Children as tour guides

Abstract

Despite recent calls to include children in tourism research, the trend of overlooking children's perspectives and experiences remains pervasive (Gram, O'Donohoe, Schänzel, Marchant, & Kastarinen, 2019; Poria & Timothy, 2014). This is a lost opportunity, especially in today's anthropocentric context, as children can offer insightful perspectives on human-nature relationships, and possible lessons for cultivating responsible human connections to, and coexistence with, non-human nature (Merewether, 2019). This research note emphasizes the importance of 'knowing with' children. Based on preliminary findings from a study that looked at nature-based proximity tourism and family nature walk experiences using sensory ethnographic methodologies, we show the value of considering children as tour guides. More specifically, we adopt a relational approach to engaging children's experiences in the world to illuminate under-explored and under-appreciated modes of knowing with non-human nature. Furthermore, we encourage future research that considers children not as a 'state of becoming' or as 'the future', but as influential actors within the present of tourism research (Carpenter, 2015; Leonard, 2019).

Promoting children-nature relations through play-based learning in ecotourism sites

“…By focusing on children and the role of environmental education within Anthropocene debates, the study contributes to the discussions on the role of ecotourism in promoting both environmental awareness and education in society (e.g., Kimmel, 1999;Lee & Moscardo, 2005;Ting & Cheng, 2017). Given that children are fairly absent in tourism studies (Milne et al, 2019), this research also contributes to drawing attention to the role of children in tourism discussions concerning responsibility, sustainability and the Anthropocene.…”

Responsible tourism: the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of empowering children

“…This shift of paradigm is left to the individual academics themselves (Kemper et al, 2019). However, additionally, children may also be educated to be responsible citizens and tourists in informal educational environments, such as nature walks (Honig, 2019;Milne, Rantala & Grimwood, 2019).…”