Troubling the intersections of urban/nature/childhood in environmental education

Abstract

This collection examines why urban environments are key sites for reimagining and reconfiguring human-nature encounters in times and spaces of planetary crisis. Cities constitute powerful and troubling spaces for human-nature intersections. They typically represent the effects of human dominance over nature: humans in control, taming and managing the wildness of 'nature' by domesticating it. Children existing in these mostly adult designed and orchestrated creations are often ignored as city dwellers, along with animals who increasingly migrate into urban areas. Yet cities are also sites of innovation and 'greening' , of critical democracy and renewal, with the most innovative cities including those where children co-create urban environments, and where animals and plants are valued as co-city dwellers. As this collection shows, troubling and reimagining these sites for diverse forms and ways of living, including of encounter with the other, and thus what can be learnt and taught through urban nature childhoods, is one possible pathway for working out different modes of being human with the earth. The idea for this collection on troubling and reimaging the deeply familiar concepts of urban, nature and childhood arose from a study visit to Berlin, Germany, where urban social, cultural, political and ecological initiatives are in constant tension with aggressive capital driven development. In Berlin, like in many of the world's cities, urban innovation (Ferguson 2014) co-exists with gentrification (Walsh 2013), urban food initiatives (Steele 2008), wildlife and cosmopolitics (Hinchliffe et al. 2005; Duhn 2017), brutal politics of expulsion (Sassen 2014), and with childhoods lived in poverty and childhoods lived in affluence (Chaplin, Hill, and John 2014). Berlin's politics of urbanity are at least partly about the 'renegotiation of the urban commons' (Ferguson 2014, 14; cf. the urban of Detroit, Johannesburg, Hangzhou, Lamu, Curitba and other case study sites of 'urban renewal' in Unesco 2016). Berlin's negotiations have led to discussions and debate, art works, architectural practices, discontent, disobedience and reclaiming as well as a re-imagining of KEYWORDS

Mapping Child-Animal Care Relations in Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia

“…Neither tale is about finding "ultimate resolution" or a "final peace" as it were, for life is messy, and ongoing encounters with people and other animals can be awkward, unruly, and conflictual (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017, p. 143). The thematic of strangeness within these tales correspondingly troubles categories of childhood/nature/culture (Duhn et al, 2017), as I now seek to highlight by way of conclusion.…”

Strange loops, oedipal logic, and an apophatic ecology: Reimagining critique in environmental education

“…The aforementioned criticisms identify such narratives as founded on the culture-nature distinction that obfuscates the cultural specificity of such a divide as well as those experiences and phenomena-ominous or repulsive aspects of the more-than-human environments-that do not neatly fit in either side of the dichotomy (Clarke, 2017;Duhn et al, 2017;Lysgaard et al, 2019). Moreover, insights from dark ecology have been used to point out the paradoxical character of incitements to 'connect with nature' in EE discourses, which are deeply paradoxical as they constantly reiterate the nature-culture distinction they seek to abolish (Fletcher, 2017).…”

Nature matters: diffracting a keystone concept of environmental education research – just for kicks

“…For example, there are now 'scales' to objectively measure just how related to nature you are, such as the 'Connectedness to Nature Scale' (CNS) (Mayer and Frantz 2004), the 'Nature Relatedness Scale' and the 'Connectivity to Nature Scale' (Selhub and Logan 2012, 228), and conferences to disseminate the almost always positive results of these scales, such as 'Nature Connections…an interdisciplinary conference to examine routes to nature connectedness' (Nature Connections 2015). Karen academic and educational circles and buoyed by the work of authors such as Richard Louv, relies on an 'adult sentimentality' of urban children's loss of connection to 'nature' (also see Duhn, Malone andTesar 2017, 1363). Malone (2016) draws on the work of Rautio (2013) to demonstrate a number of logical problems and anthropocentric assumptions in the view that children need to be more connected to nature: '(1) human societies used to be closer to nature,…”