Experiencing Environment and Place through Children's Literature

Amy Cutter-Mackenzie, Phillip Payne, Alan Reid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317979456
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Recent scholarship on children's literature displays a wide variety of interests in classic and contemporary children's books. While environmental and ecological concerns have led to an interest in 'ecocriticism', as yet there is little on the significance of the ecological imagination and experience to both the authors and readers – young and old – of these texts. This edited collection brings together a set of original international research-based chapters to explore the role of children's literature in learning about environments and places, with a focus on how children's literature may inform and enrich our imagination, experiences and responses to environmental challenges and injustice. Contributions from Australia, Canada, USA and UK explore the diverse ways in which children's literature can provide what are arguably some of the first and possibly most formative engagements that some children might have with 'nature'. Chapters examine classic and new storybooks, mythic tales, and image-based and/or written texts read at home, in school and in the field. Contributors focus on exploring how children's literature mediates and informs our imagination and understandings of diverse environments and places, and how it might open our eyes and lives to other presences, understandings and priorities through stories, their telling and re-telling, and their analysis.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Environmental Education Research.

Through green eyes: complex visual culture and post-literacy

Sidney I. Dobrin

Department of English, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA

By way of reclamation of the metaphor ‘green,’ this paper contends that research regarding the relationships between children’s literatures and cultures and environmental experience requires a reinvigorated consideration of the role of the visual. The heightened importance of visual texts is made evident via three primary, contemporary conditions of textual dissemination: hyper-circulation, shifts from page to screen as the dominant method of textual transmission, and increases in visuals as the primary mode of information conveyance. The conditions of textual distribution also call to question the status quo understanding of children’s subject formation. This paper contends that by examining new media technologies in conjunction with methodologies borrowed from studies of complex ecology and systems theories, research might be able to better theorize how and why children’s texts influence children’s lived experiences with environments and place. Ultimately, this paper proposes not just that a greater attention to the visual rhetoric of children’s texts is crucial, but that researchers also consider how current contexts encourage child subjects to produce texts as active agents within complex networks, not only interpret them.

‘Green’

The metaphor ‘green’ has been adopted as a way of indicating environmentally conscious political positions. To ‘go green’ implies active participation in environmentally or ecologically sound practices. To ‘be green’ is to advocate environmental protection, to be attuned to nature. To manufacture ‘green products’ is to make goods in ecologically friendly ways. Etymologically, green is derived from gréne and growan verbs, indicating to grow plants and, in turn, growth. The metaphor is derived from a sense of the visual, a metaphor adopted as representing the color of photosynthesizing organisms, a foundational level of complex ecological energy exchanges. Green is seeing the color of plants. It also has roots in representations of the sea, the color of Neptune’s realm. Green combines the foundational attributes of ecological life on earth: water and light/photosynthesis. Green has been naturalized as a metaphoric representation of nature and environment, a metaphor in need of reclamation. We must, for instance, also take into consideration that ‘green’ can serve other metaphoric purposes, including the understanding that to be green is to be new growth, to be new. In this way, to be green might also suggest both innocence and inexperience. To ‘be green’ is to be fresh, just grown, but it also implies being unripe or immature. To ‘be green’ is to be a novice, one lacking experience (e.g., a greenhorn). Lack of experience can suggest being unaware, something to be taken advantage of, a simpleton. To ‘be green’ is to exhibit the condition of ignorance and inexperience. In some cases, this greenness is pejorative, suggesting feeblemindedness; in others, green suggests the possibility of growth and the shedding of innocence with the acquisition of experience.

