The Blue Car in the Forest: Exploring Children’s Experiences of Sustainability in a Canadian Forest (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
This paper explores the observations and perceptions of school children as they engage with nature through place based environmental experiences. The paper reports on two projects, one based in the USA and the other in Australia, designed to promote understanding of sustainability through outdoor interventions. While the interventions share common educational goals the children came from very different places, on many levels. From New York City to regional Australia the children’s collective experiences highlight the capacity of outdoor-based interventions to promote understandings of nature. Originating and enacted in different hemispheres, both interventions demonstrate the value of passive outdoor education in developing eco-centric thinking and values.
This article presents an ongoing study within early childhood education for sustainability at the Department for Early Childhood Education in Stavanger, in collaboration with the School of Early Childhood, Queensland University of Technology, in Brisbane, Australia. The study commenced in 2014, and will compare the responses to interviews of young children (4-5 years) in Brisbane with those of children in Stavanger, in order to find out ways to enhance learning about sustainability topics, to identify which kind of environmental/sustainability activities are memorable for young children, and to obtain mutual inspiration about early childhood education for sustainability from the different countries.
Nordic Studies in Science Education
Education for sustainability in early childhood tends to focus on practices and advocacy, rather than on the aims of this education. We suggest that the aim should be to consider children as being and becoming eco-citizens. This suggestion is built on an exploration of children as eco-citizens. With theories concerning child-sized citizenship we suggest a description of children and adults as being and becoming eco-citizen. We explore this through the fields of nature connection and science and children’s curiosity. We find that environmentally friendly practices as gardening and harvesting wild food show how children’s eco-citizenship is realizable. We support this additionally by references to how children’s literature, seeing how children depicted as eco-citizens can support the notion of children as eco-citizens. Through these analyses, we conclude that children should be viewed as being and becoming eco-citizens.
2014
The authors take a reflective journey to explore the research methodology utilised in a multi-method, multi-site research study of children's environmental learning in schoolgrounds in Australia. Informed by an extensive literature review and dialogue with researchers around the world, the study constructed a research design and procedure that could be utilized by practitioner researchers and academic researchers as the foundation for further research on children's learning in schoolgrounds. This paper has the specific task of sharing our research story and lessons learnt as a conversation to those who intend to conduct future research with children on schoolground greening projects. Résumé Les auteurs prennent un séjour de réflexion pour explorer la méthodologie de recherche utilisée dans un projet multiméthodes, un projet de recherche réparti sur plusieurs emplacements, un projet de sensibilisation des enfants à l'environnement dans les cours d'école en Australie. Éclairée par une recension exhaustive des écrits et par un dialogue avec des chercheurs du monde entier, l'étude a échafaudé un plan de recherche et de procédures qui pourrait être utilisé par des chercheurs praticiens et par des chercheurs académiques comme le fondement d'une recherche future sur l'apprentissage des enfants sur les cours d'école. Cet article a la tâche spécifique de partager nos textes de recherche et les leçons apprises en conversant avec ceux qui ont l'intention de mener des recherches futures avec des enfants sur des projets d'écologisation de cours d'école. Children's environmental learning in their local environment has been a key area in the multidisciplinary field of children's environments (Hart, 1979; Moore, 1986). Building on this tradition, our schoolground research project, Children's Environments, applied research methods from the UNESCO Growing Up In Cities project (Malone, 1999; Malone & Hasluck, 1988) alongside methods adapted from "playground research" projects to develop a multimethod approach to researching children's experiences of their school environment.
Young children learning for the environment: Researching a forest adventure
Australian Journal of Environmental Education , 2009
Field experiences for young children are an ideal medium for environmental education/education for sustainability because of opportunities for direct experience in nature, integrated learning, and high community involvement. This research documented the development - in 4-5 year old Prep children - of knowledge, attitudes and actions/advocacy in support of an endangered native Australian animal, the Greater Bilby. Data indicated that children gained new knowledge, changed attitudes and built a repertoire of action/ advocacy strategies in native animal conservation as a result of participating in a forest field adventure. The curriculum and pedagogical features that supported these young children’s learning include: active engagement in a natural environment, learning through curriculum integration at home and at school, anthropomorphic representations of natural elements, making connections with cultural practices, and intergenerational learning. The paper also highlights research strategies that can be usefully and ethically applied when conducting studies involving young children.
“The Beauty and Pleasure of Understanding: Engaging with Contemporary Challenges Through Science Education”, 2019
Humanity's sustainable future is undermined by serious environmental and socioeconomic problems all over the world. However, 'Early Childhood Education for Sustainability' (ECEfS) is not yet a high priority and research about it remains rather limited. Our study addresses the question of whether it is feasible to design a learning environment that could effectively combine biology education and EfS to help preschoolers enhance their conceptual understanding about nature along with their socio-environmental awareness. Our focus here is set on identifying whether and how preschoolers' understanding about the idea of 'sustainability' in particular, has changed within the 3 rd version of our learning environment (LE3). LE3 was designed in the 3 rd research cycle of a design research considering the 'possible futures'-approach, and was tested in a case study with thirty, conveniently selected preschoolers (age 4.5-5.5). Children were divided in six small groups which separately attended fifteen, 20-30-minute sessions, organized in three parts and implemented in an eight-week period. The idea of 'sustainability' was first explored with 'decision-making scenarios' in a 'guided dialogue'-session of the 'Intro-part', but it was actually present in almost every session throughout LE3. Children gave pre/post, individual, semi-structured interviews, which were tape-recorded, transcribed and analyzed in 'NVivo'. The question probing their pre-/post-understanding about 'sustainability' was based on a 'decisionmaking scenario', similarly structured with those of LE3. According to the results, LE3 worked quite well in familiarizing young children with the idea of 'sustainability', since almost all of them were able to apply it in the post-test scenario.
