Childhoods past and present: anxiety and idyll in reminiscences of childhood outdoor play and contemporary parenting practices

ABSTRACT

Outdoor play is considered an essential aspect of a ‘proper childhood’. However, unsupervised outside play is declining, a decline attributed to parental anxieties about children’s safety. However what drives these anxieties and how this impacts on contemporary outdoor play is less clear. Our paper seeks to explore this through an analysis of adult narratives generated through digital map-making and forum discussion about where they played as children and where they would allow a child to play unsupervised now. Our analysis explores the nature of these narratives and pivotal moments in which adults articulated the disconnect between their own recollections of idyllic spatial freedom and the spatial restrictions they place on contemporary children. This offers a rich understanding of how parents navigate conflicting cultural imperatives on risk-avoidance and children’s rights to a ‘good’ childhood.     

The emergence of early childhood education outdoor programs in British Columbia: a meandering story

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the emergence of early childhood education outdoor programs in British Columbia, Canada. The story told follows paths not dissimilar from how one might observe children on a walk to the park. While the park is the destination, it is the journey to the park, of picking up pebbles, looking at flowers, and finding sticks, that enlivens and binds the journey. Through our consideration of stories from a number of outdoor programs, we weave patterns that join their emergence and consider how their stories might sustain and encourage educational action.     

Engaging children to voice their sense of place through location-based story making with photo-story maps

ABSTRACT

Sense of place is neither linear nor rooted in time. One way for children to voice their sense of place is through location-based stories with plots structured in space, rather than time. Since mobile devices are already ingrained in the everyday lives of many children in the U.S., a mobile application offers a familiar medium to engage children in location-based story making. Here, we present photo-story maps, our approach to leveraging an existing story-map mobile application as a research tool to collect and analyze children’s stories about sense of place. We found that photo-story maps facilitate the organization of nonlinear location-based stories, promote an inclusive story-making process through a mobile application, support triangulation of varied digital story elements, and provide dynamic interview material. We suggest photo-story maps demonstrate the value of location-based story making and the potential of familiar mobile applications for reducing the barriers to including children in research.     

Collapsing contexts: social networking technologies in young people’s nightlife

In the latest discussions of children and young people’s new geographies of leisure and pleasure, one controversial issue has been how digital technologies co-produce and reconfigure young people’s everyday worlds. This article draws on semi-structured interviews with 40 young people who regularly use social networking technologies in their nightlife experiences in Zurich and Lausanne, two nightlife hubs in Switzerland. Informed by Danah Boyd’s concepts of ‘collapsing contexts’ and ‘imagined audiences’, this article enables a critical engagement with young people’s emerging understanding of their nightlife contexts, which are increasingly permeated by networking technologies. I show how social networking spaces facilitate the coming together, or collapse, of various social contexts which induce young people to imagine multiple audiences, including authority figures, in their nightlife practices. These collapsing contexts and imagined audiences, I argue, present new perspectives on debates about control and surveillance in young people’s contemporary urban nightlife.     

Young people’s everyday landscapes of security and insecurity

Abstract

Debates about ‘security’ rarely feature children or younger people, whilst research with children and young people seldom focuses upon issues traditionally found within security studies. Building upon long-standing debates about political geographies of youth and political participation as well as feminist geopolitics and emerging discussions about children’s and young people’s geopolitics, we chart young people’s everyday landscapes of security and insecurity. Key themes explored here include: secure pasts and insecure futures; ontological security and insecure selves; online security and digital insecurities; home(land) securities and insecure households and families; and global securities and insecure worlds.     