Green, of course, is a visual metaphor, one reliant upon at least a tacit understanding of light and color. Falling between yellow and blue within the spectrum, green is how we see light of wavelengths between 520 and 570 nanometers. The metaphor of green is grounded in light, a foundational element of both life and vision. While the relation between light and life intrigues me as an avenue of research not often taken up outside of the sciences, I am curious about the role light plays as a central characteristic of the ability for visual texts to convey meaning. From a visual rhetorical standpoint, the intersections of children’s literature and environmental criticism provide interesting opportunities to consider not just the role of children’s literatures in environmental education and experience, but to greatly expand the inquiries of intellectual endeavors that undertake these intersections. In the spirit of this collection, in its forward thinking to push at the boundaries of how we understand the relevance of children’s literatures and texts to environmental education and experience, I propose a re-situation of ecological literary criticism (ecocriticism) and studies in children’s literatures/cultures focusing on the role of the visual and the ways in which ‘green’ subjects engage visual information. This focus, however, should not be heard as a simple need to become more attentive to the role visual texts play either in children’s literatures or in ecocriticisms, or to the need to extend analytical or interpretive methodologies to texts that might be labeled as falling within the aegis of either (or both) areas of study. Arguably, each has already developed traditions of ‘reading’ or ‘seeing’ visual texts as artifacts, as representational technologies, as contributors to the cultural milieu in which such texts function (see Bigger and Webb 2010; Korteweg, Gonzalez, and Guillet 2010; Sloane 2010). Instead, I want to consider the role of the visual in relation to the construction of the child subject and as part of networked culture, as part of a more complex ecology than either children’s literature or ecological literary criticisms have taken up before. Ultimately, what I hope to initiate is a conversation that (re)invigorates a critical investment in the role of the visual in light of complex ecology and network theory. Given the complexity of network societies and the (hyper)circulation and velocity of information and text in the network, a more complex notion of ecology should begin to fuel our investigations and research. Where this argument leads (I hope) is to a recognition that the limited ecology of ecological literary criticism hampers what we can know, teach, and learn about children and children’s texts and their deeply complex ecological relationships to the systems in which they function, natural and otherwise.

Lawrence Buell, in the concluding section of his manifesto The future of environmental criticism: Environmental crisis and literary imagination (2005), prophesizes the future of environmental criticism by way of four challenges: ‘the challenge of organization, the challenge of professional legitimation, the challenge of defining distinctive models of inquiry, and the challenge of establishing their significance beyond the academy’ (128). The subtext of Buell’s prophecy, however, is an open call for the development of critical methodologies that are not hamstrung by the very methodologies that have propelled environmental criticism over the past 10 years. My intent in this opening contribution to the collection is less a representation of a specific body of research or methodologies than it is an answer to Buell’s call in the form of a suggestion that appears – at least to me – to begin to address Buell’s challenge. In order to accomplish this, and in light of the green metaphor, I contend that future avenues of research regarding the relevance of children’s literature – and by extension children’s texts, all literature, and all text – demand greater attention to visual components, particularly given the rapidly increasing consequence of visual media in contemporary information exchange (see Kress 2003). To this end, I first consider the development of the child subject as connected with technological development and the growing importance of the visual in children’s subject formation. I contend that cultural moves from page to screen as the dominant medium of information exchange open doors for reconsideration not just of the relationship between literature and children’s environmental education and experience, but the very idea of the child subject. I introduce concepts of complex ecology as possibly providing one methodological basis for examining the relationship between children’s texts and the formation of child subjectivity. I call for not just a reinvigorated consideration of the visual for the sake of interpreting visual information, but toward the inclusion of textual production alongside textual interpretation as central to examining how literatures contribute to both child subject formation and the relationship between child subjects and environment/place.

