VIRTUAL Prague Research & Teaching Conference

Abstract

My recent PhD research investigates children’s embodied connections with Nature. It seeks to understand how children encounter Nature at the beach through their bodies and how this correspondence may be captured and communicated beyond words. It builds on existing studies of children’s relationships with Nature and the role of their bodies in learning. The study explicitly questions whether Western pedagogical conventions, characteristic of many European and British mainstream schools, are sufficient to authentically engage children with the natural world. This learning is under the auspices of Learning for Sustainability (LfS) in Scotland. LfS is positioned across the formal curriculum to encourage children to tread more lightly upon the planet. The research involved 27 schoolchildren aged eight and nine who visited a local beach. Once there, they engaged in various arts-based activities, such as poetry writing, photography, drawing, and modelling. The children literally and figuratively drew and built upon their experiences at the beach to better understand their place in relation to the other species found there. As the children co-responded through their bodies with Nature, week on week, a rich tapestry of dynamic bodymind experiences was collected. These revelations in knowing, Haraway might have termed ‘situated knowledges’, the children called Becoming Naturish. We captured our evolving beach identities over time and published them as a class comic. Although this research was principally designed to explore the body’s function in children’s learning, it strongly indicates an invaluable role for arts-based research methods and methodologies in Higher Education. I argue that my conventionally published PhD thesis’s unique contribution to knowledge is just as evident, maybe more so, in this children’s classroom magazine! It is this magazine I wish to share with you!