Children's Role in Meaning Making Through Their Participation in an Environmental Education Program

Abstract

The authors conducted an ethnography investigating children's lived experiences in a 3-day residential environmental education (EE) program with 20 gifted 4th- and 5th-grade students. The authors also conducted participant observation and a series of interviews before, during, and after the trip. After the authors conducted the interviews and collected other data, they conducted analyses that identified domains describing the children's lived experience with a residential EE program (J. P. Spradley, 1979). Through domain analysis, a theme emerged: Children's nonformal environmental-learning experience is negotiated through the feeling of having choices and enhanced through sensory perception and personal relationships. Explicit recognition of the importance of informal social interactions, unstructured time and play, and perception of choice has potential to enhance the meaningfulness of residential EE programs.

Keywords:

• choice
• environmental education
• ethnography
• residential programs
• social influences