Written by: Jenny Renlund , Kristiina Kumpulainen, Jenny Byman & Chin Chin Wong

Abstract: This paper examines the child–environment–researcher aesthetic encounters that emerged through a post-qualitative methodological approach called rhizomatic patchworks. Rhizomatic patchworks is an arts-based analytical process grounded in relationality, when posthuman theories and children’s storying provoked the researchers’ material and digital experimenting and thinking, manifesting in visual-textual assemblages through digital art. Drawing from an ethnographic research project on children’s digital storying at a Finnish primary school, we illustrate how the rhizomatic patchworks processes made us attentive to the various ways aesthetic dimensions entwined and became part of the children’s and our own relating with local environments. Aesthetic encounters emerged across intertwining events and modes of children’s storying and the researchers’ theoretical thinking and digital artmaking practices, allowing us to sensuously engage in frictional, troubled, and complex intersections of children’s stories and environments. Our article shows how rhizomatic patchworks can offer educational research creative, transformative and embodied ways to attend materially and digitally to the more-than-human phenomenon of aesthetic encounters in environmental education and discusses the ethical challenges and potentials of this methodological approach.

Keywords: post-qualitative inquiry, methodological approach, rhizomatic patchworks, aesthetic encounters, environmental education, digital art