Beyond pedagogical intention: exploring more-than-human entanglements in early childhood education and care

This paper explores how Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) can be understood as a space consisting of human and more-than-human entanglements. Moving beyond traditional anthropocentric perspectives, it examines how children, animals, objects, and environments intra-act within educational settings. Drawing on an ethnographic story from a kindergarten in Nanjing, China, the study adopts storytelling as a methodology to trace the dynamics triggered by a street cat's unexpected entry. Using the ontological concept of entanglement, the paper rethinks how ECEC boundaries are continually negotiated between human and more-than-human actors. The findings highlight how more-than-human elements are selectively included or excluded through situated boundary-making processes. Storytelling, as both an analytic and representational practice, offers a way to engage with the complexities of relational life in ECEC, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of the fluid, co-constitutive relations shaping educational spaces.