Abstract
We appeal to nonhuman nature as the standard against which human uses of natural resources should be judged, while childhood is often viewed as a natural state of being that is universal across all settings and children. Yet there is no natural childhood, and nature is a profoundly human construct. I offer this perspective as one way to frame childhoodnature. This chapter explores the fundamental essence of childhood (its nature) and problematizes childhood vis-à-vis nature in order to question the assumptions with which we articulate our world. Integrated into this chapter are memoirs of my life as a child and a scholar. A systems approach draws attention to the networks of power and privilege that shape the physical as well as lived realities of children. Children’s drawings from different countries are presented to highlight how visual, written, and unspoken narratives normalize culturally based ideas of people-place relationships. They reveal children’s connections to the environment and help us understand not only what children are thinking, but also what they are being taught to think. Recognizing the nature of childhood in childhoodnature is to confront this reality.
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Wee, B. (2018). The Nature of Childhood in Childhoodnature. In: Cutter-Mackenzie, A., Malone, K., Barratt Hacking, E. (eds) Research Handbook on Childhoodnature . Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_56-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_56-1
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