Entangled soil: young children’s encounters with earth matter and ecological education

This article examines how encounters with earth matter shape young children’s ecological responsiveness in a small, mixed-age early childhood setting in suburban China. Drawing on twelve weeks of micro-ethnographic fieldwork with twenty-eight children aged four to six, supplemented by twenty-four hours of video footage, it analyses children’s play with native soil in an outdoor soil-and-mud area and their less sustained interactions with commercial kinetic sand indoors. Framed by vital materialism and process philosophy, the analysis follows four episodes: excavation and the awakening of water, the small tunnel’s collapse, the arrival of a semi-resident stray cat, and mud’s unwashable residue. The article argues that soil became educational through its partial non-compliance: it resisted, collapsed, stuck, stained, attracted other beings, and reorganised children’s bodies and collaborations. It contributes to early childhood environmental education by conceptualising material variability as a hidden curriculum: a pedagogical force through which the children in this study negotiated resistance, uncertainty, interdependence, and residue, with implications for outdoor space, teacher judgement, and family communication around hygiene.