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.

Posthuman research playspaces: Climate child imaginaries addresses the need for new forms of climate change education that are responsive to the rapidly changing material conditions of children's socioecological worlds. The book provides a comprehensive understanding of how posthumanist concepts and methods can be creatively developed and deployed in collaboration with children and young people. It connects climate change education with posthumanist studies of childhood in the social sciences and environmental humanities. It also offers opportunities for readers to encounter new theoretical and methodological approaches for collaborative art, inquiry, and learning with children. Drawing on three years of participatory research undertaken with 135 children in the Climate Change and Me (CC+Me) project, it takes children's creative and affective responses to climate change as the starting point for the co-production of knowledge, community engagement, and the transformation of pedagogy and curriculum in schools. Thinking through process philosophy, and in particular, the works of Whitehead and Deleuze, the book develops new concepts and methods of creative inquiry which situate children's learning, aesthetic production, and theory-building within a more-than-human ecology of experience. The book presents a series of generative openings and propositions for future research in the field of climate change education, while also offering wide-ranging applications for graduate students and researchers in childhood and youth studies, the environmental arts and humanities, cultural studies of science and technology, educational philosophy, and environmental education.

Posthuman research playspaces: Climate child imaginaries addresses the need for new forms of climate change education that are responsive to the rapidly changing material conditions of children's socioecological worlds. The book provides a comprehensive understanding of how posthumanist concepts and methods can be creatively developed and deployed in collaboration with children and young people. It connects climate change education with posthumanist studies of childhood in the social sciences and environmental humanities. It also offers opportunities for readers to encounter new theoretical and methodological approaches for collaborative art, inquiry, and learning with children. Drawing on three years of participatory research undertaken with 135 children in the Climate Change and Me (CC+Me) project, it takes children's creative and affective responses to climate change as the starting point for the co-production of knowledge, community engagement, and the transformation of pedagogy and curriculum in schools. Thinking through process philosophy, and in particular, the works of Whitehead and Deleuze, the book develops new concepts and methods of creative inquiry which situate children's learning, aesthetic production, and theory-building within a more-than-human ecology of experience. The book presents a series of generative openings and propositions for future research in the field of climate change education, while also offering wide-ranging applications for graduate students and researchers in childhood and youth studies, the environmental arts and humanities, cultural studies of science and technology, educational philosophy, and environmental education.

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."

This book is a transdisciplinary, international collection situated within a genealogy of experimental walking practices in the arts, arts-based research, and emergent walking practices in education. It brings together emerging cartographies of relation amongst walking practices ranging across arts-based, ecological, activist, decolonising, queer, critical and posthuman modes of inquiry. Its particular investment is in the proliferation of artful modes of inquiry that open up speculative practices and concepts of walking as an orientation for pedagogy, inquiry, and the everyday, resisting the gaze of privilege and the relentless commodification of human and nonhuman life processes. This is important work for the burgeoning demand for creative methodologies in the social sciences, and more specifically, for arts-based educational research.

This book focuses on socioecological learning through the touchstone concepts of the Anthropocene, the Posthuman and Common Worlds as Creative Milieux. The editors and contributors explore, situate and interrogate social learning through transdisciplinary positionings, exemplars and theories. The eclectic and cohesive chapters unfold as a journey that may inspire innovative and unique understandings of the socioecological learner: insights that will surely be paramount as we careen towards the 22nd century and all of its as-yet-unknown challenges. Offering tangible and nuanced practice for educational leadership in socioecological learning, this pioneering book will be of interest and value to researchers and educators at all levels. This volume is sure to appeal to students and scholars of socioecological learning as well as the Anthropocene and the Posthuman.

This volume offers an alternative vision for education and has been written for those who are passionate about teaching and learning, in schools, universities and in the community, and providing people with the values, knowledge and skills needed to face complex social and environmental challenges. Working across boundaries the socio-ecological educator is a visionary who strives to build community connections and strengthen relationships with the natural world. The ideas and real-world case studies presented in this book will bring that vision a step closer to reality.

