Storying with mythical beings as slow pedagogy in environmental education

Chin Chin Wong and Jenny Byman

Myths and folklore, such as spirits in nature and forest elves, are often used to engage children in exploring their community’s worldviews, traditions, and beliefs. Learning grounded in myths is suggested as a powerful means of opening transformative ways of relating, being in the world and re-imagining possible futures (Molloy Murphy, 2021). In our ethnographic study, we noticed that multiple temporalities and rhythms emerged when children (aged 7–9) engaged in storying activities with mythical beings, entangling with moments of hesitation, silences and slow embodied movements (Byman et al., 2025). Below, we engage with these temporal patterns of children and mythical beings with the theoretical perspectives of slow pedagogy.

Studies on slow pedagogy in environmental education emphasise the importance of integrating a “slow” temporal experience to deepen the understanding of place and ecological relationships (Clark, 2022). In our project “Riddle of the Spirit” in Finland, we engaged children (aged 7–8 years) in a primary school in lingering with global issues such as climate change with pre-modern Baltic Finnic myths about nature spirits. Baltic-Finnic myths are entangled with specific places, oral stories, landscapes, and the dynamic forces of the natural world across Karelia, Ingria, Finnish, and Sami traditions and lifeworlds. The children were invited into the world of mythical beings through an imaginative storyline: the thunderstorm spirit Ukko has lost the ability to control the weather. With other nature spirits, including the forest spirit Tapio and the water spirit Vetehinen, the children pondered the cause of this troublesome situation and engaged in playful activities that linked to the nature spirits’ worlds.

Our ethnographic approach links slow pedagogy and slow childhoods to more-than-human worlds of folklore. Slow pedagogy is not only about changing the ontological and epistemological focus in education; rather, it requires a “practical and systemic venture” (Dýrfjörð and Hreinsdóttir, 2025: 2) to challenge how we think about rhythm and linear clock-time in childhood. Slow time, or “uninterrupted time”, with more-than-human beings allows uncertainty and unruliness and encourages children to get deeply involved with places and landscapes, attune to environmental details and arouse wonder about ecological systems and issues climate change causes on these. In line with this, our research emphasised the importance of playful and open-ended pedagogical practices in creating chances for children’s deliberation and meaning-making about the stories, places and their materialities they encounter. In the storying activities, many children were deeply engaged with issues related to their local forest, expressing concerns about the garbage in the woods and how it could harm the nature spirits. Some children acted out how the spirits might see the local forest with anger, frustration and helplessness. Others created imaginative solutions, such as the forest spirit Tapio bringing firewood to the forest and bringing it back to life. These encounters all emerged when children moved with the mythical beings, the local environment and the material configuration of the Riddle of the Spirit project.

The temporality of children’s storying with mythical beings was characterised by shifting and dynamic relations of time. As Farquhar (2016) discusses temporal entanglement, we inhabit the intersection of various forms of time and must reconsider how multiple temporalities coexist in pedagogical practices of early childhood education. In our project, the myths of nature spirits were reimagined and transformed, fuelled by children’s curiosity, care and concerns about socio-ecological issues. Storying with mythical beings created movements comparable to “speculative spaces” (Byman et al., 2025), transcending linear time and allowing different layers of timespace to interact. Spontaneous embodied movements, “off-task-ness” and moments of hesitation were important speculative spaces for children to engage with issues related to natural forces and climate change, such as forest degradation and environmental pollution (Byman et al., 2025). These speculative spaces emerged from an active doing and a “becoming different” in relation to the worlds of nature spirits through open-ended activities that attended to lingering with the process itself, rather than focusing on a clear-cut outcome.

We therefore invite researchers and practitioners to recognise children’s slow rhythms and imaginative encounters with mythical beings as meaningful opportunities to unsettle dominant narratives and imagine alternative realities. In children’s stories, human exploitation, stewardship of natural resources, and ethical kinship are questioned and reimagined. Meanwhile, care comes to matter as a force for repairing earthly relations in our common world. Storying with myths bridges the world as it was, the world as it is, to the world as it could be and should be (Molloy Murphy, 2021). These practices invite speculative fabulations of just ecological relationships and caring worlds with the more-than-human.