Environment and the Contemporary Child: a Cross Cultural Exploration of what makes a Place Special
Author(s):
Elsa Lee (presenting / submitting)
Conference:
ECER 2016
Network:
30. Environmental and Sustainability Education Research (ESER)
Format:
Paper

Session Information

30 SES 06 A, Children and Place

Paper Session

Time:
2016-08-24
15:30-17:00
Room:
NM-A105
Chair:
Elsa Lee

Contribution

In a recent report on research into future trends in Environmental Education and Education for Sustainable Development Ardoin, Clark and Kelsey (2013) identify a need for greater integration both between the local and the global and between the social and the ecological.  One way of doing this is to investigate what meaning children attach to the physical spaces they live in and to do this in different regions of the world so that data can be drawn together across regions to search for matters of global significance.   

This presentation reports on a recent research project (AHRC funded Pathways to Understanding Changing Climates: children’s perceptions of time and place in cultural learning about the environment) which set out to do that.  Here I will focus on one part of that data that responds to two questions:

  • What do children's choices of special places tell us about their environment?
  • What can we take from this as environmental educators?

Theoretically this research approaches place and environment from a perspective of a philosophy of becoming, so not as a static entity separate from its living inhabitants but the comprisal of its human and other-than-human interactants, both living and non-living. As such it is in a dynamic and constantly changing state, always reforming around the changing constituents of its immanence.  This philosophy of becoming as it has been elaborated by Clarke and MacPhie (2015) and Gannon (2015) draws on Deleuze and Gauttari's metaphorical depiction of the rhizomatic nature of immanence.  Nakagawa and Payne (2014) use the concept of emplacement and fluid margins to capture this dynamism of place that is also resonant with the way place and environment are conceptualised here.    

The conceptualisation of a philosophy of becoming also draws on the work of Bachelard (1958) whose take on the creative impact of poetry or painting may explicate the recreation of encounters through recounting of memories which forms part of the data analysed here.  From this point of view, the places that children choose as special to them take on a particular significance.   The meaning of their utterances lies in both the encounters that created the memory initially and in the recreation of those encounters through the recounting of the memory.  The transactional perspective of Ohman and Ostman (2007) also nourishes the theoretical foundations of this analysis.

In attempting to answer the question ‘What do children’s choices of special places tell us about the meaning they attach to environment?’ I recorded a range of physical spaces from the data.  I also identified a range of recurring factors that appeared to be guiding choices, such as family expeditions and holidays, friendships, celebrations, spaces of safety and familiarity and so on.  Looking at these different physical spaces and causal factors through the lens of a philosophy of becoming might provide a way of understanding both the trajectory and the immanence of the modern child’s perceptions of the environment.  This presentation will explore how this emerges from the data.  It will also compare the features of special places in the different cultural settings explored in this research. 

Regarding the second question, for environmental educators a deeper understanding of children’s perceptions of the environment through knowledge of what is meaningful to them and what underpins this meaningfulness is significant.  It may enable a more nuanced and incisive approach to encouraging learning that leads to a transformation in human understandings of their environmental locus and how they respond to threats within it.  In transforming understanding of our own locus within the environment we may be better empowered to respond to threats and therefore more likely to transform our role within it.

Method

The data that this presentation draws on was gathered in primary schools in rural areas in East Anglia, Mongolia, Mexico and Alaska. The data is part of larger data set gathered over the course of a year in a project investigating children’s perceptions and articulations about place and change. The data of children’s identification of special places was in the form of a photographic or hand drawn image and accompanying explanatory text, or verbal expressions in whole class or group discussions. A list of physical spaces and encounters of environmental significance with meaning to children was produced through content analysis of these data. These items were then elaborated through an explication of why they are meaningful for these children. Often this information could be gleaned from the children’s explanations directly but other factors could be indirectly inferred from the images and text. The analysis was informed by literature on place in environmental education including research (Kudryavstev, Stedmann and Krasny, 2012). The data from each country were analysed separately to look for trends that might be culturally determined and whilst there was some variation in the way the task for generating the data was presented in each different setting, there is value in looking at the data collectively to get a global overview of what gives meaning to place for the modern child and thus responding to gaps identified in research in environmental education (Ardoin, Clark and Kelsey, 2013), as will be discussed in this presentation. Emerging findings point to the fact that meaningfulness of place in a child’s environment comes more from kinship, friendship with humans and other animals such as pets, as well as trees and from the affordances for creating connections between the self and these other interactants. However, the affordances of a space for enabling emotional equilibrium is also very important so that a space becomes significant because of its agency in influencing a child’s emotional well-being. As such private spaces including homes and bedrooms have great significance for children.

Expected Outcomes

This notion of meaning being dependent on a child’s emotional state, their relationships with other interactants in the space and so on is concordant with the way that a philosophy of becoming conceives of what might be termed the immanent environment. The specialness of a space is determined by its inhabitants and interactants and its existence is momentary, it is elicited both as it happens but then re-elicited in its recounting. Its recounted nature is different from its original form as it has been reimagined and reconstituted by the continuance of the child’s trajectory as well as the context in which it is being both delivered and taken up. This presentation will discuss these findings from a perspective of a philosophy of becoming to offer some insights into how we might reconfigure our interpretation of what is meaningful to children from an environmental perspective. Whilst much of what we found in this study is not new, research in Geography, Social Anthropology and ESE has already identified what makes a meaningful place for a child, the cross-cultural comparisons that we have been able to carry out represent a significant development. How differences in cultural context influence the way that children make places meaningful is significant because it may enable a better understanding of how children respond to threats to their environment. An understanding of the cultural divergences and convergences may therefore improve our potential as environmental educators to develop children’s engagement with and learning about such threats in a culturally sensitive manner.

References

Ardoin, N.M., Charlotte Clark & Elin Kelsey (2013) An exploration of future trends in environmental education research, Environmental Education Research, 19:4, 499-520, DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2012.709823 Bachelard, G. 1958. The Poetics of Space. Translated from French by Maria Jolas. Beacon Press: Massachusettes Clarke, D.A.G. and J. Mcphie. 2015. From places to paths: Learning for Sustainability, Teacher Education and a Philosophy of Becoming. Environmental Education Research. DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2015.1057554 Gannon, S. 2015. Saving squawk? Animal and human entanglement at the edge of the lagoon, Environmental Education Research, DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2015.1101752 Kudryavtsev, A., Richard C. Stedman & Marianne E. Krasny (2012) Sense of place in environmental education, Environmental Education Research, 18:2, 229-250, DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2011.609615 Nakagawa, Y, and P Payne. ‘Critical Place as a Fluid Margin in Postcritical Environmental Education’. Environmental Education Research 11, no. 4 (2005): 1–25. doi:10.1080/13504622.2013.862612. Ohman, J. and L. Ostman. 2007. Continuity and Change in Moral Meaning-Making—A Transactional Approach. Journal of Moral Education 36(2): 151-168.

Author Information

Elsa Lee (presenting / submitting)
The University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

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