Postitive Youth Development

• Positive youth development is an assets-based approach for cultivating competencies essential to personal well-being. • When environmental education enables children and youths to contribute to improving urban environments, it can not only increase cities\u27 sustainability and resilience but also foster young people\u27s personal growth. • Participatory action research, peer education, and youth civic engagement are three educational approaches that can lead to positive change for both urban environments and youths living within them

The mesh of playing, theorising and researching in the reality of climate change: creating the co-research playspace.

This chapter develops the concept of the ‘co-research playspace’ as a methodological figure for working with children as co-researchers and co-artists. This concept emerged through our collaborative research and artistic co-production with 135 children who participated in the Climate Change and Me project (2014-2016) in Northern NSW, Australia. Drawing on Winnicott’s concepts of ‘transitional space’ and ‘transitional objects’ in relation to children’s art and environmental play, we locate the co-research playspace within the mesh of children’s playing, theorising and researching in the reality of climate change. In developing the concept of the co-research playspace, we specifically focus on that ways that iPads functioned as transitional objects within the Climate Change and Me project. This leads us to further analyse the ways that children used digital video as a ‘transitional medium’ that allowed them to experiment with new forms of co-production and creative resistance. Through our analysis of films produced by children in the project, we outline a series of three political-aesthetic modes of response to climate change that break with the predominant moralistic discourse surrounding the issue: I. critical interventions in public space; II. wild, absurd, and improvisational disruptions; and III. the creation of thought experiments and alternative worlds. The chapter concludes with the consideration of ‘children as para-academic researchers’, a concept that emphasises children’s abilities to invent their own modes of co-creation and critical inquiry that disrupt normative research protocols and associated adult expectations

The Parental Milieu: Biosocial connections with nonhuman animals, technologies, and the Earth

This article develops the concept of the “parental milieu” as a theoretical tool for biosocial research in environmental education and the emerging field of critical life studies. Using the concept of milieu as a catalyst for theoretical inquiry, we map several movements and variations of the term through the 20th century works of von Uexkull, Simondon, and Deleuze and Guattari. This results in the development of four propositions that connect the parental milieu with the territorial milieu of the animal world; the technical milieu of ubiquitous digital networks; the metabolic milieu of consumption; and the trans-qualitative milieu of fluid relations and queer kinships. We conclude with a call for transgenerational research that addresses the ways that the parental milieu intersects with children's environmental learning and ­ethico-aesthetic sensibilities

Call for research – the consuming child-in-context in unhealthy and unsustainable times

Childhood obesity is a highly complex issue with serious health and environmental implications. It has been postulated that young children (preschool-aged in particular) are able to internalise positive environmental beliefs. Applying a socioecological theoretical perspective, in this discussion paper we argue that although children may internalise such beliefs, they commonly behave in ways that contradict these beliefs as demonstrated by their consumer choices. The media directly influences these consumer choices and growing evidence suggests that media exposure (particularly commercial television viewing) may be a significant “player” in the prediction of childhood obesity. However, there is still debate as to whether childhood obesity is caused by digital media use per se or whether other factors mediate this relationship. Growing evidence suggests that researchers should examine whether different types of content have conflicting influences on a child’s consumer choices and, by extension, obesity. The extent to which young children connect their consumer choices and the sustainability of the product/s they consume with their overall health and wellbeing has not previously been researched. To these ends, we call for further research on this socioecological phenomenon among young children, particularly with respect to the influence of digital media use on a child’s consumer behaviours

Promoting healthy eating, active play and sustainability consciousness in early childhood curricula, addressing the Ben10™ problem: a randomised control trial

Background: This paper details the research protocol for a study funded by the Australian Research Council. An integrated approach towards helping young children respond to the significant pressures of ‘360 degree marketing’ on their food choices, levels of active play, and sustainability consciousness via the early childhood curriculum is lacking. The overall goal of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of curriculum interventions that educators design when using a pedagogical communication strategy on children’s knowledge about healthy eating, active play and the sustainability consequences of their toy food and toy selections. Methods/Design: This cluster-randomised trial will be conducted with 300, 4 to 5 year-old children attending pre-school. Early childhood educators will develop a curriculum intervention using a pedagogical communication strategy that integrates content knowledge about healthy eating, active play and sustainability consciousness and deliver this to their pre-school class. Children will be interviewed about their knowledge of healthy eating, active play and the sustainability consequences of their food and toy selections. Parents will complete an Eating and Physical Activity Questionnaire rating their children’s food preferences, digital media viewing and physical activity habits. All measures will be administered at baseline, the end of the intervention and 6 months post intervention. Informed consent will be obtained from all parents and the pre-school classes will be allocated randomly to the intervention or wait-list control group. Discussion: This study is the first to utilise an integrated pedagogical communication strategy developed specifically for early childhood educators focusing on children’s healthy eating, active play, and sustainability consciousness. The significance of the early childhood period, for young children’s learning about healthy eating, active play and sustainability, is now unquestioned. The specific teaching and learning practices used by early childhood educators, as part of the intervention program, will incorporate a sociocultural perspective on learning; this perspective emphasises building on the play interests of children, that are experienced within the family and home context, as a basis for curriculum provision. Trial Registration: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry ACTRN12614000363684: Date registered: 07/04/201

Children of an Earth to Come: Speculative fiction, geophilosophy and climate change education research

Over the last three years, the Climate Change and Me project has mapped children and young people’s affective, creative and ontological relationships with climate change through an emergent and child-framed research methodology. The project has involved working with 135 children and young people from across Northern NSW, Australia as co-researchers responding to the rapidly changing material conditions of the Anthropocene epoch. In this paper, we position speculative fiction as a mode of creative research which enabled the young researchers to inhabit possible climate change futures. This node of the Climate Change and Me research was initiated by co-author Jasmyne, who at the time was a year seven student at a local high school. Through an ongoing series of visual and textual posts on the project website, Jasmyne created an alternate world in which children develop mutant forces and bodily augmentations that enable them to resist social and environmental injustices. Drawing on these visual and textual entries in dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy, we consider ways that speculative fiction might offer new conceptual tools for a viral strain of climate change education that proliferates through aesthetic modes of expression

\u27The garden is a place where I don’t feel discriminated against\u27… teaching & learning cultural diversity through food gardening

A significant number of Australian schools are implementing gardening programs. Grant and Littlejohn (2004, pg.92) describe this as “transforming barren expanses of asphalt and frayed grass into exciting natural spaces for learning, playing and socialising”. The benefits of gardening programs have become increasingly more convincing to schools as teachers seek pedagogical approaches to engage children in experiential learning and work towards tackling societal concerns such as childhood obesity and environmental sustainability (Miller, 2007). The desire to enable children to experience ‘slow’, less technologically focused experiences (Payne, 2003; Payne & Wattchow, 2008) and to address concerns that children are growing up with what Louv (2005) describes as “Nature Deficit Disorder” are additional drivers that have led teachers and communities to embrace school gardens programs. The focus of the paper is the Multicultural School Gardens program that is being implemented in disadvantaged schools in the Western suburbs of Melbourne that use food gardening and cultural diversity as a focus for implementing a holistic environmental education program. The participating schools have high proportions of migrant and refugee families. Alongside the implementation of the Multicultural School Gardens program a research process has occurred where the children researched their experiences. The children’s research has shown that the Multicultural School Gardens program has acted as a catalyst for cultural tolerance and understanding in highly culturally diverse schools and communities. To this end, this paper explores the accomplishments, challenges and implications in teaching and learning cultural diversity through food gardening programs