Karen Ann Malone

Swinburne University of Technology · Faculty of Higher Education

This paper theorizes children’s interspecies relation with dogs in La Paz Bolivia utilizing posthumanism and new materialism as its approach. This approach allows for the deconstructing of human–nature binaries found in discourses central to the children in nature movement. Questioning the universalizing of children’s experience in nature the paper...

This article explores and reconsiders the view of children's encounters with place as central to a place-based pedagogy that seeks to dismantle rather than support constructions of a nature-culture binary. I unpack the current fervour for reinserting the child in nature and nature-based education as a significant phenomenon in environmental and out...

By exploring and reconsidering the view of children’s encounters with nature from a posthumanist perspective, this chapter seeks to dismantle rather than support constructions of a nature-culture binary. A posthumanist approach adopts the tools of new materialism by allowing for the rereading of research data by decentering the human and attending...

Studies over the years on human-environment relationships have revealed a strong assertion that humans learn through engagement with their local places. But due to the increasing degradation of urban environments, there has been a progressive dehumanization of urban space, a dehumanization that has impacted particularly on children and young people...

This chapter explores the role of child-friendly cities in supporting sustainable development of cities. It does this by ascertaining how to devise an approach to analyzing children’s independent mobility (CIM) by reviewing global studies on freedom, mobility, and risk and then applying a sociocultural-ecological analysis to consider some of the ch...

This paper explores one element of a multi-faceted project that sought to investigate nature play in early childhood, namely the creation and co-creation of visual diaries by educators, children and academics. The methodology was participatory cartography, which involved the creation of visual and verbal mappings of nature play pedagogies by early...

This paper explores the potential for extending relational ontologies to include a specific focus on human-plant relations. We theorise the emergence of a vegetal ontology, as a novel way of working and remaking theories around human-plant relations that can be applied to the field of environmental education. A vegetal ontological approach, as appl...

Posthumanist thinking opens new possibilities for research that informs new imaginaries for teaching and learning in environmental education. Posthumanism attends to decentering the human, by seeking the means to acknowledge and navigate our symbiotic relationship of being in the world with a host of others. A posthumanist perspective therefore tak...

Childhoodnature encounters can flourish in the Anthropocene. Assembled theories supporting childhoodnature can produce sparks when knocked together. The chemical composition of all living things is composed of the shared building blocks of all life: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulphur. Indeed, even beyond our own planet, rec...

Humans are living in damaged landscapes within a new geographical epoch known as the Anthropocene. The COVID-19 outbreak fuels uncertainty, instability, and ambiguity for humans. This viral disaster has been blamed for losing and further exacerbating ecological imbalance, and prompts a need to re-examine multispecies relations and, in particular, h...

Who is a child and what is childhood? These are not easy questions to address, yet they are questions that every adult could potentially answer. Every adult was once a child and we all have some form of understanding and conceptualization of childhood; albeit these may be rooted in different ontologies and draw on diverse epistemes. As such, these...

This article speaks up for those who are feeling unheard as post-qualitative inquirers. It also speaks with hope, helpfully, to those in positions of supervision and mentorship to help student researchers work across post paradigms, becoming allies with those who are attempting to experiment with new theory, figurative forms, and processes. Address...

Exploring possibilities and potentialities arising out of the comprehensive, all-encompassing movements of life and matter in and through children’s learning environments is the focus of this chapter. It brings together the theoretical shifts outlined in Chaps. 1, 2 and 3 with the focus on people, places and things in the curriculum from Chap. 6, i...

Rethinking constructions of childhoods, and what it means to be a child, this chapter builds on the foundations developed in the first three chapters of the book. While those chapters challenged the rational, naturalising, social, universal or oppositional, binary constructs of childhood and addressed the concept of childhoods as plural, this chapt...

Re-positioning ways in which we see children’s entangled realities with and in the world, this chapter places a posthuman lens on children’s lives and their affective relationships with human and non-human entities and things. Throughout the chapter, we provoke the posthuman thinking which we have built up throughout the book by conceptualising how...

