1,721,083 research outputs found
Uncommon worlds: toward an ecological aesthetics of childhood in the Anthropocene
Get PDFIn addressing the need for a more robust engagement with aesthetics in posthumanist studies of childhood and nature, this chapter makes some tentative steps towards an ecological aesthetics of childhood that is responsive to Whitehead’s speculative philosophy. In doing so, the chapter takes an alternative theoretical approach from much of the ‘common worlds’ scholarship that has emerged in recent years, while making the case for a new aesthetics of childhood that is responsive to the accelerating social, technological, and environmental changes of the Anthropocene epoch. Our approach foregrounds the singularity of children’s aesthetic experiences as relational-qualitative ‘intensities’ that alter the fabric of nature as an extensive continuum held in common. We therefore argue that every moment in the life of a child is an uncommon and unrepeatable occasion through which the common world of nature is felt, perceived, and experienced differently. This eco-aesthetic approach is developed further through the analysis of photographs taken by children as part of the Climate Change and Me project, which has mapped children and young people’s affective responses to climate change over a period of three years in New South Wales, Australia. Rather than working with images as representations or analogic signifiers for children’s experience, we analyse how each photograph co-implicates children’s bodies and environments through affective vectors of feeling, or ‘prehensions’. This leads us to reframe aesthetic notions of image, sensibility, perception, and causality in relational terms, while also acknowledging the individuation of childhood experiences as ‘creaturely becomings’ that produce new potentials for environmental thought and behaviour
Early Childhood Australia\u27s best of sustainability: research, practice and theory
No full textECA Best of Sustainability: Research, theory and practice by Elliott, Edwards, Davis and Cutter-MacKenzie collates a range of key articles focussing on sustainability from past editions of the Australasian Journal of Early Childhood and Every Child. Sustainable service operation and promoting children’s responsibility and care for the environment are now part of the National Quality Standards and more importantly, all early childhood services must engage with sustainability in this time of increasing global environmental concerns.
The publication documents the best of research, theory and practice to date and questions where has early childhood education for sustainability come from and more importantly, where is it going? There are multiple possibilities for educators, researchers, policy makers and managers to take action in early childhood settings for an environmentally sustainable future
Children as researchers: applications and possibilities for environmental education evaluation and research
No full textIn Australia, both school and community-based environmental education programs are readily being developed and implemented. While evaluation is often expected to be incorporated as part of the program, evaluation is typically carried out after the program and/or evaluated utilising inappropriate or limiting research methods, not encapsulating the depth, richness and/or potential of the program. Drawing upon a current environmental education program evaluation, namely the evaluation of the Sustainables Challenge (Gould Group, Department of Sustainability and Environment and Sustainability Victoria), the potential and rigour of \u27children as researchers\u27 in evaluating and research environmental education programs is explored in this article. [Author abstract, ed
Ecological Aesthetics: new spaces, directions, and potentials
Get PDFIn this final section of the Handbook, we turn to ecological aesthetics in response to radical changes in both the nature of childhood and the nature of nature in the contemporary world. Artistic and aesthetic approaches have become increasingly relevant as children encounter a world typified by the acceleration of social, technological, and environmental change, and the mutually reinforcing conditions of planetary instability, inequality, and precarity. Anthropogenic climate change, the mass extinction of plant and animal life, and the chemical contamination of air, food, soil, and water resources are transforming not only what we might think of as “the environment”, but also the aesthetic qualities and environmental sensibilities that constitute the experience of being alive. For many scholars these changing conditions of Earthly life have taken on the name of ‘Anthropocene’, an epoch defined by the total imbrication of human life with more than human planetary systems and technologies. The authors in this section take up ecological aesthetics as a relational, experimental, and theoretically adventurous field which aims to grasp the experiential qualities of life under these changing conditions, and to imagine alternatives. With chapters focusing on the role of movement, nature-study, poetry, pattern, sense-awareness, and the creation of experimental works of art, this section highlights interdisciplinary research and pedagogy which attends to richly textured compositions of childhoodnature experience through a diverse range of material, social and conceptual practices. In drawing together a range of Indigenous, speculative, sensory, cultural, empirical, and artistic approaches, the range of chapters collected in this section attests to the diversity and emergent shaping of ecological aesthetics as a field that is still very much in the making
Exploring the Significant Life Experiences of Childhoodnature
Get PDFBy foregrounding childhoodnature experience and its ongoing influence, Significant Life Experiences (SLE) offers a formative field of research for consideration by childhoodnature researchers. The first part of this chapter summarizes key findings and insights from previous SLE research and, as a contested field, aspects that have been challenged. In the second part, we introduce the nine chapters; here, a collection of contemporary studies interweaves the fields of SLE and childhoodnature through time and space. Together the studies in this section supports previous findings and affords new understandings of how childhoodnature is experienced and how this influences environmental behavior.In the third part we group the chapter findings into five childhoodnature insights: embodied experience, nature as family, cultural participation, childhoodnature loss, and developing methodologies. The studies reaffirm that SLE in childhoodnature can be a combination of continuous or single experiences, but that self-awareness within experience is significant. Further, SLE are often sociocultural in character involving cultural participation. Authors have also demonstrated the value of exploring the notions of SLE and childhoodnature with educational professionals.In the final part, we raise issues for future consideration, not least the need for longitudinal research and the advancement of child-framed approaches in these fields. We contend that there is an urgent need for more research in disadvantaged and culturally diverse contexts as a response to the contemporary realities of, and changes to, childhoodnature in the Anthropocene. Importantly, we appeal for a paradigm shift to bring childhoodnature experience into the heart of all education systems
