Amy N Cutter-Mackenzie

What's there, what if, what then, and what can we do? An immersive and embodied experience of environment and place through children's literature

We describe an immersive investigation of children’s contemporary picture books, which examines concepts of environment and place. The authors’ experience occurred through and alongside a community of learners, of preservice teachers and young children, in an urban coastal community, as part of an undergraduate, pre‐service teacher education unit. Participants were led through the experience utilizing techniques informed by immersive art pedagogy, to foreground the in‐between dispositions of their roles as artists, researchers, and teachers (A/r/tography), and their emerging roles as environmentalists (A/r/t‐e‐ography). Our investigation of the relationship between picture books and inquiry into their embodied experiences with the books awakened an awareness of environment and place, taking us from what’s there? to what if? to what then? to what can we do? This reflexive process provides an entry point into the second part of the article, a focused autoethnographic account of how environment and place might be treated pedagogically using Jeannie Baker’s 1991 book, Window.

Australian Waste Wise Schools Program: Its Past, Present, and Future

The Waste Wise Schools program has a longstanding history in Australia. It is an action-based program that encourages schools to move toward zero waste through their curriculum and operating practices. This article provides a review of the program, finding that it has had notable success in reducing schools’ waste through a “reduce, reuse, and recycle” (or “three Rs”) approach. Since the programs conception, an evaluation process has continually occurred alongside the actual program. This report presents the most recent program evaluation results: a 2007 statewide survey that was administered to 1,015 primary (elementary) and secondary teachers. The article outlines the past, present, and future directions of the Waste Wise Schools program and, in doing so, discusses the broader implications for school-based environmental education programs. In particular and of most significance, the findings reveal a growing sustainability culture in Australian schools and communities.

Experiencing environment and place through children's literature

Introduction: Experiencing Environment and Place through Childrens Literature Amy Cutter-Mackenzie, Philip Payne, and Alan Reid 1. Through Green Eyes: Complex Visual Culture and Post-Literacy Sidney Dobrin 2. Re-searching and re-storying the complex and complicated relationship of biophilia and bibliophilia Heesoon Bai, Daniela Elza, Peter Kovacs and Serenna Romanycia 3. Remarkable-tracking, experiential education of the ecological imagination Philip Payne 4. Childrens literature as a springboard to place-based embodied learning Linda Wason-Ellam 5. The Stories are the people and the land: Three educators respond to environmental teachings in Indigenous childrens literature Lisa Korteweg, Ismel Gonzales, and JoJo Guillet 6. Whats there, what if, what then and what can we do? An Immersive and Embodied Experience of Environment and Place through Childrens Literature Geraldine Burke and Amy Cutter-Mackenzie 7. Exploring instructional strategies to develop prospective elementary teacher childrens literature book evaluation skills for science, ecology and environmental education Bill Hug 8. Developing environmental agency and engagement through young peoples fiction Jean Webb and Stephen Bigger 9. The Lord of the Rings - a mythos applicable in unsustainable times? Alun Morgan 10. Reading The Lorax, orienting in potentiality Amy Sloane 11. Openings for researching environment and place in childrens literature: ecologies, potentials, realities, and challenges Alan Reid, Philip Payne and Amy Cutter-Mackenzie

Openings for researching environment and place in children’s literature: ecologies, potentials, realities and challenges

This not quite ‘final’ ending of this special issue of Environmental Education Research traces a series of hopeful, if somewhat difficult and at times challenging, openings for researching experiences of environment and place through children’s literature. In the first instance, we draw inspiration from the contributors who have authored, often autoethnographically, some of the art and craft of their respective ecopedagogies and research efforts. We then proceed with a reminder of the lurking presence of fear found in some of the articles published here and elsewhere, opening up the fear factor at large in broader everyday, social, political and global discourses to further scrutiny and a more optimistic quest when engaging children’s literature, its risks and its hopes. Our aim here, as noted in the Editorial, is to develop the discourse and practice of environmental education research in this area. Thus, we also explore how children’s literature has a pedagogical place in the positive social construction of intergenerational ethics focusing on how and what, and in what ways, textual and visual messages can be passed on to that next generation, and how and what they might take up creatively and imaginatively, in practice and conceptually. To do this, we offer thoughts on how children’s literature might draw selectively from broader aspects of the eco‐literature and humanities, and finally, on the basis of this collection, present a series of possible research issues and further deliberations to broadly nurture the development of research in this area.

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 childs 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 childs consumer behaviours.