Louise Chawla

University of Colorado Boulder | CUB · Children, Youth and Environments Center (CYE)

There is extensive evidence that when people have parks, gardens, and greenery near their homes, they gain mental and physical health benefits. As a result, there are a number of health care initiatives to motivate people to spend time in local green spaces. This article proposes a network of access and engagement with nature to support health and...

Previous research has demonstrated that practicing forest bathing has significant positive effects on adult psychological well-being. Considering the ongoing adolescents’ mental health crisis of increasing anxiety and depression, determining whether forest bathing has similar effects on adolescents is an important expansion of forest bathing resear...

Evidence is mounting that nature-based learning (NBL) enhances children’s educational and developmental outcomes, making this an opportune time to identify promising questions to carry research and practice in this field forward. We present the outcomes of a process to set a research agenda for NBL, undertaken by the Science of Nature-Based Learnin...

1. Within a generation, children’s lives have largely moved indoors, with the loss of free-ranging exploration of the nearby natural world, even as research indicates that direct experiences of nature in childhood contribute to care for nature across the life span. 2. In response, many conservation organizations advocate connecting children with na...

The burgeoning study of access to nature for public health and well-being is currently seeking to find doses of nature needed for different health benefits, including efficient cognitive processing. This information is important to guide clinical practice and the greening of schools and neighborhoods. Yet with children in particular, more is lost t...

Methods for children's participation in improving the conditions of their hospital care.

Contextual discussion of two South African child participation programs: the Street-Wise program for children living on the streets, and Growing Up In Cities (GUIC). This focus on children in low income environments highlights the daunting challenges faced by children and youth in defining their place in a newly democratic country following the rav...

To understand the longest reach of HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa, it is necessary to consider the children who carry the disease and related illnesses like tuberculosis, or who have lost a parent or other family member to this academic. In addition to physical effects, children carry the emotional wounds of loss, fear, or social stigma, and t...

An illustrated, essential guide to engaging children and youth in the process of urban design From a history of children’s rights to case studies discussing international initiatives that aim to create child-friendly cities, Placemaking with Children and Youth offers comprehensive guidance in how to engage children and youth in the planning and de...

To better understand children’s needs and desires, many landscape architecture and urban planning professionals are engaging children in participatory design processes. These projects often involve children in early conceptual design phases but not in later planning and construction, when technical expertise dominates the process. This article focu...

Project to identify children’s recommendations for best hospital practices in healing. Dissemination of materials and use in training; lessons learned.

Early childhood environmental education in cities draws on ideas of John Dewey, Reggio Emilia preschools, environment education in the built environment, and education for sustainability. Urban environmental education facilitates children’s contact with and learning about urban nature and the built environment. Successful models for early childho...

The outgoing co-editors reflect on their service to Children, Youth and Environments by describing the historical themes, current trends, future directions in the fields, and their legacy. The transition to a new “home base” for the journal at the University of Cincinnati is described and the incoming co-editors are introduced. Goals for the journa...

This paper investigates how green schoolyards can reduce stress and promote protective factors for resilience in students. It documents student responses to green schoolyards in Maryland and Colorado in the United States under three conditions: young elementary school children׳s play in wooded areas during recess; older elementary school children׳s...

Socially just, intergenerational urban spaces should not only accommodate children and adolescents, but engage them as participants in the planning and design of welcoming spaces. With this goal, city agencies in Boulder, Colorado, the Boulder Valley School District, the Children, Youth and Environments Center at the University of Colorado, and a n...

This handbook is the first to comprehensively study the interdependent fields of environmental and conservation psychology. In doing so, it seeks to map the rapidly growing field of conservation psychology and its relationship to environmental psychology. The Oxford Handbook of Environmental and Conservation Psychology includes basic research on en...

Bringing green spaces to the places where people live, work, learn and play is essential to reduce barriers to contact with nature, and people are more likely to use and care for these places if they have a role in designing and creating them. Participation in environmental decision-making is part of a comprehensive definition of health, as a sense...

Children and the environment cover a broad, interdisciplinary field of research and practice. The social sciences often use the word “environment” to mean the social, political, or economic context of children’s lives, but this bibliography covers physical settings. It focuses on a place-based scale that children can see, hear, taste, smell, touch,...

Within the framework of the “capability approach” to human rights, this paper argues that adults who facilitate participatory planning and design with children and youth have an ethical obligation to foster young people’s capacities for active democratic citizenship. Practitioners often worry, justifiably, that if young people fail to see their ide...

This chapter takes up two questions essential to participatory environmental education: What experiences prepare children to be aware of their environment and to take action on its behalf? And, how can communities support children’s environmental learning and action? I suggest answers to these questions based on an ecological approach to psychology...

This article reviews four bodies of research that shed light on how to promote active care for the environment in children and youth: research on sources of proenvironmental behavior, socialization for democratic skills and values, the development of a personal sense of competence, and the development of collective competence. The article begins wi...

Referencing the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child as the basis to make cities more supportive of children's needs, this paper discusses the emergence and characteristics of child- friendly cities. It then reviews the development of an initiative in Denver, Colorado, to become the Number One child-friendly city in the USA, and describes Lea...

