Playing-with nature: educators and children caring for the environment

Nature-based learning in the early years has gained global prominence, particularly in Australia and Denmark, where bush kindergartens and forest pedagogies have become central to early childhood education practices. This article explores how educators and children play-with nature, which is understood as an active co-player and more-than-human participant in reciprocal, intra-active relationships. Across two distinctive research projects from the Australian and Danish contexts, Australian educators’ documented encounters of play-with nature are brought into a diffractive dialogue with insights from the Danish Forest Gang project. Rather than comparing national contexts, this approach explores how different pedagogical settings and practices shape possibilities for playing-with nature and caring-with the more-than-human world. Informed by relational materialism, posthuman perspectives and feminist ethics of care, we illuminate how play, care and learning emerge through entangled relations among children, educators, materials, places and more-than-human beings. Our findings highlight the educator’s role as a relationally responsive co-player who attends to children, materials and environments while remaining open to uncertainty and emergent possibilities. We argue that playing-with nature offers a pedagogical approach for cultivating curiosity, care and ethical and sustainable relationships with the more-than-human world, with implications for teacher education in developing educators’ capacities to notice, listen and respond to the relational and material conditions through which children and more-than-human beings learn and play together.