Children, Place and Sustainability

Margaret Somerville, Monica Green

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137408501
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ehe- & Familiensoziologie

Through focusing on children's sustainability learning this book examines how school education can address the current environmental problems. It explores children's responses in literacy and language, arts-based approaches, and indigenous studies as well as scientific pedagogies to provide a unique insight into how children learn.

1

Children’s Place in Sustainability Education

This blue circle is my world. The green part is Australia where I live. The anchors are holding onto the world ‘cause there is rubbish on Australia. The world is supposed to move slowly but it is moving really fast to get rid of all the rubbish so the anchors have to hold it in place and only the rubbish will fly off.

(Clayton Cole, Kurri Kurri Preschool)

Clayton is four years old and goes to Kurri Kurri Preschool in a rural coal mining area outside of the industrial town of Newcastle, about two hours north of Sydney on the east coast of Australia. Kurri Kurri is surrounded by coal mines, and the Newcastle Harbour has massive coal loading docks, a new and even bigger one being constructed by Chinese interests. In the sea off the coast of Newcastle, sleeping barges wait to enter the harbour and receive their load of black coal to carry over the sea to the harbours of the coal buyers in Asia. Clayton is inevitably and irreversibly connected to their worlds. The director of his preschool welcomes others to come into the school to work with the children; it is a bustling place full of life and child energy. The children have made a brightly coloured fairy garden with patterns of multicoloured recycled plastics arranged in patterns in between the succulent plants. In an inside room, a little boy sits quietly painting with an educator who talks to him about the figure on a motor bike. The child says, ‘that’s my brother, it’s a picture for his birthday’. In the yard outside, a group of children around a metal water tank on a stand wield hoses, pipes and containers, laughing, shouting as they duck the streams of water coming at them. Two others sit inside a temporary fence of wire mesh, one holding a grey furry guinea pig close to her chest. ‘Do you want to pat him?’, she asks. The grey ball of fur wriggles and extends its claws down her arm. ‘Look’, she says, ‘scratches’, and pulls the guinea pig back close to her chest. The other child, waiting his turn, says, ‘the boy one is in his house, he’s got a sore on his back, it’s yucky’.

The adults in this preschool respond to children’s initiatives in place making. One of the educators has been exploring the topic of rubbish and recycling in their sustainability learning. The children participate in an ongoing project with another university researcher about ‘children’s place making in a globalising world’ (Millei, Gallagher, Walker, & Buchanan, 2014). This researcher describes a scene where she is working intently with a child who is making a map of his travels all around the world when another repeatedly joins in to do his note taking. Asked what he is doing, he replies, ‘I am a researcher’. Meanwhile a girl interjects with numerous cups of tea and cookies for a tea party for the four of them. Children decide on their part in this project. They can work with an artist and the researcher to express their ideas about the world in visual, digital and verbal forms. Clayton’s sustainability learning and his global imaginary intersect in his detailed drawing and the quirky imagination of his story. What is it that emerges for children from their profoundly local places in the space of global imaginaries in trying to make sense of our changing worlds? What pedagogical opportunities can enable children to build a future world in which they feel empowered, engaged and hopeful? These are the questions we wish to ask in this book.

Children of all ages have their own views and understandings of their worlds that are qualitatively different from those of adults (James & Prout, 1990). Like many other outsider groups within society, children have little power, spending much of their time in places that are regulated by adults (Matthews, Limb, & Taylor, 1998). This is particularly the case in schooling contexts where the position of adults as controllers of power and holders of knowledge makes children invisible (Murris, 2013; Mannion, 2003). There is now a well established expectation that sociogeographical investigation of childhood should be with children rather than on or for children. This sociorelational view of children and society shifts attention away from age as a cultural determinant. Within this framework children are understood as cultural producers and social actors in their own right rather than pre-adult becomings, involved in shaping their social and environmental transactions at a variety of sociospatial scales (Scourfield, Dicks, Drakeford, & Davies, 2006).