In an era in which environmental education has been described as one of the most pressing educational concerns of our time, further insights are needed to understand how best to approach the learning and teaching of environmental education in early childhood education. In this book we address this concern by identifying two principles for using play-based learning early childhood environmental education. The principles we identify are the result of research conducted with teachers and children using different types of play-based learning whilst engaged in environmental education. Such play-types connect with the historical use of play-based learning in early childhood education as a basis for pedagogy. In the book 'Beyond Quality in ECE and Care' authors Dahlberg, Moss and Pence implore readers to ask critical questions about commonly held images of how young children come to construct themselves within social institutions. In similar fashion, this little book problematizes the taken-for-grantedness of the childhood development project in service to the certain cultural narratives. Cutter-Mackenzie, Edwards, Moore and Boyd challenge traditional conceptions of play-based learning through the medium of environmental education. This book signals a turning point in social thought grounded in a relational view of (environmental) education as experiential, intergenerational, interspecies, embodied learning in the third space. As Barad says, such work is based in inter-actions that can account for the tangled spaces of agencies. Through the deceptive simplicity of children's play, the book stimulates deliberation of the real purposes of pedagogy and of schooling. Paul Hart, University of Regina, Canada

This volume offers an alternative vision for education and has been written for those who are passionate about teaching and learning, in schools, universities and in the community, and providing people with the values, knowledge and skills needed to face complex social and environmental challenges. Working across boundaries the socio-ecological educator is a visionary who strives to build community connections and strengthen relationships with the natural world. The ideas and real-world case studies presented in this book will bring that vision a step closer to reality. "

This book focuses on critical walking and mapping practices through the research methodology of a/r/tography. Initially establishing seven global sites for employing movement-based research practices within culturally conceived a/r/tographic perspectives, the book builds upon and extends an international community of practice. The editors and contributors apply public pedagogy through a/r/tographic and critical walking inquiry, and explore how these forms may be engaged, understood and expanded globally. The chapters examine how a/r/tography and walking inquiry can be practiced, theorised, experienced, extended and conceptualised. The cartographic perspectives, theoretical positions and conceptual investigations included in this collection respond to the fundamental contemporary need for new and fresh models of teaching, learning and scholarship regarding global and local educational and social challenges. They offer tangible, aesthetic and rigorous examples for researchers, educators, community practitioners and research students to engage with a/r/tography and critical walking inquiry.

This book focuses on socioecological learning through the touchstone concepts of the Anthropocene, the Posthuman and Common Worlds as Creative Milieux. The editors and contributors explore, situate and interrogate social learning through transdisciplinary positionings, exemplars and theories. The eclectic and cohesive chapters unfold as a journey that may inspire innovative and unique understandings of the socioecological learner: insights that will surely be paramount as we careen towards the 22nd century and all of its as-yet-unknown challenges. Offering tangible and nuanced practice for educational leadership in socioecological learning, this pioneering book will be of interest and value to researchers and educators at all levels. This volume is sure to appeal to students and scholars of socioecological learning as well as the Anthropocene and the Posthuman.

This book investigates the relationships between environmental education teacher education preparation and the willingness of student teachers to practice environmental education in their teaching. Student teachers' and lecturers/professors' environmental education knowledge, attitudes and practices were explored through a qualitative, ethnographic-based research approach. The study revealed that novice teachers of the options generation who are exposed to more authentic pre-service environmental education teacher preparation are more likely to be environmentally active and informed, with greater knowledge, a more positive attitude and a greater disposition towards implementing environmental education in primary schools. In short, the study identified that the introduction of separate authentic pre-service environmental education courses, with knowledgeable and enthusiastic lecturers/professors, is the most likely means of advancing the end goals of environmental education and in turn the production of an ecoliterate citizenry.

Dr Cutter-Mackenzie's PhD study was aimed squarely at examining the scope and range of Australian primary school teachers' eco-literacy (their knowledge and beliefs). It was a benchmarking study revealing the connections between what researchers, syllabus writers and key stakeholders expect teachers to know and to teach, and what teachers actually know and teach. The study employed a rigorous qualitative and quantitative research methodology, identifying that teachers are likely to be functioning at a 'knowledge' level of eco-illiteracy and/or nominal eco-literacy. Such primary school teachers tended to dismiss the importance of knowledge, preferring to focus upon attitudes/values in the teaching of environmental education. The findings identify eco-literacy as the "missing paradigm" in environmental education and education more broadly. Such findings can be placed in wider theoretical arguments to do with knowledge and its apparent lack of focus in education over the past thirty years. In any case, such levels of eco-literacy are inadequate if eco-literate students and thus an eco-literate citizenry are to be achieved within schools.