Olfactoscapes in Malawi: Exploring the smells children like and are exposed to in semi-urban classrooms

Abstract

Moving beyond the “canned” lens on literacies dominant in contemporary literacy studies in Malawi, this study connects theoretical perspectives on sensory and critical literacies to original empirical data on children’s lived “olfactory literacies”. We focus on situational and locally experienced odours in two classrooms in semi-urban Malawi. We present findings from interviews and drawings with 25 children who shared their olfactory preferences with the local researcher. Children’s views were supplemented with the researcher’s and teachers’ evaluations of the olfactory qualities of their classroom environments. Our study advances the field by being the first to unite theoretical provocations on sensory literacies in global child research with critical and empirical insights into children’s local olfactoscapes.

Children’s multisensory experiences in museums: how olfaction interacts with color

“…Children's olfactory preferences are detectable early on after birth (Schaal, 1988) but change and further develop until adult age (Ventura and Worobey, 2013). Children's olfactory preferences are varied though often food-related (as shown in our studies in Malawi, Mwenda Chinula, 2023 andNorway, Kucirkova andBruheim Jensen, 2023). Recent studies show similarities in children's olfactory perception across countries (Oleszkiewicz et al, 2022) and provide evidence for the predictive value of early odor perceptions for later life (Lindroos et al, 2022).…”

“…Indeed, it seemed like other parts of their experiences with the exhibition, particularly with the story characters, dominated children's drawings. In a related project in Malawi, where the researchers asked children to portray smells via drawings, we noted a similar methodological limitation of drawings in that the children captured their story experiences but not olfactory references, as was intended by the researchers (see Kucirkova and Mwenda Chinula, 2023). The embodied cognition theory provides a useful explanatory framework for these findings in that it explains that bodily interactions generate various cognitive responses (see Wilson, 2002).…”