Critical spatial learning: participatory mapping,spatial histories,and youth civic engagement

As digital technologies become ubiquitous in many places, scholars of civic engagement, youth and political life, and geographic education have explored the potential of teaching critical and spatial thinking through digital technologies. This paper examines interactive digital mapping as a technology environment for teaching and practicing critical spatial thinking, in relation to civic engagement. From this participatory and dialogic mapping project with teenage girls in Seattle, Washington, we develop a conceptualization of critical spatial thinking that emphasizes how social and spatial processes intertwine to generate societal inequalities and show how this learning informs students’ social and spatial civic responses. We show how interactive digital mapping pedagogies offer students an opportunity to develop awareness of what happens in their urban geographies, but also how and what they might do to intervene.     

Childhood narratives: adult reflections on encounters with difference in everyday spaces

Research on children and young people commonly focuses on the present experiences of childhood. Yet Philo, C. [2003. “‘To Go Back up the Side Hill’: Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood.” Children's Geographies 1 (1): 7–24] has argued that we might also access the ‘worlds’ of children and childhood through the memories or recollections of adults, given that we have all been children once. In response, this paper explores the narratives of adults reflecting on their childhood experiences and in particular, on the formation of their attitudes towards difference. The paper offers a means of understanding how adults reflect on their childhood encounters with difference, how their attitudes towards difference are developed over time and the extent to which these childhood narratives are carried into adult lives. This is not to suggest that early experiences are deterministic. Rather, individuals can reflect on their own lives and encounters and choose to change or react to wider social relations in new ways such that they produce and embody new dispositions.     

A visual ethnographic pilot study of school travel for families living with childhood disability

ABSTRACT

Children’s school transport has become a major research focus over the past 20 years, particularly within the fields of planning, transport geography, and children’s geographies. However, this work has rarely considered children living with disability. This article presents the pilot component of a visual ethnographic study about school transport within families living with childhood disability. It explains why we piloted the study, details the pilot process, and presents lessons learned from piloting the study with two families of children living with different mobility needs. The lessons largely concern the design of interview guides and the interviewing process, as well as the development of an adaptive photo kit to enable children’s independent participation. The article shows how piloting qualitative studies, particularly those involving disabled children, can be invaluable in terms of improving data collection technologies and logistics, as well as enabling inclusive participation.     

Participatory work with young children: the trouble and transformation of age-based hierarchies

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the ways that participatory work with young children was actually lived in practice, in one early childhood setting. Drawing on an ethnographic study, the paper argues that disruption of age-based hierarchy was key for making space and time for young children’s meaningful participation. Practitioners held a strong, nuanced view of young children’s ‘richness’, rather than defining young children in terms of what they lack. The finished state of adulthood was troubled, with adults seen as fellow ‘emergent becomings’, in the process of learning alongside children. However, despite conscious efforts to deconstruct age-based hierarchy, age and life experience remained troublesome concepts at the nursery. The paper examines tensions and limitations in how far adults were willing to cede control to young children, focusing on the example of care routines. The paper contends that participatory work with children must itself be maintained as a space for inquiry and reflection.     

Beyond exploitation/empowerment: re-imagining Southern producers in commodity stories

One of the most dominant strands of research within cultural geography's ‘materialist turn’ is that of commodity stories. Through everything from phones to flowers, geographers have attempted to reveal the myriad connections between (Northern) consumers and (Southern) producers. Following commodities and tracing their networks, this research tends to privilege consumption as the primary site of social and cultural meaning within the global economy. Where producers are the focus, the theoretical framework for understanding their lives is typically a developmentalist one, foregrounding exploitation and/or empowerment. Thus, we learn little from commodity stories about the ordinary lives of Southern producers and the co-production of the sociocultural and the economic through their everyday practices. This paper argues that deeper sociocultural analysis of the processes of production is necessary to balance the current dominance of consumption-led commodity stories and, more importantly, to open up space for a re-imagining of Southern producers. Through the personal accounts of fourty beadwork producers in Cape Town, I explore how the everyday practices of craft production sustain existing social relations, generate new networks, and help to shape both a sense of belonging and a sense of self. This commodity story reveals Southern producers' lives to be both richer and more mundane than dominant constructions suggest.     

