“Worm alert!”: Relational ebullience in young children's photographs

Drawing from a yearlong multispecies ethnography of preschoolers’ more-than-human encounters in an urban church’s garden, this article centers the photographic doings and relational learning of a multilingual class of four- and five-year-olds during intense autumn rainfall. Building upon the robust scholarship in the environmental humanities and common worlds pedagogies, this article attends to how children's more-than-human encounters took multiple energetic shapes and directions through photography in a classroom setting. The uniting of children and cameras co-produced a child–camera assemblage that gave rise to “relational ebullience,” a phenomenon in which children's ways of relating to each other and more-than-humans through the child–camera assemblage became spontaneous, dynamic, joyful, and chaotically divergent. Mobilizing concept as method, I follow the surfacing of relational ebullience across three vignettes of children's encounters with the more-than-human to illustrate how the child–camera assemblage influenced children's relationality to each other, more-than-humans, and place through photography. Written from my perspective as a classroom teacher, this article offers relational ebullience as a praxis-oriented account of how theory and practice can conceptually and pedagogically inform each other while advocating for the inclusion of photographic methodologies in common worlds pedagogies to disrupt normative, human-centric learning in early childhood environmental education.