This shift in focus recognises the validity of children’s viewpoints and their ability to articulate and construct their own unique perspectives, agendas and subjective understandings as a way of participating in communities as active members (Prosser & Burke, 2008; Burke, 2007). Crucially, Skivenes, and Strandbu (2006, p. 11) argue that it is ‘not sufficient that children are invited to participate and can express themselves. Consideration must be given to the ways in which states and adults view children and gain a proper understanding of their opinions, as well as ways in which adults can facilitate their participation’. The discourse of children’s participation and ‘voice’ emphasises the need to understand children from the perspective of their immediate lifeworlds and to recognise that they may have very different values about place and space from those of adults. Rather than assuming children know less than adults, children may know something else (Matthews, et al., 1998). The idea of the ‘something else’ inspires our interest in our research with children.

The spatial meaning making that is so significant for sustainability education is something we know very little about when it comes to children. A special edition of the journal Local Environment on ‘Children, young people and sustainability’ identified that in many parts of the world, it is still not unusual to find major national, regional or local policy agendas relating to sustainability that make no specific reference to children and young people. Where children and young people do figure in policy discourses pertaining to sustainability, their presence is often slight, circumscribed and precarious. Many policy and educational interventions with children and young people tend to be limited in their spatial scope, being overwhelmingly focused upon either learning in the classroom or behaviours in the home. This tendency underestimates the complexity of these places and overlooks the much more complexly distributed everyday ecologies of life courses and lifestyles. Such limitations preclude consideration of complex interconnections between everyday spaces and global dimensions in children’s lives and imaginaries (Horton, Hadfield-Hill, Christensen, & Kraftl, 2013, p. 250).

Where are the children in research on sustainability education?

There are very few empirical studies of primary school children in relation to sustainability education. In order to provide an overview of what studies there are and what they say about children, we have reviewed articles published in the last five years in some key journals – Environmental Education Research, Australian Journal of Environmental Education and Canadian Journal of Environmental Education. We have only included articles that contain empirical data from or about children of primary school age, and we have categorised these articles according to their methodological approaches as Positivist/quantitative, Interpretive, Critical and Posthuman.

Positivist/quantitative studies

This category includes four studies that aim to measure children’s attitudes to the environment or changes in attitudes in response to environmental education. One large scale study analysed the variables related to environmental knowledge and behaviour in 1,140 Turkish elementary school children. The study found that the main impact factor for students’ environmental knowledge was the education level of their fathers; it also revealed that girls had more favourable attitudes to the environment than boys (Alp, Ertepinar, Tekkaya, & Yilmaz, 2008). Students’ behaviours towards the environment were independent of their knowledge of environmental issues in this study.

Two other studies used different validated instruments to measure changes in children’s attitudes to the environment in response to environmental education programmes. A study of 385 North American children found that the amount of time they spent in nature, and their age, predicted their connectedness to nature (Ernst & Theimer, 2011). Another US study used Bogner and Wiseman’s Model of Ecological Values to measure the impact of an earth education programme on 729 upper elementary children’s environmental perceptions (Johnson & Manoli, 2008). Both of these studies found, not surprisingly, that children’s attitudes changed in a positive direction as a result of participating in environmental education programmes. A study of Greek children similarly found that their understanding of waste was positively impacted by recycling programmes in schools (Malandrakis, 2008).

However, from our perspective, children and their thinking do not become visible in these studies and there is little sense of what their experience is or what it means to them to participate in these programmes; close attendance to what children say or think about the environment is precluded by children’s attitudes being defined in broad terms of positive or negative as judged by adults.

Interpretive studies

Interpretive studies aim to understand aspects of the participant’s experience. Out of the seven, only one study in this category included direct observations of children’s activities. This US case study investigated how kindergarten to second grade children and their families chose to guide the process of creating a garden as part of a school-wide, interest based enrichment model (Kozak & McCreight, 2013). They found that students’ knowledge of the environment became more nuanced as they collaborated with family members, solved problems, made decisions and engaged directly with the materiality of the earth.

The remaining six studies in this category used some form of children’s visual representations as the main form of data. Two studies asked Turkish children and Czech children to draw a picture of ‘nature’. The Turkish study found that children drew nature in a stylised way with a range of mountains in the background, a sun, a couple of clouds and a river rising from the mountains (Ulker, 2012). The Czech study, following on from this one, found that Czech children’s drawings of nature were not universal in this way (Yilmaz, Kubiatko, & Topal, 2012). A study using a draw-and-write method exploring US children’s relationship with the natural world offered considerably more detail about how children understood their everyday worlds (Kalvaitis & Monhardt, 2012). All of these studies were framed in terms of children’s connection or relationship with the natural world as developed within environmental education programmes.

