Environmental education as cultural learning: Children's experience-based ideas, beliefs and feelings about nature and natural environments

Children’s environmental education is grounded in everyday cultural learning. This claim rests on several premises: 1) that nature is everywhere (Valkonen 2) that all places – forests, gardens, city streets, and shopping malls - are learning environments (Olteanu and 3) that all human relationships with nature, including scientific ones, are inevitably cultural (MacNaughton & Urry 1998). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Paris, Velika Gorica and Aarhus under the auspices of REGREEN, an EU Horizon 2020 project, the article explores cultural facets of environmental education within and beyond school sand raises questions about how the ’nature’ children encounter is physically and symbolically constituted. Focusing on children’s cultural learning in specific physical/symbolic environments raises questions of how children come to understand and act in worlds not of their own making. While education is often thought of as what adults teach children in schools, cultural learning is an ongoing quotidian process. Like everyone, children educate themselves daily by paying attention to what is, what is going on, who does/says what, what matters to whom, and figuring out what to do next. They do not however necessarily share adult versions of which aspects of the world most warrant their attention and imagination (Toren 1993, 2012). A focus on children’s cultural learning draws attention to the discontinuities and contradictions inherent in all learning processes and environments. Through descriptive juxtaposition, the article explores culturally mediated environmental learning in Paris (France), Velika Gorica (Croatia) and Aarhus (Denmark). The claim here is that children’s quotidian learning is impacted by particularities of place and meaning. Topography, vegetation and the spatial, social and symbolic organization of places co-construct where children find and place nature, and also how they understand and interact with various forms and aspects of nature. The article also explores how nature is construed and enacted as teachers select which aspects of nature to teach and which to ignore. Ostensibly a simple task, deciding whether to inventory schoolyard hedgehogs or rats involves considerations at once structural, legal, collegial, cultural, pedagogical, social, moral, aesthetic and hygienic. Such complex constraints contribute to how schools fashion particular versions of nature for children. In conclusion, the article argues for greater awareness among those with power and mandate to create habitats for living - educators, planners, politicians, architects, engineers, scientists and builders - that learning is an intergenerational life process in which all participate. As such their decisions and actions greatly impact the quotidian environmental learning processes of children and adults alike.