Revolutionary possibilities of love in a time of disaster,decolonisation, and diffraction

Representations of love appear across many disciplines and discursive fields that are and should be in conversation with geography. It is imperative that geographers engage in formidable but worthy tasks to distil diverse renderings of love into the regenerative interventions we urgently need. Those interventions require geographically minded interpretations of love to drive radical research, pedagogies, policies, and practices in ways that have direct and indirect effects across the life course and life worlds. Such labours are mediated by state and law, by intersectional relations, or by neuroscience, and involve asking how love underwrites critical infrastructures—of place (making), care and entanglements, colonialism, and human-nature relations in the Anthropocene and posthuman—that lead to the flourishing futures we seek. Rich geographical studies oriented to those tasks still face charges of flattening difference. This commentary picks up one aspect of this agenda: a blind spot in geographical research relating to the ethical imperative to love based on benevolence. Instead, I champion the revolutionary possibilities for geography to inform policies, pedagogies, and practices by using a love based on alterity aligned with social weight, reasserting accessible science as an effective driver of social and system transformative changes. Specifically, I argue for a regenerative socio-political analytic of love in a time of disaster, decolonisation, and diffraction.     

The lived experiences of school lunch: an empathy-based study with children in Sweden

ABSTRACT

School lunch is in general regulated through policies and agendas constituted by the perspectives of adults. In this article, we focus on children’s lived experiences of school lunch with a special emphasis on emotions and how they relate to social and physical dimensions. This study draws on empathy-based stories written by 10–11 year olds (n?=?171) from schools in Sweden. We identified three themes: Interaction and exposure, Routines and restrictions and Food and eating. The children’s lived experiences of school lunch and the emotions attached to them are closely associated and intertwined with the socio-spatial dimension of school lunch. A pleasant meal experience seems to require harmonization between the physical and social space whilst negative experiences contain tensions between them, something that actors working with school lunch and school lunch environments should take in consideration when resourcing, planning and scheduling school lunch, and also when designing new school restaurants.     

The educational work of a National Museum: creating knowledgeable young citizens in Ottawa,Canada

ABSTRACT

This article explores the geographies of education at the National Museum of Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. Through an analysis of the spatialization of children’s museum education, we highlight how the museum sought to inculcate in young Canadians knowledges about their country, its people, and natural resources. We situate children’s museum education within the broader context of Canadian nationalism, other museum activities, and public education in the capital. Focusing on the design and material organization of the museum, we highlight how the space of the museum, from the objects on display to the imposing grandeur of the building, sought to impress upon students the importance of the knowledge it conveyed. Finally, we illustrate how the museum’s programming aimed to provide children with knowledge of their national heritage, building citizenship through claims of development as destiny.     

Street child spaces: belonging,conflict and resistance in the city of Durban through the eyes of street youth

ABSTRACT

This article is concerned with the everyday ‘spatial tactics’ deployed by children in a street situation in order to deal with notions of public space that define them as ‘out of place’, marginal and deviant. Using photovoice, we reconstruct former street children’s definitions of and feelings about their spaces in the city, bringing into view a complex set of social problems, attitudes and strategies that moves beyond the traditional binary notion of street children as either deviants or victims. This work points to the importance of finding ways to ensure the voices of marginalized and disadvantaged children are heard and presents the narratives that are important to our understanding of their worlds. Analyzing their spatiality in contexts of conflict, belonging and resistance, we found that children and youth in a street situation are mainly concerned with empowering themselves and resisting dominant labels and police repression.     

How to Produce a Digital Story

Modern day students are said to hold a toolbox of technical knowledge, which can assist them with their undergraduate studies. The ‘net generation’ is more technologically capable than ever before and crave interactivity and image-rich environments, which has created a need for higher education institutions to diversify assessment practices. Digital stories (this refers to a collection of still images, audio and video) as a means for assessing Geography undergraduates, lend themselves well to fieldwork activities, and this paper provides practical advice and guidance to students on how to create the best digital stories for assessment.     

