Pathways to Understanding Changing Climates: Walking and talking with children

Author(s):

Elsa Lee(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

30. Environmental and Sustainability Education Research (ESER)

Format:

Paper

Session Information

30 SES 04 A, ESE in Early Childhood (Part 1)

Paper Session to be continued in 30 SES 05 A

Time:

2015-09-09

09:00-10:30

Room:

X. Előadó [C]

Chair:

Elsa Lee

Contribution

This presentation will focus on one element of a current research project with Key Stage 2 children in primary schools in two different ecological zones in the UK (and repeated in Alaska, Mexico and Mongolia). The overall aim of this research is to develop an approach that can be used to form an understanding of how children and adults perceive and articulate issues relating to changing climates in place and time.

Our research questions represent the diverse range of interests from the team of researchers with backgrounds in both Education and Social Anthropology and include questions about place and time in different cultural contexts. The focus of this presentation will be a question about what comprises place for children in these two zones and how children both arrive at and value that which creates their knowledge of their own neighbourhood.

A such our reserach draws on the wide ranging and deep body of literature on place in both environmental education (Ardoien, 2006, Heisse, 2007, Kudryavtsev, 2012) and social anthropology (Basso, 1996).

One assumption that we seek to trouble through this research is the somewhat pervasive acceptance that children’s knowledge and awareness of place is restricted to their own homes, and back gardens or has become virtualised through their computer screens. This notion of detachment or lack of awareness of place has abounded for some time (Thomas, 1986, James et al, 1998, Wilson, 2012) but has been questioned recently by Karsten (2005) amongst others. Through spending time with children in their neighbourhoods we show that children have a strong sense of awareness of place despite the perceived decrease in time spent outdoors, and have much detailed knowledge of their own neighbourhoods.

This knowledge which is not always valued by the children themselves is generally of an embodied nature, being formed by their experiences of moving around the neighbourhoods on foot, on bicycles or on scooters and in the backs of cars; and their experiences of playing in both designated and undesignated spaces.

Method

The methodology of this research is broadly transactional, drawing on the work of Ohman and Ostman (2007). These two researchers and their colleagues take inspiration from the writings of John Dewey to develop an onto-epistemic frame that is both structured and focused whilst being flexible and contextually responsive. The premise of this approach is that knowledge and understanding cannot be separated from context and that it emerges in situ: as actions occur, so understanding is formulated. The methodology also draws on Comparative Education approaches (Bray and Thomas, 1995) in that it carries out a broadly similar method in different schools in different parts of the UK and the world and seeks to understand what can be learned from comparing findings across different schools, zones and cultures. This presentation reports on the initial findings of the first stage of the research. This stage involved walking with children around their own neighbourhoods and talking to them about the neighbourhood. We talked to them about their memories of living and playing there, about their use of the spaces we walked through and about their ideas about the past and future of those spaces. The conversations we draw from are either those that took place between ourselves and the children or those they had with each other which they audio recorded themselves. The routes we walked were determined by the children during an earlier mapping session where they identified local landmarks and places of interest that they wanted to show us. The methods we used for this stage (what we call mapping and walking) have proved a rich source of data about of what children’s awareness of place is comprised of and how it comes into being.

Expected Outcomes

We have a number of ideas which we will advance through the next two stages of this research. Our preliminary analysis suggests a list of constituent elements which can be divided into categories including knowledge through play, through moving around the neighbourhood, through family outings, through local sports clubs, and through school trips. Knowledge through intergenerational interactions is also a significant category but any element of this category is also likely to appear in other categories. Children who attend schools with a locally-based curriculum get to know about, for example, people whose names appear on war memorials. In the next stage we will interrogate these preliminary findings by talking to some parent/child pairs in interviews about the kinds of understandings that they share about their neighbourhood. A further interesting finding is the way in which children rate or assign value to the knowledge that they have through their use of their neighbourhood. Most children, when asked to tell us about their neighbourhood initially thought they had nothing to say. They did not count their memories or movement around the space as valid forms of knowledge. They also struggled to talk about play. This may be partly due to their wish to keep this knowledge secret (Roe, 2007; Moore, 2014), their wish to have a space which is protected or obscured from adult intervention. However, it may be that there is no language with which to talk about this sort of interaction. Their knowledge of play is in their doing of it and thus is articulated through actions and not words. In both instances the approach that we took (of walking with children around their neighbourhoods) was successful because it allowed us to get at some of this obscured or embodied knowledge.

References

Ardoion, Nicole M. 2006. Towards an Interdisciplinary Understanding of Place: Lessons for Environmental Education. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education 11: 112–26. Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Landscape. In Senses of Place. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, eds. Pp. 53-90. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Bray, M. and Thomas, R.M. (1995) Levels of Comparison in Educational Studies: Different Insights from Different Literatures and the Value of Multilevel Analysis; Harvard Educatinoal Review 65:3 pp 472-490 Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford University Press. James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (1998). Theorizing childhood. Cambridge: Polity Press. Karsten, L. (2005) It all used to be better? Different generations on continuity and change in urban children's daily use of space, Children's Geographies, 3:3, 275-290, DOI:10.1080/14733280500352912 Kudryavtsev , A., Stedman, R.C., & Krasny, M.E., (2012) Sense of place in environmental education, Environmental Education Research, 18:2, 229-250, DOI:10.1080/13504622.2011.609615 Louv, R. (2008) Last Child in the Woods, Algonquin Books Moore, D. (2014) ‘The teacher doesn't know what it is, but she knows where we are’: young children's secret places in early childhood outdoor environments. International Journal of Play. Ohman, J. and Ostman (2007) Roe, M. (2007) Feeling ‘secrety’: children’s views on involvementin landscape decisions, Environmental Education Research, 13:4, 467-485, DOI:10.1080/13504620701581562 Thomas, Keith. 1983. Man and the natural world: changing attitudes in England 1500-1800. London: Allen Lane. Wilson, P. (2012). Beyond the gaudy fence. International Journal of Play, 1(1), 30–36.

Author Information

Elsa Lee (presenting / submitting)

The University of Cambridge

Fulbourn

Search the ECER Programme

Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
Search for authors and in the respective field.
For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.