Moving Beyond Innocence: Educating Children in a Post-Nature World
Research Handbook on ChildhoodNature, 2018
This chapter examines some of the challenges of unlearning anthropocentrism – i.e., the deep-seated cultural, psychological, and enacted prejudices of human specialness – in nature-based early childhood education programs. We begin with a critical exploration of recent trends in environmental philosophy and the conservation sciences that seek to move beyond the so-called archaic notions of “wilderness” and “nature” toward more managerial models of human dominion over planetary “ecosystem services.” We suggest the trouble with these discursive moves is that they shirk from the courageous conversations required from environmental education in a time of ecological emergency. We conclude by drawing on research at nature-based schools in the Netherlands and Canada to illustrate the tenacity of anthropocentric “common sense” and suggest the beginnings of pedagogy of childhoodnatures guided by notions of rewilding and ecological humility.
‘I might know when I'm an adult’: making sense of children's relationships with nature
This paper reports subjective experiences in nature of 5 children aged 6-10 years collected during a 5-day camp in a botanical garden. Creative expressive visual methods and semistructured interviews were used to collect data. Inductive analysis produced the follow themes: children being positioned to take care of nature and to be taken care of by nature, as well as nature needing protection from children and children needing protection from nature. The roles of gatekeepers in mediating attraction to and repulsion from nature were also highlighted. We examine these in the context of socio-cultural constraints and invitations that children experience in developing these relationships. These themes are discussed using a theoretical framework that blends Vygotsky's socio-cultural development theory with Gibson's theory of affordances. Findings contribute to a more integrated understanding of how ecological psychology and social psychology can inform our understanding of children's relationships with nature; in particular, how children's experiences with nature are mediated by socio-cultural factors. By adding to our understanding of how children develop relationships with nature, practitioners can more effectively facilitate experiences that encourage pro-environmental and stewardship attitudes and behaviors as well as result in positive health and development outcomes for children. This paper contributes to the children's geographies literature by strengthening the theoretical foundation from which geographers approach child -nature relationships.
Toward an Ecopedagogy of Children's Environmental Literature
The world we remember from our childhoods -whenever and wherever those childhoods wereis changing. Gone are the strawberry fields and orange groves, the stark blue skies and purple mountains from my childhood in the San Fernando valley of Los Angeles. Gone are the days of running through water sprinklers for hour after unthinking hour on summer afternoons, the water running off the thick grassy lawn and into the streets so that cars would splash through it, too. Gone are the mountains covered with sage and yarrow, orange poppies and purple lupin and yellow daisies, mountainsides where coyotes and jackrabbits and bluejays alike found food, water, and freedom enough for their wild lives. Gone are the days of gasoline at .25 cents a gallon, days of backyard trash incinerators, days of unlimited hours spent tanning and talking and playing on the beach without sunscreen protection against skin cancer, without fears of swimming in and through plastic bags, rusting metal, needles and broken glass.
Children’s environmental literature: from ecocriticism to ecopedagogy
Neohelicon, 2009
Beginning with a review of ecocriticism's scholarly and activist origins and development through the related fields of eco-composition, ecofeminist literary criticism, and environmental justice literary studies, this essay discusses children's environmental literature from the intersecting standpoints of animal studies, environmental justice, and ecofeminist literary criticism. From that intersectional standpoint, the essay raises three central questions for examining children's environmental literature, and offers six boundary conditions for an ecopedagogy of children's environmental literature. Keywords Ecofeminist literary criticism Á Ecopedagogy Á Children Á Ecocriticism Á Environmental justice The world we remember from our childhoods-whenever and wherever those childhoods were-is changing. Gone are the strawberry fields and orange groves, the stark blue skies and purple mountains from my childhood in the San Fernando valley of Los Angeles. Gone are the days of running through water sprinklers for hour after unthinking hour on summer afternoons, the water running off the thick grassy lawn and into the streets so that cars would splash through it, too. Gone are the mountains covered with sage and yarrow, orange poppies and purple lupin and yellow daisies, mountainsides where coyotes and jackrabbits and bluejays alike found food, water, and freedom enough for their wild lives. Gone are the days of gasoline at 25 cents a gallon, days of backyard trash incinerators, days of unlimited hours spent tanning and talking and playing on the beach without sunscreen protection against skin cancer, without fears of swimming in and through plastic bags, rusting metal, needles and broken glass. Some of these losses are cause for grief; others signify long-needed changes in heedless behaviors. As temperatures around the planet rise, as safe drinking water becomes scarce and costly, as food costs soar, populations swell, clearcutting continues, and the global violence against women, children, animals, and ecosystems proceeds unabated-what in the world are we doing by reading environmental literature?