Openings for researching environment and place in children’s literature: ecologies, potentials, realities and challenges

Abstract

This not quite ‘final’ ending of this special issue of Environmental Education Research traces a series of hopeful, if somewhat difficult and at times challenging, openings for researching experiences of environment and place through children’s literature. In the first instance, we draw inspiration from the contributors who have authored, often autoethnographically, some of the art and craft of their respective ecopedagogies and research efforts. We then proceed with a reminder of the lurking presence of fear found in some of the articles published here and elsewhere, opening up the fear factor at large in broader everyday, social, political and global discourses to further scrutiny and a more optimistic quest when engaging children’s literature, its risks and its hopes. Our aim here, as noted in the Editorial, is to develop the discourse and practice of environmental education research in this area. Thus, we also explore how children’s literature has a pedagogical place in the positive social construction of intergenerational ethics focusing on how and what, and in what ways, textual and visual messages can be passed on to that next generation, and how and what they might take up creatively and imaginatively, in practice and conceptually. To do this, we offer thoughts on how children’s literature might draw selectively from broader aspects of the eco‐literature and humanities, and finally, on the basis of this collection, present a series of possible research issues and further deliberations to broadly nurture the development of research in this area.

Keywords:

• children’s literature
• hope
• fear
• risk
• ecoliteracy
• environmental rhetoric
• ecocomposition
• ecopoetics
• ecocriticism
• environmental criticism
• irreal

Notes

1. For example, Barratt Hacking and Barratt (2007) note that at an international conference held in 2005 called ‘Childhood’, devoted to examining their role in transforming societies, only a ‘limited number’ of the 700 papers explored environmental perspectives. In extracting some lessons from the articles published in that special issue of Environmental Education Research, namely children as environmental stakeholders, researching their environmental learning, including agency and restrictions on learning, and further directions for childhood environment research, there are numerous positive and important suggestions that pertain to questions of marginalization and restorative justice, participatory approaches that give voice to children, intergenerationality of interest and power, and the existential (and phenomenological) significance of everyday, local environments. Methodological adjustments and new directions are also recommended. Children’s literature is not mentioned though, and ecoliteracy, in the sense anticipated by literature, is implied only.

2. According to Buell (2005, 113) the challenge for environmental justice revisionism will be to fill the ecocriticism gap of explaining ‘… how nature matters for those readers, critics, teachers, and students for whom environmental concern does not mean nature preservation first and foremost and for whom nature writing, nature poetry, and wilderness narrative do not seem the most compelling forms of environmental imagination, then the movement may fission and wane’.

3. Somewhat akin to the surrealist movement in Art, and exemplified by Salvador Dali’s The persistence of memory, commonly referred to as the ‘melting clocks’, we bear witness to the time of the landscape being partially deconstructed via Dali’s paranoia‐critical method. Ants and flies feed on the disintegration of the rotting carcass of ‘modern time’, measured by and symbolized through numerically quantified clocks.

4. Indeed, while it may surprise some readers that advocates of poststructural analysis in environmental education haven’t (quite? yet?) taken the increasingly familiar route to this troika in such work – to explications of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory perhaps via Slavoj Zizek’s post‐Marxist commentaries or Julia Kristeva’s inquiries about language, the subject and semiotics, is perhaps putting it (too) crudely – it does appear to have been on the horizon for some time (cf. early work by Conley 1997).

5. This is rather than to privilege a direct focus on what it might hide in the classroom, as in an ideologically driven critique. Interestingly perhaps, Alain Badiou (2003, 4) has defined a fable as ‘that part of a narrative that, so far as we are concerned, fails to touch on any Real, unless it be by virtue of that invisible and indirectly accessible residue sticking to every obvious imaginary’.

6. There is a considerable hill to climb here. What counts and is experienced as restrictive forms of thought and action imposed on people by the social conditions, of say, capitalist globalized societies, can be easily contested and thus derailed in disputes about notions of false consciousness, the credibility of Marxist and Marxian analysis, etc.; while an identity (colonized or not to different degrees and hybridities), being a fundamental attachment for the subject, cannot simply be thrown off at will. Indeed, identifying it is not reducible to claims of an identity, as if the claim were identical and identifiable with what is labelled or assumed as the identity, or if simply speaking otherwise in the face of irreducibility can erase difference. As noted in the Editorial, MacIntyre, Ricoeur and Gare, each lay claim to identity requiring narrative competence – accounts of ourselves are intersubjective and interlocutory, and thus never fully or solely subject to the control of an individual alone.

7. Cf. Aleksandra Mir’s ‘Switzerland and Other Islands’, exhibited at Kunsthaus Zurich, August–September 2006. This series of political, geographical and mythological drawings on the subject of islands includes Insula Svizzera, which reimagines Switzerland’s landlocked borders as a coastline, while the Unexplored Islands series uses a range of frames and objects to resituate family political boundaries as those yet to be explored or integrated with existing atlases. http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/switzerland/switzerland.html.

8. The Harlequin, lest we forget, stands in the place of the chaos of life and has been a commonplace in historic European children’s literature. According to Lechte (2008, 347), this ‘hybrid, hermaphrodite, mongrel figure, a mixture of diverse elements’ and ‘a challenge to homogeneity’, with the Harlequin, when one costume is removed, another is underneath to take the former’s place. Equally, the Harlequin’s presence and story‐telling can be used to bear witness to the tragedy and absurdities of our stories and times, revealing, challenging and redistributing knowledges that might otherwise escape attention or reflection.

9. This is a markedly different conclusion to that of Theodor Adorno. Given this, and following Sloane’s lead, an ‘eco’‐informed engagement with John Boyne’s 2006 children’s novel, The boy in the striped pajamas, presents a potentially rich and compelling scenario to explore the intersections of its aesthetic, ethical and political dimensions, responsibilities and limitations, given the im/possible and forbidden childhood friendship Boyne portrays on either side of a camp fence.

10. If it is said, ‘every tool is a weapon – if you hold it right’ (Ani DiFranco), is a stone or stick a weapon if you throw it (right)? More pointedly and abstractly, it is said, representations remain objectifications because they articulate an external position. So, in one view, children’s storybooks, mythic tales, etc., as objects, are, by their very nature, quite literally a ‘frozen’ relation that immobilizes and condenses meanings, concepts and possibilities. Equally, in themselves they do not avail the interiority to a meaning or self in time engaging with ‘the ways things are’ or one’s or another’s life as lived. But in throwing a stone, or in ‘teaching a stone to talk’, as Annie Dillard would have it, they can present openings to many things: they may afford transformative interdictions, even when – perhaps, better when – their genre isn’t intentionally transgressive but rather ‘conservative’. To understand how this may be so, autoethnographic approaches are arguably well suited to the exploration and examination of these claims, in that these approaches foreground inquiries as to whether the reader is awake to possibility, regards a text as provisional and not closed or incontestable, or, as Burke and Mackenzie (2010) have suggested, can demonstrate they are ecoliterally competent to make good use of all that in, as and through an environmental education worthy of the name.