Since the introduction of more contemporary concepts of the construction of the child subject, children have been cast as green figures in both senses of the metaphor, both tied to nature and environment as well as considered innocent, ignorant, and inexperienced (Stables 2009). If children are understood to be inexperienced – and simultaneously innocent – their greenness has also been understood to provide a connection to nature that is lost as one loses innocence and gains experience. Loss of youth and innocence distances one from nature and environment, a trope profoundly evident throughout children’s literatures (e.g., see Burnett 1983; Hiaasen 2006; Kingsley 2007; Porter 2006; Bigger and Webb 2010; Morgan 2010; Wason-Ellam 2010). This duality between greens, flanked by inexperience and environmental attachment, situates children in the problematic realm between their greenness of inexperience, denying the child subject any experience for understanding what a connection to nature might mean, and an attachment to nature that can only be fleeting. Understanding these dubious constructions as central to the construction of children, children’s texts, and the representation of children in children’s texts (and the acknowledgment that these three distinctions are often blurred and inseparable) motivates the affiliation between studies in children’s literatures/cultures and environmental criticism, studies central to any research regarding the relationship between children’s literatures and environmental education.

Children’s literatures and visual rhetorics

Childhood in the West, we might say, is increasingly a function of technology, specifically, information technologies. Scholars of children’s literatures and cultures have proposed that the subjectivity of the child dramatically shifted from that of miniature/amateur adult who was expected to participate in daily life, sharing the burden of economic labor, to a transitional position between infancy and adulthood (Aries 1962). It has also been widely understood that much of this shift can be attributed to the spread of literacy (Morgenstern 2002; O’Malley 2003). As European culture shifted from primarily feudal systems of social organization to systems with greater dispersions of class division and greater focus on commerce and urban life, the rise of a middle class that displaced the aristocracy as the primary producers of ‘authorized’ culture evolved hand in hand with the rise of the spread of commerce. We now recognize much of this class shift as influenced by technological advances, many of which have also been linked to the rise of environmental/ecological ‘crisis’ (think industrialization and its effects). Within this class configuration, children of the new middle class were less likely to enter into the family business immediately because the family business now required forms of (literate) experience (education, training, acculturation) that extended beyond that required to engage in physical labor. Children of the labor classes experienced vastly different childhoods than did children of the middle or upper classes, as they were expected to contribute labor at an earlier age (globally, such divisions remain). The children of the new middle classes were afforded a period between infancy and adulthood with little, if any, expectations of economic contribution.

Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the use of Guttenberg’s moveable-type printing press technologies spread throughout Europe, so too did the ease and velocity of information dissemination increase dramatically. The middle class rose hand in hand with the spread of information technologies. I do not mean to argue that childhood was a result of new information technologies in the same way that many have argued that the very idea of childhood as we now conceive it resulted from the rise of the middle class; I do mean to suggest that the very idea of childhood – and in turn the ideas that there can be something codified as children’s literature, and in turn the study of childhood and children’s literatures – cannot be separated from understanding developments in information technologies, and that, in fact, as Western culture now shifts from an era of information technologies grounded in the page to one dominated by the screen (Kress 2003), studies of children and children’s literatures should make disciplinary accommodations to again rethink not just children’s texts, but the very idea of the child subject (see also Stables 2009). Thus, as contemporary technologies engulf the child subject and subsume it within larger networks of information exchange, the child subject becomes more akin to other subjects, no longer separated from culture in transitional forms. Instead, the child subject is now cast as another node within the hyper-circulatory networks of contemporary information exchange. The child subject is provided greater access and maneuverability within the network, able to access not only children’s texts, but all texts, granting the child authority to experience the world much more rapidly and wide-ranging than were children of the past. And, as I address later, the child subject is authorized to participate in the network, contributing to the flow and velocity of information circulation, no longer only a consumer of culture, but an active node producing, remixing, and circulating information within the network.