This chapter focuses on the multiplicities of theoretical thinking and the means for pursuing new ways of being and knowing about children and about childhoods. To do so we utilise theories, think with theories and with contemporary scholarship and conceptual thinking. We recognise the development of thought over the past two decades that has been...

The glossary outlines some of the ways in which we have used key concepts throughout this book. Its intention is to be a useful guide, and by no means a conclusive or complete representation of the meanings of any of the terms listed. The glossary gives insights into particular meanings as they relate to the topics of this book and to our collectiv...

The final chapter of the book outlines some of the potential implications of the posthuman and new materialist framings of this book on researching the child and contemporary childhoods. It explores how using philosophy as a method of inquiry supports engaging with the complications of posthuman research paradigms and offers a range of perspectives...

Considering the entanglement of materials and objects in children’s lives through a posthuman reading of curricula, this chapter follows on closely from Chap. 5 to investigate children’s relationships with materials and nonhuman objects. Its focus is on how children’s lives are shaped by regulatory documents, and as our first example, we examine Ao...

Outlining the complex relationship between childhood studies, philosophy and education, this chapter maps the story of the child and childhood, from a non-biological and non-medical perspective tracing philosophical perspectives over time. In the chapter, we interweave conceptions of the child subject with the philosophy and history of education, a...

In this chapter, we examine the new sociological ways of thinking about children and childhoods introduced in critique of the dominant developmental theories in the later part of the twentieth century. The chapter seeks to clarify some of the rethinking of childhoods beyond developmental frameworks and towards the posthuman, new materialist perspec...

This chapter explores posthuman pedagogies as relational ontologies in childhoodnature. It situates the reconceptualization of children and childhoods in the Anthropocene, as with nature rather than outside of nature, to present a range of ways to think about humans, and particularly children and their encounters, relations and response-ability wit...

This paper draws on a research study that builds on a long and rich history of research in environmental education focusing on the value of learning through everyday experiences with the more than human. This study specially focused on very young children's experiences of ecologies and explored the unique opportunities sensorially rich bodily inter...

Drawing on a posthuman lens we walk — with Deborah Bird Rose and her conceptual framing of shimmer . We explore shimmering as incorporating a sensorial richness, as beauty and grandeur, as constantly in flux, moving between past, future and back again. Shimmering has potentiality in a posthuman context in its encompassing of spiritual and ancestral...

Offers a unique perspective by positioning the reader as a pre-service teacher embarking on a new career.The reader is introduced to three fictional pre-service teachers whose narratives flow throughout the text. These characters share how their personal and professional life experiences have exposed them to new ways of thinking about young people,...

We were excited to speak with Karen Malone at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference in New York, 2018.

This handbook provides a compilation of research in Childhoodnature and brings together existing research themes and seminal authors in the field alongside new cutting-edge research authored by world-class researchers drawing on cross-cultural and international research data. The underlying objectives of the handbook are two-fold: • Opening up spac...

This book is a genealogical foregrounding and performance of conceptions of children and their childhoods over time. We acknowledge that children’s lives are embedded in worlds both inside and outside of structured schooling or institutional settings, and that this relationality informs how we think about what it means to be a child living and expe...

Bodies sensing ecologically is a concept the author uses in order to imagine how children can engage/communicate with the more-than-human-world prior to language acquisition. Meaning through bodies; sensual knowing emerges as the means for making sense of things in the act of sensing. A very young child finding ways to be with nonhuman animals; pla...

Walking-with children on blasted landscapes opens up possibilities of an entangled set of uneasy encounters, revealing and provoking an alternative geo-storying, a de-colonialising pursuit conjured up from an awakened ethical sensibility. I am walking-with those who have been deemed unworthy of recognition and are invisible in the obscene manifesta...

