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Paper short abstract

The paper explores how children, through sensory and imaginative engagement with urban nature, create narratives interwoven with memory, emotion, and place—allowing the youngest to narrate the city as a living, storied space.

Paper long abstract

In the paper we will presents educational project focused on developing narrative thinking in early childhood, grounded in the theoretical framework of narrative knowledge ( Ricoeur, Kearney, Gadamer). The project emphasizes the cultivation of children’s narrative competencies, including dialogical listening, imaginative engagement with diverse perspectives, temporal orientation of life experiences, and the development of practical wisdom in ethically complex situations.

The project explored how natural elements—such as trees, birdsong, weather, and overgrown paths—become important narrative actors in children's experience of the city. Through experiential walks, observation, intergenerational dialogue, and meetings with local figures (including poet and musician), children explored the layered histories and cultural traces of their neighborhood. They discovered forgotten names, historical sites and personal stories linked to specific places.

The children responded by creating twelve original narratives—poems, stories, visual art, riddles, and short films—that were integrated into a participatory map of Vodmat. This process shows how even the youngest urban dwellers engage in the co-creation of place, where different places become narrative touchstones. The paper argues that such storytelling constitutes a form of ecological and narrative citizenship, in which nature is not only seen and sensed, but storied and remembered as integral to urban life. It reflects on how this process bridges ethnographic practice, folk narrative, and early childhood pedagogy. It argues that children’s storytelling fosters a form of narrative citizenship, enriching our understanding of place as a lived, narrated, and collectively imagined reality.