Public art as public pedagogy: memorial landscapes of the Cambodian genocide

Historical memory in the form of public art acts as a pedagogical tool, both revealing the artist’s interpretation of history and serving as a historical device for the viewer. In Cambodia, new generations are developing an understanding of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979) and its effect on their country’s history. Young peoples’ understanding of history is constructed through institutional, living, and public memory pedagogies. These pedagogical channels do not always work in unison, leaving gaps in historical education. In Cambodia, institutional and living memory pedagogies on the Khmer Rouge genocide often fail to transmit this important national history to those who did not live through it. Publicly accessible memorial art has the potential to supplement the historical understanding of young, rural Cambodians. Three murals sites in rural Cambodia act as landscapes of public pedagogy by depicting scenes of Khmer Rouge atrocities. This paper aims to understand the significance of the impact and implications of public memorial art as an educational supplement, and how public art can be utilized as public pedagogy in Cambodia and beyond.     

Lost in translation: exploring childhood identity using photo-elicitation

Photo-elicitation is recognised as a visual method which can enhance children’s participation in research and is responsive to childhood experiences. This paper reports on a participatory study which employed photo-elicitation and examines what this method can reveal about research designed to explore children’s identity. Twenty children (6–10 years) were given a digital camera to take pictures ‘all about me’ at home and an after-school club. In addition, parents and practitioners participated in semi-structured interviews. This paper considers the materiality of photo-elicitation and describes the different ways in which children build narratives using photographs as interview prompts. Despite the capacity for photo-elicitation to enable children to take pictures of material things which forge connections to embodied, affective and routine identity processes, this paper critically examines how photographs as material things are made sense of and potentially translated within social practices bounded by power dynamics.     

Generation as a social variable

ABSTRACT

In this short paper, I start with a case study – about how elementary school children in the early twentieth century in England understood their responsibilities vis-à-vis family (and school). This example provides a window into a past which deeply contrasts with present-day children’s and adults’ understandings and lives. I go on to consider (very briefly, for the field is vast) how ideas about childhood changed in the interwar years and how, since then, children have become locked into educational establishments – as well as into families. It seems to me that in these circumstances we are not used to thinking of children as thoughtful and active members of society. So it is no surprise to me that adults do not look to inter-relations with children as key variables towards understanding the social order. I note that my emphasis is on the UK, since I know most about that!     

Education for what? Shaping the field of climate change education with children and young people as co-researchers

ABSTRACT

Children and young people are often positioned as the next generation of leaders in whom the public imagines or expects to overcome the legacies of climate and environmental inaction. Increasingly analyses of progress in environmental education independently identify the need for researchers and teachers to ‘listen to children’s voices’. In this paper we argue that climate change education presents a significant platform not only for youth voices, but also for a genuine activation of children’s political agency in schools, universities, and the public domain. In so doing, we draw upon the government funded project Climate Change?+?Me, which has involved working with 135 children and young people from across Northern NSW, Australia as co-researchers investigating young people’s voices in climate change. We conclude that climate change education can open up an entirely new field of educational experience and inquiry when it is inclusive of and led by young people.     

World Making,Critical Pedagogies,and the Geographical Imagination: Where Youth Work Meets Participatory Research

Renewed interest in the critical geographies of education has raised productive yet under‐examined synergies with reflections taking place among radical youth work and participatory research practitioners. In particular, such intersections point to important ways that the geographical imagination might advance a critical yet creative means of learning through the living material forces of everyday worlds. This paper examines this common ground through a collaborative, London‐based case study exploring young people's sense of home and belonging in the inner‐city. It argues that cross‐overs between the praxis of participatory research and youth work offer generative potential to act alongside young people in the production of autonomous geographical knowledges. Specifically, the case is made for prioritising an imaginative, experiential and intersubjective pedagogical process of “world making”, as an alternative to practices that intervene in, act upon and ultimately “other” the everyday lives of young people.