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child contains a set of “participation clauses” which are leading members of development agencies, municipal offices, and community organizations to incorporate children and youth into community planning. The Growing Up in Cities project of UNESCO provides a model for doing this, with a focus on lo...

Combines insights from ecological research and Montessori theory and practice to portray the unfolding of childhood in natural places. Suggests that children's manipulation of the landscape results in optimal creative involvement. Maintains that the act of finding favorite places in all weather, combined with a positive role model, leads to lifelon...

Incl. bibl.

This paper discusses the benefits of involving children in planning and managing human settlements both for the children, as they learn the formal skills of democracy, and for the wider community, as young people contribute their knowledge, energies and perceptions about local environments, and remind adults of their rights and their special needs...

This article summarizes the findings of a four-site study of children’s needs and priorities, part of the process to transform Greater Johannesburg into a child friendly city. Applying the Growing Up in Cities model, it presents the voices of 10 to 14-year-olds from four diverse but representative areas of the city. For each of these areas, boys an...

Initiatives to involve children and adolescents in assessing, planning and managing their local environments are increasing around the world. How these initiatives are to be evaluated, however, has only begun to be discussed. A particular theoretical challenge to be faced is formulating an approach that has broad cross-cultural applicability while...

The article presents the evaluation of two Johannesburg sites of 'Growing Up in Cities', a project that involves children in documenting and improving their urban environments, with respect to the effect of project participation. Participating children and their parents were surveyed or interviewed regarding the project's value and effect on the ch...

The article presents the evaluation of two Johannesburg sites of `Growing Up in Cities', a project that involves children in documenting and improving their urban environments, with respect to the effect of project participation. Participating children and their parents were surveyed or interviewed regarding the project's value and effect on the ch...

Weaves theoretical concepts of Maria Montessori and Edith Cobb to suggest that a moral, meaningful life is influenced by early contact with nature in which adults draw children's attention to its value. Suggests that nature is the prepared environment fostering cosmic harmony and asserts that educators should provide opportunities for early encount...

This article is a commentary on commentaries: a personal response to a set of critical commentaries on significant life experience research which formed a special issue of Environmental Education Research , Vol. 5(4), November 1999, and a symposium on the same subject at the Annual Meeting 2000 of the American Educational Research Association. The...

This paper describes the difficult relationships among those implementing an action research project with children in a low-income settlement in Bangalore (India), the distant and unresponsive bureaucracy of an international funding agency, and the authoritarian management of the NGO through whom its money was channelled. This case study highlights...

Agenda 21, the Habitat Agenda and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child have brought new relevance to Growing Up in Cities, a project of participatory action-research for urban children and youth. The origins of the project in the 1970s under the leadership of the urban planner Kevin Lynch are described, along with a brief histor...

Structured, open-ended interviews were conducted with 30 environmentalists in Kentucky and 26 in Norway (35 men, 21 women) who represented a broad range of issues, from wilderness protection to urban planning, to determine the sources of their environmental commitment. Experiences of natural areas, family influences, organizations, negative experie...

This article reviews different research approaches to understanding the significant experiences that influence people's environmental concern and behavior, with an emphasis on identifying the strengths and weaknesses of existing studies. It also reviews relevant findings regarding the validity of autobiographical memory, as memory is the medium whi...

Beginning with the study of significant life experiences initiated by Tanner, this article reviews a growing body of related research in the form of surveys, interviews, and questionnaires that explore people's accounts of the sources of their environmental interest, concern, and action. The questions, methods, and results of studies in this field...

This paper describes the research under way in many cities to help understand how well urban communities function for adolescents from low-income families and how best to work with them in planning and implementing improvements.

Presents a conceptual model of how young children learn about the physical environment, reviewing theories concerning environmental cognition and moral development. Notes that children in developed nations receive much of their information about the environment from the media and are often exposed to conflicting viewpoints about the natural world....

Two Kentucky communities are compared to evaluate the changing quality of children's community experience since 1900: Portland, an old working-class area of Louisville, and New Castle, a rural county seat. Through a combination of oral histories, archival re search, and contemporary children's evaluations, pre- and post-World War II com munity reso...

An investigation of effects of community change on children's lives explored the proposition that, in both rural and urban Kentucky since the Second World War, children have lost shared multigenerational activities, freedom to roam, and open unstructured time. Data included oral histories from residents born 1895-1950, archival research, and commun...

Recommendations for directions in research in environmental education are placed in the context of past research results and present changes in the environmental movement. Past research suggests that environmentally responsible behavior is fostered by environmental sensitivity, in-depth knowledge of specific issues, personal investment in change, a...

reviews research and design advances in housing for children and adolescents in developed nations / the places it [the chapter] focuses upon are the dwelling and the housing site—the places which form the primary matrix of their lives / reviews recent attempts to define housing at its best observe where intensive research has already been done /...

Fifteen autobiographies from a larger random sample were selected for examination in this article because they exhibit the type of intense environmental encounter described by Edith Cobb in her essay (1959) and book, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood (1977). These autobiographies are analyzed for insight into four questions: Are autobiographe...

"A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Psychology ... " Thesis (Ph. D.) -- City University of New York, 1984. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 477-486).