Forest school research highlights 3 post-humanist approaches to study child-nature relationshipsThis article discussed three promising ways that post-humanist researchers (researchers using a critical framework challenging human-centered views by questioning the unique status of humans) might approach human-nature relationships in studies of young children. Ironically, most children and nature research assumes methods, measures, and Western ways of knowing that separate children from nature while privileging the human over the more-than-human world. The author turned to post-humanist theory and Indigenous common worlds approaches to avoid these methodological pitfalls, Euro-centric and anthropocentric worldviews, and problematic assumptions about human-nature relations; however, most of that scholarship provides limited direction for researchers to enact posthuman research. This study addressed this problem by exploring three post-humanist approaches to field work that the author used in her study of a forest school program for young children: non-participant observations, sit spots, and wearable cameras. She offered up her personal experience to other researchers to help them produce relational and contextual knowledge while navigating the complexity of posthumanism.
This is a theoretical article about the author’s empirical study of empathy and learning in an early childhood nature school in Canada. It presented three posthumanist approaches she used in her field work and then discussed the extent to which each enabled her to engage some of the messy, entangled relationships among people, plant and animal species, material objects, weather, natural forces, culture, and history—human-nature relationships that conventional (humanist) research ignores and obscures. The discussions were both theoretical and practical to help graduate students and university researchers to (1) wrestle with important critiques of humanist, psychological, and positivist research methodologies and (2) plan and carry out posthuman studies with children in outdoor contexts.
The author found that posthumanism and a "common worlds" research framework (which argues that the social sciences and the natural sciences are not distinct domains and cannot be studied separately) helped her critique humanist assumptions in traditional education research and to look beyond humanist data collection and data analysis procedures, such as interviews. However, she found limited published discussions on how researchers might conduct posthuman or common worlds research. The heart of her paper discusses three ways she collected data to "think with" in her doctoral dissertation to attend to children’s interactions with the more-than-human world at the forest school. First, non-participant observation enabled her to resist a human focus through physical distance. Rather than participating in the children’s activities and adopting a narrow humanist view of child development, she focused her observations on the space between the child and other beings and objects to begin to account for their ongoing intra-actions and entanglements. Second, sit spots helped the researcher observe and listen attentively to more-than-human beings at the forest school. She picked sit spots in and around the regular locations used by the forest school program and immersed herself at those locations for 30-40 minutes to experience the human and more-than-human actors with all her senses. Third, having children wear GoPro cameras de-centered the adult-centric research gaze and instead attended to materials and objects around the nature school since children’s bodies were not visible from the body cameras. Importantly, these approaches were not put forward as post-humanist methods or examples that others necessarily should use in their research—but ways for researchers to <em>think with</em> their research context. “Thinking with” acknowledges that thought is relational and that knowledge is not only produced by the researcher but constituted through interactions among a range of human and more-than-human agents, material objects, cultural tools, and actions acting upon actions—both during and after the act of data collection.
The practical research approaches discussed in the article show promise for examining relationships that most studies of young children in nature exclude, such as multi-species relations, relations among human and more-than-human others, non-visual sensory experiences (sound, smell, feel), natural forces, and ways of knowing and being not centered on the human(ist) subject. Attending to the shared or common worlds of humans, forces, objects, places, history, plants, and animals opens up ways for researchers to understand young children and the children-nature connection in more relational—and less anthropocentric and Eurocentric—ways. The examples and discussions within this study could help graduate students and researchers to study children in ways that actually connect children and nature rather than separate children from the natural world to produce generalizable scientific knowledge. Likewise, these posthumanist approaches can de-center the human to produce more relational and contextual knowledge that includes and acknowledges the roles that nature and more-than-human actors play in children’s learning and development.
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