Dawn Sanders

Making Public the Private Life of Plants: The Contribution of Informal Learning Environments.

Plants are essential to life on Earth and yet are often deemed invisible by the human populace. Botanic gardens are an under‐researched educational context and, as such, have occupied a peripheral arena in biology education discussions. This article seeks to readdress this absence and present the case for a more sustained use of informal learning environments, such as botanic gardens and homes, to make public the private life of plants and their role in sustaining life on Earth. By drawing on empirical data from a doctoral thesis and reviewing relevant research literature, the author argues for a renewed focus on botanical education within science education in both formal and informal contexts.

Drawing attention to the ‘green side of life’

The notion of plant-blindness, the inability of humans to notice plants in their environment, has been much examined. Similarly, plant scientists have criticised the seemingly zoocentric focus of a biological education, which appears to neglect plants. Furthermore, there are stark contrasts between the active plant behaviours evidenced in current research journals and their seemingly lacklustre counterparts in school curricula. By utilising a body of relevant literature and drawing on empirical data sets, the authors consider the ways in which affective experiences, through personal encounters, observations and guided explorations, can enhance students’ attention to the ‘green side of life’.

On Food, Farming and Land Management: Towards a research agenda to reconnect urban and rural lives

Science education has a key role to play in helping people to develop their understanding of the local and global dimensions of food, farming and land management. Based on a review of the literature on what is known about young people’s (3–19) views towards and learning about these topics, a research agenda is outlined for consideration by the science education research community.

School Councils as an Arena for Pupils' Participation in Collaborative Environmental Education Projects

This chapter discusses pupils’ participation in collaborative projects between schools and external actors in environmental education. The two case studies that are presented – from the Danish Eco School project, and The School Grounds Development Projects (run by Learning Through Landscapes) in England – are approaches to educational change in environmental education that take place within a school setting, and in both cases our interest is in the pupils’ participation in school councils. The chapter focuses on the roles of pupils, teachers, and outside actors in collaborative projects, and the different, and sometimes inconsistent, understandings of the school councils as arenas for collaboration and participation.

Learning in Cultivated Gardens and Other Outdoor Landscapes

Much has been written on childhood experiences of gardens as places in which physical and imaginary experiences converge (e.g. Pollan, 1991). Similarly, recent research has examined the capacity of gardens and school grounds to provide artefacts and spaces for children to assimilate into imagined worlds (e.g. Malone & Tranter, 2003; Dowdell et al., 2011).

'All netted together': is there a need for cultural consilience in the face of extinction?

SummaryProfessor Stephen Hopper has suggested that ‘possibly the most significant future challenge facing plant conservation is the achievement of a global shift in value systems towards acceptance of the old cultural wisdom that humans are part of, not separate from, nature’. Here I examine this challenge for contemporary humanity experiencing increasingly divergent ‘lifeworlds’ and ask if it is possible to be ‘all netted together’, and achieve cultural consilience in the face of increasing plant extinction. The first part of the article explores a hybrid approach to botanical education, where ‘border crossings’ between ‘Pokémon’ and plant-based inquiry might facilitate 21st century urban children to engage more intimately with the living world. The second part highlights how botanic gardens can facilitate expressions of lost botanical knowledge carried through human migration from rural to urban contexts. The article ends with a discussion intended to provoke interdisciplinary discourse between botanical science and botanical education, contextualised within the wider literature that examines the role of botanic gardens.

Darwin-inspired learning

Charles Darwin has been extensively analysed and written about as a scientist, Victorian, father and husband. However, this is the first book to present a carefully thought out pedagogical approach to learning that is centered on Darwin’s life and scientific practice. The ways in which Darwin developed his scientific ideas, and their far reaching effects, continue to challenge and provoke contemporary teachers and learners, inspiring them to consider both how scientists work and how individual humans ‘read nature’. Darwin-inspired learning, as proposed in this international collection of essays, is an enquiry-based pedagogy, that takes the professional practice of Charles Darwin as its source. Without seeking to idealise the man, Darwin-inspired learning places importance on: • active learning • hands-on enquiry • critical thinking • creativity • argumentation • interdisciplinarity. In an increasingly urbanised world, first-hand observations of living plants and animals are becoming rarer. Indeed, some commentators suggest that such encounters are under threat and children are living in a time of ‘nature-deficit’. Darwin-inspired learning, with its focus on close observation and hands-on enquiry, seeks to re-engage children and young people with the living world through critical and creative thinking modeled on Darwin’s life and science.

Windows on a Changing World: Using Children’s Literature as an Aesth/Ethical Trope in Early Years Education for Sustainability

This chapter is an exploration of the opportunities afforded children’s imaginations by three books. It constitutes a teacher’s situated reflection on how the heterotopic “nowhere and here” of children’s literature can be a metaphorical window onto “something or somewhere else” in the context of environmental sustainability. Children’s stories are reflected on as points of departure from which to consider an “aesth/ethical” trope between humans, more-than-humans and material matter in order to engage with “sympathetic imagination”.

Staging Darwin’s Science through Biographical Narratives

Darwin has been the subject of many published biographies (e.g. Desmond & Moore, 1991; Browne, 1995, 2003) and, as a prolific correspondent (see Chapter 3), offers extensive personal material with which to build a biographical reading of his life, his science and the landscapes in which he developed his ideas.

The World of Downe

Charles Darwin’s achievements are all the more extraordinary when we reflect on the simple tools and domestic spaces in which he practised his post–Beagle enquiries. The relatively unchanged garden at Down House – with its glasshouse, kitchenbeds, lawn, hedgerows, adjacent woods and meadows – is a living monument to the observations, experiments, collections and continuous questioning clearly evidenced in his notes and letters.