A further two studies were framed specifically within sustainability rather than environmental education. A UK study investigated students’ understanding of sustainable development using concept mapping and semi-structured interviews (Walshe, 2008). The substantive findings of this research suggest that there is a wide variety of understandings of sustainability among the students, but that generally they allude to the nature, purpose and timescale of planetary sustainability. The study concludes that a lack of agreement as to what education for sustainable development should include impacts on UK students’ understanding. Children in the highly urbanised city of Seoul were asked to draw and write their perception of social and environmental development in South Korea (Kim, 2011). The study found that the students’ views were grounded in optimistic and positive expectations and visions of science and technology even as some of the children showed awareness and concern about environmental destruction. The study discusses these findings in light of the complex meanings of development in modern Korean society and the challenges teachers there may face in cultivating sustainable views and relations via science and environmental education.

The visibility of children within these studies is not necessarily related to the particular theoretical framework but to how closely the methods of data collection and analysis attend to children’s actions or representations. Kalvaitis and Monhardt’s (2012) study of children’s relationship to nature, for example, allowed an in-depth exploration in which children’s understandings could emerge. The collection of data from 175 children from 6 to 11 years of age enabled the researchers to make the general conclusions that the participating children did not see themselves as separate from nature, but they did depict themselves as more distant as they grew older. The method provided some very detailed insights into individual children’s understanding of their everyday worlds. The drawings depict a world in which children, family, pets, trees, other living creatures and the textures of the landscape are pictured as one. This is also reflected in the writing that accompanies the drawings:

I’m sitting by a tree watching the sunset. The tan tree is my favourite climbing tree. The mountains are reminding me of my favourite song. Lake reminds me of my favourite book. The cloud is to remember the sweet smell of rain. The nest and the bird is for my love of animals. The flowers are for my friends. The sand is for my aunt.

(Kalvaitis & Monhardt, 2012, p. 223)

For this Grade 4 child, sunset, tree and climbing, mountains, song, lake, book, cloud, sweet smell of rain, nest, bird, flowers, friends, sand and aunt are all part of an everyday world that is relational, affective and expressive, with humans and the natural world co-produced in the language of this child’s story.

Critical studies

The primary aim of research in the critical paradigm is individual and/or social transformation. Studies using a critical paradigm are few in primary education, and those that focus on children are even fewer. A New Zealand study of children aged 11–12 sought to empower students by explicitly teaching environmental and social knowledge and action skills to advocate for the sustainability of a lake’s ecosystem (Birdsall, 2010). Three different lenses are used to examine the knowledge children developed and their subsequent actions, including types of knowledge, understandings of sustainability and type of actions taken. A three part model is proposed to assist students to learn about the nature of action enabling them to work towards potential solutions for complex environmental issues. An action research study using participatory planning methods with Greek children aged 9–12 used storytelling, photography and environmental drama methods (Tseverini, 2011). The children developed planning visions to take action at local government level. Finally, a New Zealand study engaged students, staff and community members (including professional practitioners) in an architectural co-design project that resulted, after four years, in a built classroom (Wake & Eames, 2013). The researchers collected children’s participatory and co-design examples and found that sustainability co-design projects with children lead to improved outcomes for all participants as well as promoting authentic and relevant sustainability learning. Children in these studies are visible to the extent that they are able to design their own inquiries. Often within the critical paradigm it seems that adults decide what needs to be achieved within standard discourses of environmental and sustainability goals and the children are co-opted to adult agenda.

Posthuman approaches

Posthuman theories have rapidly risen to prominence across all disciplines in response to escalating ecological challenges and the imperative to find new ways to bring human and natural systems together in language, thought and action. Posthuman approaches aim to de-centre the human being in order to envisage the human as co-constituted with the more-than-human world. These new frameworks draw on contemporary philosophy to disrupt the separation of nature and culture, the ‘nature/culture binary’ in Western thought (see Bennett, 2010; Colebrook, 2010; Grosz, 2008; Haraway, 2008; Barad, 2007). These approaches are only rarely seen in primary school education, possibly because of the constraints of the crowded school curriculum and pressures of standardised testing.

