Research Seminar - Kristiina Kumpulainen with doctoral researchers
RECORDING HERE
Enriching Children's Ecological Imagination with Augmented Storying
Abstract:
In this talk, I will be sharing together with my research team our ongoing research about a novel place-based pedagogy intended to enrich children’s ecological imagination. Specifically, in our research, we investigate how augmented storying—or children’s creation of their own stories of place through cultural and historical stories of nature enhanced through augmented reality technology—can enrich their ecological imagination. During augmented storying that entails walking, reading and storying places, digital and physical realities of the past, present and future can intertwine, potentially supporting children's ecological imagination and learning with places. Ecological imagination has been theorized in the literature as a capacity of humans to deliberate upon the relations of ecological systems, recognizing the consequences of human actions on such relations. At present, there is a dearth of research knowledge about the educational enhancement of children’s ecological imagination as a child-sensitive, emancipatory, and transformative response to environmental crises. It is equally unclear how multi-voiced cultural and historical stories of nature that are tied to physical places through augmented reality technology can create animated means to immerse children in ecological imagination. To illuminate our results, we will draw on empirical data situated in a Finnish elementary school and a local forest co-generated with children and their teachers through video-recordings, photographs, field observations, interviews, and children's story artifacts. Our analysis of these data has been informed by ecological narrative inquiry, visual and sensuous ethnography, and A/r/tography, allowing us to utilize interdisciplinary knowledge from the arts, humanities, and the social and natural sciences.
For more information, visit our website: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/echoing-project/
Bio:
Kristiina Kumpulainen is a Professor of Education at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. At the moment, she works as a Professor of Educational Technology and Learning Design at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Her current research focuses on multiliteracies, digital literacies, agency, and imagination in young children’s learning and education.
Jenny Byman, Jenny Renlund and Chin-Chin Wong are doctoral researchers at the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Their theses explore different aspects of children’s affective relationality with socioecological worlds, the potential of arts-based pedagogies in environmental education, and affect-driven multimodal approaches to climate change education.
Date: Monday 7 November 2022
Time: 2:30pm - 3:30pm
Room: S402, Level 4, Social Sciences Building #24
Zoom link: https://uqz.zoom.us/j/89589974819