Encounters with ice and snow in preschool outdoor practices - and the becoming of (un)sustainability values

Wintry conditions, including ice and snow, last for six months of the year in northern Scandinavia, and thus strongly influence many preschool outdoor educational practices, but there has been little research on their impact and implications. To address this gap, we have explored preschool teachers' experiences of everyday outdoor practices during the winter in the region. Through an analysis rooted in post-human and new materialist perspectives, we have identified human agents as well as non-human agents and their complex intra-actions between variations in ice and snow (e.g. ice-crust and sticky snow). In addition to illustrating how non-human, temporal agents may directly affect outdoor preschool practices, our study shows that diverse intra-actions in human-nature encounters play important roles in the becoming of ice, snow and associated (un)sustainable values. The results indicate a need for further critical examination of how preschool children's outdoor encounters are framed by seasonal and climatic changes.