Certainly, some have noted that such shifts have direct implication upon the development of the child subject, forcing the ‘immature’ subject into spaces that require experience and maturity for effective (and healthy) engagement. For instance, Baroness Susan Greenfield (2009) has argued that contemporary ‘screen culture,’ characterized by heightened audio and visual sensations, is ‘primarily a world of a small child’ in which immediacy dominates over long-term result and consequence. In March 2009, Greenfield reported to the UK Government’s House of Lords that the rise of screen culture over the past decade may, in fact, be changing how human brains develop and how those changes might be measured against other identifiable changes, such as a threefold increase in Attention Deficit Disorder pharmaceuticals prescribed for children over the same time frame. Greenfield’s claims about brain research, to be clear, are not those of cause and effect or even of direct linkage between these two conditions, but one of caution and a need to explore such links.¹ For my purposes here, there are two key points that must be elicited immediately from Greenfield’s claims. First, that the Westernized child subject is becoming more and more immersed in the technologies of screen culture to the degree that in such immersion it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate the child subject from any other subject form within the network (whether such immersions are or are not negative is insignificant in this inquiry). Second, that the relationship of the subject – child or otherwise – with information technologies is an ecological relationship, grounded in how an organism (subject/agent) interacts within an environment and establishes its niches.² In Greenfield’s construction, the image is a predominant characteristic of the new environment.

Within the networks of contemporary information and cultural circulation then, we are witnessing a (re)turn to the image as the dominant means of information conveyance. As literacy theorists, including Gunther Kress (2003), have noted, while ‘language-as-speech’ is likely to remain the primary mode of human communication, ‘language-as-writing’ is rapidly being displaced by image in public communication (1). This shift, Kress argues, has profound effects on how we engage the world: ‘The world told is a different world to the world shown’ (1, original emphasis). While these ‘profound changes’ might affect how we think of literacy, information, and communication (and I believe they do), for scholars of children’s literatures and cultures – or more accurately, scholars of children’s subjectivities – such changes offer a unique opportunity to step to the fore and provide a well-established history of inquiry into the value of image as mechanism for information exchange and acculturation. As modes of information exchange shift from page to screen and new media and literacy theorists turn a fresh lens to image, childhood studies and children’s literature scholars already understand that technology and image are at the center of the function of literature, literacy, information, acculturation, and subjectivity (Jenkins 1998).

Like children themselves, visual texts have (until very recently) been considered green texts, texts thought to be immature, undeveloped, or designed for inexperienced readers. Conventional wisdom suggests that visual texts are pre-literate, designed to convey information to subjects not yet imbued with the experiences necessary to interpret written-textual information. Visual texts³ are naïve texts intended for green readers. Yet, the turn from page to screen has caused a (re)questioning of this traditional position of the visual. As visuals become a dominant form of information conveyance – or more accurately, as they become a more immediate form of information conveyance – they are cast not as pre-literate forms of communication, but post-literate forms (though some, like Greenfield, take a different approach, claiming that such turns ‘infantilize’). Gregory Ulmer (2003) has established that we are witnessing a shift from literacy to ‘electracy,’ a shift he likens to the shift from orality to literacy that preceded. Electracy is to the digital age what literacy was to the print age. Such shifts do not eliminate the prior modes of communication, but supersede them as primary. Visual texts, forms of which dominated communicative methods of writing early in writing’s development (hieroglyphs, pictograms), have again become a dominant mode of textual representation. For studies of children’s literatures, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword: Experiencing environment and place through children’s literature
• 1. Through green eyes: complex visual culture and post-literacy
• 2. Re-searching and re-storying the complex and complicated relationship of biophilia and bibliophilia
• 3. Remarkable-tracking, experiential education of the ecological imagination
• 4. Children’s literature as a springboard to place-based embodied learning
• 5. The stories are the people and the land: three educators respond to environmental teachings in Indigenous children’s literature
• 6. What’s there, what if, what then, and what can we do? An immersive and embodied experience of environment and place through children’s literature
• 7. Exploring instructional strategies to develop prospective elementary teachers’ children’s literature book evaluation skills for science, ecology and environmental education
• 8. Developing environmental agency and engagement through young people’s fiction
• 9. The Lord of the Rings – a mythos applicable in unsustainable times?
• 10. Reading The Lorax, orienting in potentiality
• Afterword: Openings for researching environment and place in children’s literature: ecologies, potentials, realities and challenges
• Index