Un/Learning Adult Frames of Reference in Death Enquiries: Thinking~With a Picturebook, Philosophical Animism and Ontological Tact

ABSTRACT Developmental psychology continues to shape how adults engage with children about death and dying. This influences whether children are included in rituals surrounding human and other‐than‐human bodies. Figurations of the innocent, immature and vulnerable child still dominate adult imaginaries of young children's understandings of mortality. The fabulist picturebook Frog and the Birdsong (1991) by Dutch creator Max Velthuijs opens a radical space for playfully complicating death, dying and relations with the dead. We argue that the philosophical animism it provokes offers a legitimate and generative way of making sense of experience. What might death education become if we conducted open‐ended philosophical conversations with young children that enact posthumanist and decolonial philosophies and cultivate ontological tact (Despret 2021) by bracketing the adult (Murris 2021)? Drawing on a postqualitative framework, we respond to children's drawings, paintings and sculptures not as evidence to decode but as part of ongoing relations among researchers, children, materials and place. Such a relational ontology is contingent on an ethics of attentive obligations to question whose futures are rendered possible in reimagining death and dying (Peers 2024). The children's relational, imaginative and nondualistic engagements with the more‐than‐human world challenge adult‐centric conceptions of life and death, inviting more ethically responsive ways of thinking~with death in education.