Conference Program

Developing ecological awareness in childhood requires educational practices capable of fostering attentive encounters with the living world (Meier, 2020). In outdoor contexts, the ways experiences are observed, recorded and revisited play a crucial role in shaping how children understand natural environments and the life’s diversity they host. Documentation practices can function as pedagogical devices supporting observation, interpretation and meaning-making processes (Dardanou & Karlsen, 2023) in relation to biodiversity.
This contribution offers a theoretical and methodological reflection on outdoor documentation through visual-expressive tools (Moula et al., 2022), with particular attention to nature sketching and photographic practices in early childhood education. Drawing on literature from environmental education and visual methodologies, the reflection explores how multimodal documentation (Luini, 2025) can sustain children’s engagement with natural environments and support emerging understandings of biodiversity.
Research on drawing in educational contexts highlights how nature sketching can act as a cognitive tool that slows down observation and deepens attention (Monteira et al., 2022). When children attempt to represent plants, animals or environmental elements through drawing, their gaze repeatedly returns to the observed subject, encouraging them to notice details, textures and structural differences that might otherwise remain unnoticed. Such processes can support recognition of variation within and between species, an important dimension of understanding biodiversity. Studies analysing children’s drawings of gardens, plants or local environments show that prolonged outdoor experiences can lead to increasingly detailed representations and a greater diversity of organisms depicted (Zaballa et al., 2021). Differences in the number and variety of plants represented, attention to morphological features and the use of colours related to ecological processes have been interpreted as indicators of children’s developing knowledge of the living world.
In addition to drawing, photography can function as a complementary tool for documenting outdoor experiences. Photographic documentation allows children to capture fleeting moments, relationships between organisms, seasonal changes and spatial configurations of environments that might otherwise be difficult to retain (Ardoin et al., 2014). When revisited collectively, photographs can become mediators for dialogue and reflection, supporting children in articulating observations and interpretations about the environments they explore. In some cases, research approaches such as photo-elicitation or photovoice may further enrich these processes, yet photography can serve as a medium for recording and discussing encounters with biodiversity (Walimbe, 2025).
From a methodological perspective, integrating drawing, photography and narrative reflection within outdoor educational experiences may create multimodal documentation processes that value diverse forms of expression and participation. Such practices are particularly relevant in early childhood settings, where visual languages allow children to communicate perceptions and understandings not yet fully articulated through verbal language.
Overall, the contribution suggests that visual documentation practices can support forms of slow, situated engagement with biodiversity, enabling children to notice diversity in everyday environments and construct meanings about living systems through observation, representation and dialogue. By fostering attentive ways of seeing the living world, these practices may contribute to the development of early ecological sensibilities and nuanced understandings of relationships between humans and the plurality of life forms.