Professor Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles

Posthuman research playspaces: Climate child imaginaries addresses the need for new forms of climate change education that are responsive to the rapidly changing material conditions of children’s socioecological worlds.

The book provides a comprehensive description of how posthumanist concepts and methods can be creatively developed and deployed in collaboration with children and young people. It connects climate change education with posthumanist studies of childhood in the social sciences and environmental humanities. It also offers opportunities for readers to encounter new theoretical and methodological approaches for collaborative art, inquiry, and learning with children. Drawing on three years of participatory research undertaken with 135 children in the Climate Change and Me (CC+Me) project, it takes children’s creative and affective responses to climate change as the starting point for the co-production of knowledge, community engagement, and the transformation of pedagogy and curriculum in schools. Extensively through process philosophy, and in particular, the works of Whitehead and Deleuze, the book develops new concepts and methods of creative inquiry which situate children’s learning, aesthetic production, and theory-building within a more-than-human ecology.

The book presents a series of generative openings and propositions for future research in the field of climate change education, while also offering wide-ranging applications for graduate students and researchers in childhood and youth studies, the environmental arts and humanities, cultural studies of science and technology, educational philosophy, and environmental education.

This book focuses on critical walking and mapping practices through the research methodology of a/r/tography. Initially establishing seven global sites for employing movement-based research practices within culturally conceived a/r/tographic perspectives, the book builds upon and extends an international community of practice. The editors and contributors apply public pedagogy through a/r/tographic and critical walking inquiry, and explore how these forms may be engaged, understood and expanded globally. The chapters examine how a/r/tography and walking inquiry can be practiced, theorised, experienced, extended and conceptualised. The cartographic perspectives, theoretical positions and conceptual investigations included in this collection respond to the fundamental contemporary need for new and fresh models of teaching, learning and scholarship regarding global and local educational and social challenges. They offer tangible, aesthetic and rigorous examples for researchers, educators, community practitioners and research students to engage with a/r/tography and critical walking inquiry.

This book offers an alternative vision for education and has been written for those who are passionate about teaching and learning, in schools, universities and in the community, and providing people with the values, knowledge and skills needed to face complex social and environmental challenges. Working across boundaries the socio-ecological educator is a visionary who strives to build community connections and strengthen relationships with the natural world. The ideas and real-world case studies presented in this book will bring that vision a step closer to reality.

In an era in which environmental education has been described as one of the most pressing educational concerns of our time, further insights are needed to understand how best to approach the learning and teaching of environmental education in early childhood education. In this book we address this concern by identifying two principles for using play-based learning early childhood environmental education. The principles we identify are the result of research conducted with teachers and children using different types of play-based learning whilst engaged in environmental education. Such play-types connect with the historical use of play-based learning in early childhood education as a basis for pedagogy.

This title collates a range of key articles focusing on sustainability from past editions of the 'Australasian Journal of Early Childhood' and , 'Every Child'. Sustainable service operation and promoting children’s responsibility and care for the environment are now part of the National Quality Standards and more importantly, all early childhood services must engage with sustainability in this time of increasing global environmental concerns.

The publication documents the best of research, theory and practice to date and questions where has early childhood education for sustainability come from and more importantly, where is it going? There are multiple possibilities for educators, researchers, policy makers and managers to take action in early childhood settings for an environmentally sustainable future.

Recent scholarship on children's literature displays a wide variety of interests in classic and contemporary children's books. While environmental and ecological concerns have led to an interest in 'ecocriticism', as yet there is little on the significance of the ecological imagination and experience to both the authors and readers - young and old - of these texts. This edited collection brings together a set of original international research-based chapters to explore the role of children's literature in learning about environments and places, with a focus on how children's literature may inform and enrich our imagination, experiences and responses to environmental challenges and injustice. Contributions from Australia, Canada, USA and UK explore the diverse ways in which children's literature can provide what are arguably some of the first and possibly most formative engagements that some children might have with 'nature'. Chapters examine classic and new storybooks, mythic tales, and image-based and/or written texts read at home, in school and in the field. Contributors focus on exploring how children's literature mediates and informs our imagination and understandings of diverse environments and places, and how it might open our eyes and lives to other presences, understandings and priorities through stories, their telling and re-telling, and their analysis.