Elsa Lee

• PhD
• Senior Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University

Drawing on fieldwork in three primary schools in East Cambridgeshire, UK, this paper explores children’s relationships with the places where they live, and the ways in which those relationships are mediated by play, exploration, and narrative imagination. Challenging assumptions of a ‘bubble-wrap generation’ which seem to discount the possibility t...

In this chapter, we explore some of the work of an arts and well-being charity in the UK called Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination (CCI), a group of artists, educators, parents, and researchers with an interest in how the arts can transform lives. CCI projects aim to open up spaces for creativity, actively engaging with people of all ages and back...

Background Nature can weaken the negative effects of deprivation on health, shifting away from pathogenic models of health and supporting the wellbeing of disadvantaged groups. Nevertheless, children living in deprived areas are nine times less likely to have access to nature compared to more affluent children. Schools can facilitate equity of acce...

Eco-Capabilities is an AHRC funded project situated at the intersection of three issues: a concern with children’s wellbeing; their disconnect with the environment; and a lack of engagement with arts in school curricula. It builds on Amartya Sen’s work on human capabilities as a proxy for wellbeing, developing the term eco-capabilities to describe...

Drawing on comparative work in primary schools in East Anglia (United Kingdom), Oaxaca (Mexico), and the North Slope of Alaska (United States), we explore what children mean when they say places are “special” to them. Focusing on information gathered during walks designed and guided by these children, we examine the experiential, affective, communi...

It is a pleasure to have an opportunity to write this closing piece to draw together the chapters in this book of stories of doctorates in Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE). To do so I will reflect only briefly on the chapters authored by the emerging researchers who were present at the EERA seasonal school in Homerton College in Cam...

Previous research on children’s wellbeing indicators has focused extensively on adults’, rather than children’s perspectives, despite there being a broad consensus that children’s conceptualisations differ significantly from adults’. In response, this study aimed to explore what constitutes children’s wellbeing through their drawings and discussion...

This book brings together the diverse narratives of researchers’ personalized stories about the process of doing doctoral research (PhD) in the field of Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) and about the life after the completion of such life-forming experience. The narratives go beyond the academic to discuss the different ways in whic...

This chapter describes and reflects upon the recent history and contemporary situation regarding Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) in the UK. It discusses how ESE is practised and understood in schools and other educational institutions and describes influencers (e.g. policy) on the practice and conceptualisation of ESE. While the fo...

There is increasing concern about children’s mental well-being and an urgent need for research into how to support positive mental health; including as part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Alongside this is the heightened awareness about diminished access to green spaces and diminished exposure to the arts for children....

What are the factors that render environmental concerns salient in people’s lives, and under what conditions do people make connections between an abstract concept such as climate change and concrete experiences in their own life? Taking as its focus ethnographic work with children in several different ethnographic settings (Barrow, Alaska; Oaxaca,...

Transformations of the landscapes which children inhabit have significant impacts on their lives; yet, due to the limited economic visibility of children’s relationships with place, they have little stake in those transformations. Their experience, therefore, illustrates in an acute way the experience of contemporary enclosure as a mode of subordin...

This paper makes a twofold contribution. Firstly it presents a typology of eco-clubs that can be used to contextualise eco-club observations by researchers and can support management of eco-clubs by practitioners. Secondly it explains how participation in eco-clubs provides a space for a child to both enact and develop as a citizen, a place for bei...

The aim of this book is to provide prospective and current doctoral students, and their supervisors, with a range of narratives of doctoral experiences. The book is an outcome of a conference where both academic and professional doctorate students at different stages of their research shared their experiences of the process of completing a doctorat...

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