More-than-human becomings: correspondent affordances in early childhood outdoor play

Outdoor play is widely recognised as central to children’s learning and wellbeing, yet research often conceptualises outdoor environments as providing discrete affordances that children perceive and actualise in the moment. This framing offers limited insight into how play possibilities emerge through sustained engagement, particularly when materials, living beings, and rhythmic processes participate in play. Drawing on Ingold’s account of correspondence, this study rethinks affordances as emergent becomings generated through correspondence between children and more-than-human participants. The study was conducted in an Australian early childhood centre and employed a participatory design, including child-led tours, photography, photo-elicitation conversations, map-making, observations, and interviews with educators and parents. The findings identify three interrelated registers through which children and more-than-human participants answered one another in outdoor play: (1) material participation through weight, resistance, and modifiability; (2) companion participation through vulnerability, movement, and responsiveness that elicits care and responsive engagement; and (3) rhythmic participation through growth, ripening, and weather rhythms that organise patterns of return and engagement. Across episodes, these registers became interwoven through sustained engagement, in which children and places returned to one another, each time carrying forward and building on what had gone before. This is a spiral process of correspondent becoming, through which relations gathered new significance over time. The study advances the concept of correspondent affordances, reconceptualising play possibilities as ongoing becomings that emerge, shift, and grow through correspondence over time. Implications are discussed for theorising outdoor play beyond human-centred framings, and for pedagogies that value responsiveness and environmental variability.