Trusting children: How do surveillance technologies alter a child's experience of trust, risk and responsibility

The growing use of new forms of surveillance technology across the day-to-day lives of children and the spaces they inhabit brings with it potential changes to childhood experience. These technologies may change the way children interact with others and the way they come to understand the world around them. This article investigates the nature of these changes by looking at the impact of new surveillance technologies on a child’s experience of trust. It aims to show that an increased surveillance presence across a child’s everyday activity may be denying children important opportunities both to trust others and to be trusted

Workshop: Writing Small Weather Stories to Change the Narrative

Theme: Postqualitative Research (Voicing Places): Basic Skills and Good Practic

Weather bodies: Experimenting with dance improvisation in environmental education in the early years

This paper reports on insights gained from incorporating dance improvisation into a broader early years environmental education ethnographic research project. Findings are reported from a two-day workshop where a dancer was invited to work with young children to attune to the weather through their bodies. In these workshops, the practice of dance improvisation was used as a deliberate interference to disrupt the disconnected and disembodied ways in which weather is often taught to young children. The paper argues that when children attune with weather through the embodied and relational practice of dance improvisation, this challenges the common practice of learning about weather as a separate phenomenon happening outside the classroom. Dance, as an intervention, helps to de-stabilise binary human-nature relations and reveals how children might come to understand their (human) selves as also weather bodies. New ways to understand humans’ entanglements with current weather events are also articulated, offering educators and researchers strategies for considering how the practice of dance improvisation might be integrated into early years education as an innovative approach to environmental learning

Moved by winds and storms : Imaginings in a changing landscape

In this chapter, I (re)imagine the human and more-than-human entanglements that are forged in the aftermath of two different wind and stormy events. Windy storm happenings continually shift and shape the world over time and space. Thinking of human mobility as happening with an earth that is itself on the move, can offer insights into how human movement is always in relation to and becoming part of the places we move through. I draw attention to the liveliness of place using Massey’s notion of ‘place and landscape as events, as happenings’ and Yusoff’s invitation to think of the inhuman forces that shape us across time, space and matter. Stormy and windy events offer an opening to think with dramatic shifts in earth and atmosphere to reveal the ways that humans engage in an ongoing negotiation with the elements; not just as a wild bodily and affective dance with weather, but a co-mingling of agency between human and inhuman forces. The narratives presented here reveal how storms and deep earthly movements from a distant past shape and exceed the ‘here and now’ and offer an imagining of being moved in a moving world

Higher stakes – the hidden risks of school security fences for children’s learning environments

In a move away from the open or low-fenced grounds that have traditionally been a feature of Australian school design, the last decade has seen a growth in the installation of high-security fences around schools. These structures, far from being passive and neutral, act to redefine the possibilities for movement and connectivity in the local landscape. This paper looks beyond the impact of fences on safety and security to explore the wider implications of these structures. By bringing together perspectives on children’s experience of independent mobility, belonging and attachment to place, the paper opens up new avenues for thinking about how children’s learning is shaped by the relationship between school, community and the boundaries between them. It provides a starting point for understanding how high-security boundaries can impact on children’s learning and why at times these structures may pose more risks than those they aim to address

Planning for flexible and innovative school spaces: Safety and risk

The chapter presents an analysis of the challenges that arise when children’s movements and activities in school grounds become limited or overcontrolled as a result of the requirements set out in safety and security policies. The discussion focuses on policies at both national and local levels that aim to respond to a particular risk (or perceived risk) of potential harm to people or property in schools. This includes an examination of safety in the playground and the tensions teachers often face between duty of care obligations and the pedagogical imperative to provide challenging and creative activities. The implications of security policy in schools, as implemented via mechanisms such as secured fences and surveillance technologies, are also examined to better understand how these might impact on both student and teacher experience with school spaces. In this discussion, the significance of implementing school safety and security policy within an educational context is explored. A number of strategies and areas for future research emerge on how school spaces may be made sufficiently safe for children and at the same time provide them with opportunities to take risks, to build authentic encounters with the world around them, and to foster skills for lifelong learning in a changing and uncertain world

Weathering time : Walking with young children in a changing climate

Children growing up today face a multitude of climate-related challenges, requiring a capacity for creative and ethical modes of attending to both the known and unknown effects of a changing climate. In response to these challenges, I explore the potential in children’s weathering encounters, as observed during an ethnographic research project titled Walking with Wildlife in Wild Weather Times. In particular, I consider the various ways children engage with the weather and what this reveals about our (human) interconnections and minglings with the weather world. In this paper, I focus specifically on the temporal dimensions of child/weather encounters. My aim is to show that taking the time with children to slow down and attend to the elemental affects in the world, can reveal a weathered entanglement of past, present and future and a foundation for a curious and open attentiveness in responding to the climate challenges ahead

Shame and the virtual gaze : Supporting children's encounters in online worlds

As the virtual gaze of another becomes an increasingly prevalent feature in children's lives, this paper aims to explore some of the emotional complexities of the emerging physical/virtual landscape of children's experience. Based on an analysis of the emotion of shame, the paper explores the new challenges that children face both now and in the future in their virtual encounters and relations with others. It is argued that virtual spaces bring new dimensions to emotional experience, at times making it more difficult to realise the productive potential of shame. This is because the gaze or imagined gaze of another, as invoked through the experience of shame, occurs in conditions of uncertainty, has no boundaries and may arise at any time in the future. These insights are significant if we are to support children in building a capacity to restore the self and be resilient in these new spaces of social encounter

Spy Kids Too: Encounters with surveillance through games and play

As modes of surveillance become more digitised, it will be difficult for children to escape or resist the network of data-capture that pervades the spaces they inhabit. They will also have to make decisions about the opportunities they are presented with to ‘look into’ the lives of others. In this context, it is important to explore how children come to understand the practice of surveillance and what it means to be both the watched and the watcher. How might children respond to the social, privacy and ethical implications of these new spaces and relations? Focusing on childhood play, this chapter takes up these issues by looking at the ways that particular games open up spaces where children can grapple with issues such as power, exposure, secrecy and deception