Finnish researcher Pauliina Rautio has conducted several studies using posthuman approaches with children of primary school age in informal settings. She has observed the ways that children seem to disrupt the nature/culture binary themselves. They may not need special equipment to do this, but may need adults ‘to take seriously the things and actions with which they encounter their worlds anyway, things called toys, or stones’ (Rautio, 2013b, p. 396). Children appear abundantly in Rautio’s project in which 12 Finnish children, aged four to seven, gathered once a week to assist an adult researcher in studying ‘things, objects and beings’. These children were provided with small, plain wooden boxes with lids and instructed to bring these boxes to research meetings, filled with whatever they chose and whatever would fit in the box. Children led the way in this research but rather than this being imagined as an individual exercise of human agency, it was considered through the concept of intra-activity, as a process of ‘countless and thoroughly entwined encounters in which all kinds of entities come into being in relation to each other’ (Rautio, 2013a, p. 3).

Early childhood researchers are leading the application of these frameworks in educational research. This includes new materialities research (mainly in Scandinavia), multispecies ethnographies (Australia and Canada) and indigenous-informed research influenced by the New Zealand bicultural curriculum. New materialities research draws mainly on the work of philosopher of physics Karen Barad and is applied in understanding the ways that young children are shaped by their intra-actions with the material world (see Rautio, 2013a; 2013b; Rossholt, 2012; Hultman & Lenz-Taguchi, 2010; Lenz-Taguchi, 2010). The Common World Childhoods Research Collective is an interdisciplinary international research collective with a focus upon more-than-human childhood relations. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, among others, the key researchers Affrica Taylor, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Mindy Blaise are involved in collaborative projects using multi-species ethnography (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015; Taylor, Blaise, & Giugni, 2013; Taylor, Pacini-Ketchabaw, & Blaise, 2012). The early childhood studies, arising from the bicultural New Zealand early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki, are informed by both Maori indigenous concepts and contemporary Western posthuman frameworks (see Duhn, 2012a; 2012b; Ritchie, 2012). Indigenous knowledge frameworks commonly originate in cultural understandings in which there is no binary structure of thought and maintain the traces of non-binary thinking in contemporary cultural practices (Somerville, 2013a). Bringing these into conversation with new Western onto-epistemologies is an important strand of research in the scholarship of the Anthropocene. These studies and their application will be further examined in the chapter ‘Emergent literacies’ in order to understand the ways that new imaginings of the child emerge in these frameworks.

Why use place as a conceptual framework?

Concepts of place

Children, like all of us, are embedded in their local places, wherever they may be and however interpenetrated by global flows of knowledge, materials and virtual connections. Place offers a common language across the various constituencies (children, teachers, families, policy makers, businesses) that participate in sustainability initiatives in schools and communities. As a conceptual framework, place provides a bridge between the local and global, real and representational, indigenous and non-indigenous, and different disciplinary approaches. Place itself is theorised in different ways according to the perspective of each person. Children have their own theories of place, as in Clayton’s story and drawing. Rather than defining and delimiting what place means, we ask what can place enable in our thinking and empirical research? We draw on a range of understandings of place in the individual chapters in this book including ‘thinking through Country’, ‘place as region’, a ‘global sense of place’ and ‘place as assemblage of more-than-human worlds’.

Place has been described as ‘an unwindable spiral of material form and interpretative understandings or experiences’ (Gieryn, 2000, p. 471). This shapes the way for us to examine both the real and the representational, and more importantly, the movement or passage between them. Both Massey (2005) and Martus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• Preface
• 1. Children’s Place in Sustainability Education
• 2. Sustainability Education in Practice
• 3. A Coastal Classroom without Walls
• 4. Children’s Place Learning Maps: Thinking through Country
• 5. Place-Making by Design
• 6. Emergent Literacies in ‘The Land of Do Anything You Want’
• 7. In the Kitchen Garden
• 8. Separation and Connection: Children Negotiating Difference
• 9. Children, Place and Sustainability
• Notes
• References
• Index