Closer to the ground: Environmental sociology of children

The negative impacts of human behavior on the natural environment are increasingly apparent, and while environmental education offers the hope that teaching and engaging young people will lead them on alternative paths in their interactions with the natural world that worthy goal has not come to fruition. Our environmentally significant behaviors as a society only continue to worsen. I suggest not only that we have not taken the time to understand children and their own child-centered understanding of the world, but more importantly that it is this very understanding that will reshape how we think about environmental education. To do this, I present an environmental sociology of children.

I orient this project within the tradition of American Pragmatism, allowing multiple methods and operationalized theories to be applied in tandem. I address three primary questions using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, with a sample of 191 kids at a Title I public Montessori school in Northern Indiana.

• What does 'nature' mean to children aged 3 - 11?
• What are these children's attitudes towards nature?
• What do environmental identities in kids, aged 7 - 11, look like?

Key findings include:

• Constructions of nature were often close to home, immediate, and experiential.
• These kids hold strong pro-environmental attitudes, but how they make sense of these attitudes vary in meaningful ways.
• Those kids with strong environmental identities made sense of their own and other people's interactions with the natural world in two primary and often overlapping ways -- giving moral standing to the natural world and/or applying the theory of evolution to make sense of human interaction with the natural world.

These findings point to the need to recognize the legitimacy of child-centered ways of knowing as pathways to engage youth and underscore the need for greater consideration and intentionality in the development of a nuanced pedagogy of humanature interaction in environmental education. I conclude the dissertation with suggestions for improving environmental education.