Environmental education and philosophy in the Anthropocene - Volume 35 Issue 3 - David R. Cole, Karen Malone

Humans are neither exempt from the ecological world nor exceptional to those they are acting with in the world. By acknowledging uneasy ties that bind us to multiple others’ past, present, and in our imagined future, humans no longer have the singularity of being the only acting subject. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s notion of kin and “being worldly w...

2 Acknowledgment Karen, Kumara and Sarah Jane acknowledge the Aboriginal lands and countries that they work on, learn on, live on and pass through and show gratitude to the traditional custodians who have shared their insights in this research. The research section that explores the encounters of the Aboriginal child acknowledges the mentorship of...

This book elaborates the need, in a rapidly urbanizing world, for recognition of the ecological communities we inhabit in cities and for the development of an ethics for all entities (human and non-human) in this context. Children and their entangled relations with the human and more-than-human world are located centrally to the research on cities...

Cities are central sites for reconfiguring human-nature encounters in the Anthropocene. The city constitutes a powerful imaginary of the human-nature disconnect and therefore brings credence and attention to our seemingly de-natured lives. Cities represent the effects of the human dominance over ‘nature’; humans in control, taming and managing the...

At a time when many societies perceive young people to be "intruders" and a "threat" in public spaces, there is a need to understand the impact of exclusionary practices on young people's experiences of urban life. This article looks at the factors young people themselves identify as affecting their use of public space in their local neighbourhood.

This collection examines why urban environments are key sites for reimagining and reconfiguring human-nature encounters in times and spaces of planetary crisis. Cities constitute powerful and troubling spaces for human-nature intersections. They typically represent the effects of human dominance over nature: humans in control, taming and managing t...

This chapter examines how integrated, participatory design and urban environmental education can enhance learning, ownership, agency, and long-term sustainability of place. Drawing on recent efforts to articulate a global urban sustainability agenda, it considers the ways that urban environmental education can help integrate the participation of un...

The Anthropocene presents a radical intersection of human history and geological time. At a unique time on the 350 million year geological time-scale of the planet since the last major extinction event where humans have become a significant geophysical force. The Anthropocene, and its impending human impact that leaves the planet in a state of prec...

In this chapter I argue that rather than continue to rely on nature/culture, subject/object binaries when analysing the way children engage with the more-than-human world, I believe we should open up new theoretical possibilities. I am considering in this chapter can new approaches to theorising that seek to decentre the human be a means for decons...

This book reflects the considerable appeal of the Anthropocene and the way it stimulates new discussions and ideas for reimagining sustainability and its place in education in these precarious times. The authors explore these new imaginings for sustainability using varying theoretical perspectives in order to consider innovative ways of engaging wi...

This report signposts pathways from evidence to impact in learning in natural environments by: 1. summarising the research context including evidence on the influence that social and economic factors have on the scale and nature of children’s use of and access to the natural environment and the challenges this presents, and five reviews of the imp...

By exploring and reconsidering the view of children’s encounters with nature from a posthumanist perspective, this chapter seeks to dismantle rather than support constructions of a nature-culture binary. A posthumanist approach adopts the tools of new materialism by allowing for the rereading of research data by decentering the human and attending...

There are many definitions of sustainable development, and it can be better understood as an emerging vision, rather than a neatly defined concept or model. It is not a fixed notion, but rather a process of change in the relationships between social, economic, and natural systems and processes. Many schools and school systems that have embedded the...

This study investigated changes in Australian children’s independent mobility levels between1991 and 2012. Data from five cross-sectional studies conducted in 1991, 1993, 2010, 2011 and 2012 were analysed. Parent and child surveys were used to assess parental licences for independent mobility and actual independent mobility behaviour in children ag...

Within a rapidly urbanising world, many governments, particularly those in developing nations, will struggle over the next 30 years to support children. There were many key issues and challenges for children in cities identified over a decade ago as countries embarked on the task of addressing and monitoring progress through the Millennium Developm...