Renaturing science : the role of childhoodnature in science for the anthropocene
No full textThis chapter proposes that there is a need to examine childhoodnature experiences and the way in which these might be influential in shaping an agenda for science and science education in the Anthropocene. A renaturing of science places a much greater emphasis on, and recognition of, the interdependency and relational nature of the natural world in which humans are inextricably embedded and suggests the need for the development of a strong ecological identity (Thomashow, Ecological identity: Becoming a reflective environmentalist. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996). This suggests that there is a need for increased availability of childhoodnature experiences and a focus on the quality of those experiences, as well as the need to explore further lifelong opportunities for developing innate biophilic (Wilson, Biophilia. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1984) tendencies. The chapter examines the childhoodnature experiences of beginning undergraduate university students and how these influence their current relationship to the natural world. Literature suggests that the strength of a person’s nature relatedness can have an impact on the way they view the natural world and can, subsequently, influence the actions they take toward that natural world. This chapter describes a mixed-methods approach used to examine beginning university students’ childhoodnature experiences and how those experiences may have influenced their sense of nature connectedness. Data gathered indicates that there are statistically significant correlations between childhoodnature experiences and current sense of nature connectedness, although the qualitative data suggests that the form of those experiences may be of critical importance. Evidence from the study presented here suggests that exposure to childhoodnature, while necessary, is not sufficient in itself, and further research is required into the nature and quality of childhoodnature experiences. This concurs with previous studies, e.g., Vadala, Bixler, and James (J Environ Educ 39:3–18, 2007), which found that it was the particular qualities of the childhoodnature experience that appeared to play a significant part in shaping future interests, attitudes, and values
Children caring for the Australian wet tropics as a response to the anthropocene
No full textThe Wet Tropics World Heritage Area in far north eastern Australia is a unique place where tropical rainforests are internationally recognized for both biodiversity and cultural values. The chapter explores how children, advised and supported by their teachers and parents, in regional and rural schools intimately connected to these rainforests and associated aquatic ecosystems, are doing works of conservation and restoration, both as a response to the novel landscapes created by the rapidly changing environmental conditions of the Anthropocene, and as a personal contribution to caring for the Wet Tropics. Caring for country is an old discourse in Australia with its origins in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. Contemporary environmental education practice in Wet Tropics schools draws on these older concepts and those of ecological and social science to create a hybrid of understandings to promote practical means for caring for rainforest country. Interview data from children are presented in the chapter to illuminate in their own words their senses of care and connection to the Wet Tropics. Barriers and enablers to restorative practice are discussed in relation to dominant schooling practices, which continue to marginalize the work of caring, even though caring is a logical and necessary response to the Anthropocene. Children wish to actively care and are supported by adults to do so; however, many aspects of the formal, public school system in Queensland are not yet fully enabling of caring practice
Exploring the Significant Life Experiences of Childhoodnature
Get PDFBy foregrounding childhoodnature experience and its ongoing influence, Significant Life Experiences (SLE) offers a formative field of research for consideration by childhoodnature researchers. The first part of this chapter summarizes key findings and insights from previous SLE research and, as a contested field, aspects that have been challenged. In the second part, we introduce the nine chapters; here, a collection of contemporary studies interweaves the fields of SLE and childhoodnature through time and space. Together the studies in this section supports previous findings and affords new understandings of how childhoodnature is experienced and how this influences environmental behavior.In the third part we group the chapter findings into five childhoodnature insights: embodied experience, nature as family, cultural participation, childhoodnature loss, and developing methodologies. The studies reaffirm that SLE in childhoodnature can be a combination of continuous or single experiences, but that self-awareness within experience is significant. Further, SLE are often sociocultural in character involving cultural participation. Authors have also demonstrated the value of exploring the notions of SLE and childhoodnature with educational professionals.In the final part, we raise issues for future consideration, not least the need for longitudinal research and the advancement of child-framed approaches in these fields. We contend that there is an urgent need for more research in disadvantaged and culturally diverse contexts as a response to the contemporary realities of, and changes to, childhoodnature in the Anthropocene. Importantly, we appeal for a paradigm shift to bring childhoodnature experience into the heart of all education systems
Propositions for an Environmental Arts Pedagogy: A/r/tographic experimentations with movement and materiality
Get PDFThis chapter works through a series of methodological experimentations with movement and materiality in order to explore the potentials of environmental arts pedagogies. We address the question of what environmental arts pedagogies might come to look like in the ever-changing contexts of children’s social and environmental worlds. This leads us to engage with the movements and materialities of learning environments as they come to co-compose pedagogical encounters. In doing so, we draw on new materialist accounts of matter as agentic, fluid and dynamic; movement as a choreographic architecting of experience; and a/r/tographic approaches to pedagogical engagement and embodied practice. Taking up the use of concepts as methods, we develop a series of artistic and pedagogical experimentations with concepts of ‘corridors’, ‘flight’, ‘viscosity’ and ‘construction’. In teasing out the implications of these concepts for an environmental arts pedagogy, we combine imagery and text to both render and diagram the movement of bodies, materials and environments in passage through each of these four conceptual enactments. This leads us to develop a series of propositions for an environmental arts pedagogy based on our creative research process. In doing so, we aim to sketch the contours of an environmental arts pedagogy that combines the speculative imagination with embodied, sensorial, and empirical experiences
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