Places that matter : an exploration of adolescents' valued places, spaces and nature connections

This study explores the role of place and nature in adolescents’ lives using a child-framed methodology. Teenage research partners from two very different contexts – Melbourne’s affluent Western modernity and India’s less-privileged rural Eastern Himalayan region - contributed their insiders’ perspective to the research. Place choices and engagements were primarily governed by the adolescent’s developmental imperatives in combination with the dominant individualistic or collectivist values of their context. Despite a marked contrast in the position of nature in the adolescents’ lives between the two contexts, a nature connectedness-wellbeing effect was evident and a pedagogical model to capitalise on this is advanced.