This chapter explores the role of child-friendly cities has in supporting sustainable development of cities. It does this by ascertaining how to devise an approach to analyzing children’s independent mobility (CIM) by reviewing global studies on freedom, mobility, and risk and then applying a sociocultural-ecological analysis to consider some of th...

Studies over the years on human-environment relationships have revealed a strong assertion that humans learn through engagement with their local places. But due to the increasing degradation of urban environments, there has been a progressive dehumanization of urban space, a dehumanization that has impacted particularly on children and young people...

This paper reports on the Dapto dreaming project that was implemented in early 2011. Funded by Stockland, a large Australian urban developer, the project was a child-friendly research activity to support the building of a new urban development located in the outer suburbs of a large regional city in Australia. The urban developers provided a unique...

A growing body of literature indicates that humans need contact with nature for their wellbeing, however at the same time young children are becoming increasingly separated from the natural world as their access to the outdoors diminishes. The importance of school and prior-to-school settings in Connecting children with nature has been acknowledged...

Living on a fragile, isolated Pacific island presents a significant challenge for many children. Tensions emerge between their seemingly idyllic lifestyle, their desire to be connected to global child cultures and the demands of being the cultural custodians of their traditions. How they manage multiple identities is the focus of this paper. The da...

This special edition of Global Studies of Childhood reports on the global research currently under way to replicate the original seminal work by Mayer Hillman on children's independent mobility that was conducted in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s, and which was replicated in the United Kingdom and Germany in the 1990s (Hillman et al, 1990) a...

The article provides a comparative analysis of children's independent mobility in four countries - South Africa, Tanzania, Japan and Australia. The authors discuss key findings across the four study sites and illustrate the contextually bound nuances connected to the data at the community level. The data illustrate that while Japanese children have...

This article presents the research results from a study conducted in New South Wales, Australia about primary school children's independent mobility (CIM), their concerns, and the concerns of their parents. These results are compared with a similar study conducted in 1992. Data were collected using written questionnaires, one for children and one f...

A growing body of literature indicates that humans need contact with nature for their wellbeing, however at the same time young children are becoming increasingly separated from the natural world as their access to the outdoors diminishes. The importance of school and prior-to-school settings in connecting children with nature has been acknowledged...

The diversity of student backgrounds and the increasing number of school students from low socio-economic areas requires teachers to have an understanding of students' worlds and to be committed to social justice both within school structures and curriculum as well as in the life of the wider community. In this context, community service learning f...

Children in middle class Australia, and many western countries around the world experience restricted opportunities to engage in free play in their neighbourhood streets and parks. The impact of this has been a drastic decrease in children’s independent mobility and environmental play. Recent research has focused on the physical environment of neig...

There has been limited recent geographic research on children's use of school grounds. This study explores the impact of school grounds on the play behaviours of children in primary schools. It examines the way in which some features of school grounds stimulate more of the type of play that is likely to produce environmental learning. The paper rep...

For many children across the globe, whether in low or high income nations, growing up in the 21 st century will mean living in overcrowded, unsafe and polluted environments which provide limited opportunity for natural play and environmental learning. Yet Agenda 21, the Habitat Agenda and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child all...

Drawing on the findings of an ARC funded project, ‘Children’s Environments and the Role of School Grounds for Enhancing Environmental Cognition’, this paper explores the question: What is the role of school grounds as sites for teaching and learning? Observation and interview data for five Australian primary schools displayed large differences betw...

This paper examines city streets and public space as a domain in which social values are asserted and contested. The definitions of spatial boundaries and of acceptable and non-acceptable uses and users are, at the same time, expressions of intolerance and difference within society. The paper focuses in particular on the ways in which suspicion, in...

To everyone in the world, Because people throw rubbish away, animals suffer. As we let deter-gents into rivers, sh and other animals can't live in them. If we stopped doing this, there would be more places for us to enjoy ourselves and more room for us to live. Our lives would improve. Once I found a sh with crooked bones among the sh I caught and...