Conference Agenda

The presentation discusses a collective walking ethnography, or garbography, of a lakeside wasteland in Tampere, Finland. The area, Nekalanranta, once served as a landfill and today is unzoned and unused land, deemed unsuitable for residential housing due to contamination. We explored the site on several visits on foot, attending particularly to the entanglement of decay and flourishing in the wasteland as a damaged landscape, as well as to the multispecies world-making projects encountered there. In addition to fieldnotes and the photographs and videos that we took, our analysis draws from documents, such as city council statements and plans for the area, together with memories of walking through the wasteland and living in its vicinity. In our presentation, we focus especially on collective walks – or ‘walking-with’ – as a method of knowing waste(lands) through movement and sensory entanglement. During our walks, we were struck by the abundance of both organic and inorganic debris, some of recent origin, others long buried in the soil and now resurfacing. We also suggest that the wasteland presents a ‘heterotopia’, a counter-space to the smooth, regulated and strictly planned urban space harnessed to utility. Situated in the margins or on the periphery, between official and acknowledged places, the wasteland may not attract much attention, yet it allows informal human uses and supports the flourishing of rich plant and animal life.

This presentation reflects on practitioner research and how one moment—sparked by a child’s fascination with a pileated woodpecker—reconfigured my pedagogical orientation and deepened my capacity to listen differently: beyond human voice, into the ecologies that shape and are shaped by our common worlds (Taylor & Giugni, 2012; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2016). This encounter opened me to the presence of the woodpecker, a species I had previously overlooked, and shifted how I attune to the minor gestures (Manning, 2016) in children’s play—those often fleeting, easily dismissed moments that can reveal profound relational connections with the more-than-human world.

In the context of the conference theme, this reflection situates such moments within broader global flows of environmental change and pedagogical practice, suggesting that even small, local encounters can hold significance in challenging times. Through the child’s sustained attention to the woodpecker, I came to recognize play as a collaborative practice of world-making (Tsing, 2015; Haraway, 2016), one that entangles humans, species, and places in shared acts of care and curiosity.

Attending seriously to these everyday encounters has reshaped how I understand and respond to children’s inquiries as invitations into collaborative, multispecies worlding. In attuning to how children become-with (Haraway, 2008) beloved species, I found a pedagogical opening for myself to become-with children’s nature worlds, to be moved by them, and to consider how these relationships might reorient what matters in education.

In reflecting on this single moment, the presentation invites a broader conversation about how qualitative, practice-based research can trace relational connections across scales—from local encounters to global ecological concerns—reminding us that new pedagogical possibilities often begin in the subtle, shared gestures of everyday life.

We present a qualitative educational study conducted with Greek elementary school children, situated within the tradition of relational assemblages of people and places (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The study was enacted through pedagogical encounters in which children, the researcher (first author), and the place formed temporary hybrid assemblages, generating experiences, relationships, and events that opened new possibilities for thinking and learning. Through a series of creative pedagogical and research experiments, the study explores what emerges within these assemblages as they unfold in space and time.

Our study adopts a post-humanist and new-materialist perspective, drawing on the philosophical toolbox of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, with the concept of assemblage at its core. Applying the research-assemblage model of Fox & Alldred (2015), we conducted a qualitative cartography, positioning the assemblage—not the human—as the unit of analysis and attending to multi-level material-semantic relationships. The narration and analysis of these encounters drew on Diana Masny’s vignette model for rhizoanalysis (2013, 2014), enabling non-linear, richly textured representations of the research process.

This research contributes to qualitative research practice by combining philosophical concepts with creative pedagogical methods, emphasizing the environmental affordances of existence and learning. It proposes ways of thinking and researching that recognize the co-production of human and non-human/more-than-human actors, for the realities-yet-to-come, as Gilles Deleuze would reflect.

Traditionally, mathematics is considered a difficult subject for the majority of pupils of all ages. As a result, a lot of them underperform in it and as a consequence only a few of them appear to succeed. Surprisingly, this unequal achievement is considered normal by implicitly accepting a hegemonic ideology of ‘aptitudes’ i.e. that only selected people can be able in mathematics.

The purpose of the study presented here was to design and implement a teaching practice which ensures that all the pupils in a classroom have the opportunity to engage productively with mathematics. This was achieved by the adoption of a collaborative problem solving approach: pupils of different “abilities” formed small groups and were set the task to discuss on equal terms carefully selected mathematical tasks.

A qualitative analysis approach was adopted which focused on the development of arguments by each member of the group recognizing that such a development is the essential indicator of mathematics knowledge-building. “Mathematics learning” is conceived as a “change” from primitive arguments to more sophisticated ones. Thus, each pupil’s discourse was recorded and analysed drawing primarily on discourse analysis and sociocultural theories of learning.

Results from the analysis of the arguments generated by the three members of one typical group are presented in this paper. The results indicate that, despite their different abilities, the pupils seem to have advanced significantly their discourse during their involvement in the collaborative work. In other words, the adopted teaching approach appears to have created equal opportunities for all the group members.