Accordingly, in the context of an outdoor literacy program for young children, conducted over two summers, we consider the pedagogies enacted in two storied play encounters and the stories told with/in them. We ask, "What stories composed the material-discursive worlds of the children's play?" and "What kinds of worlds were animated through the storied play?" The study is guided by posthuman socio-material assemblage perspectives that understand the human and more-than-human world as existing in non-hierarchical relation to one another. Our analysis engages with the concept of mycelia, making the case for the mycelial network, rather than the rhizome (a mainstay of post-qualitative educational research over the past two decades or more) as a methodological construct. Our findings, presented as two troubled stories of contaminated diversity, animate in/visible encounters in the storied worlds of settler futurity and what we come to call emergent reciprocity. Through an exploration of these entanglements, we ultimately make the arguments that the stories we tell in a particular place shape what ensues in that place "and" that the re/storying of such narratives (both larger cultural narratives and moment-to-moment play narratives) offer possibility for being and doing otherwise in that place.