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Young Authors & the Anthropocene: What Story Books Reveal about the Place-Ecological Meaning Constructed by Schoolchildren of Chennai

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Title: Young Authors & the Anthropocene: What Story Books Reveal about the Place-Ecological Meaning Constructed by Schoolchildren of Chennai
Language: English
Authors: Aneesa Jamal (ORCID 0000-0002-2673-4024), Abubakr Mohammed Jamal (ORCID 0000-0002-5168-2190), Sanitah Mohd Yusof (ORCID 0000-0003-1185-7790)
Source: Journal of Environmental Education. 2024 55(6):480-493.
Availability: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 14
Publication Date: 2024
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Education
Grade 5
Intermediate Grades
Middle Schools
Grade 6
Grade 7
Junior High Schools
Secondary Education
Grade 8
Descriptors: Teaching Methods, Childrens Writing, Story Grammar, Environmental Education, Animals, Geographic Location, Ecology, Childrens Literature, Creative Writing, Empathy, Psychological Patterns, Self Concept, Resistance (Psychology), Concept Formation, Foreign Countries, Grade 5, Grade 6, Grade 7, Grade 8, Science Education, Elementary School Science, Middle School Students, Elementary School Students
Geographic Terms: India
DOI: 10.1080/00958964.2024.2364190
ISSN: 0095-8964
1940-1892
Abstract: This small study reveals the value of story writing as a pedagogical technique in environmental education. The qualitative research conducted in 2020 examines 14 Indian children's place-ecological meaning as expressed in the story books they authored. Thematic analysis of the story books, interviews, journals, creative writing assignments & group discussion revealed that the children's outdoor nature experiences shaped their place-ecological meaning and inspired a striking critique of the necropolitical-geontopolitical Anthropocene regime in local contexts. Children's sense of marginalization forged empathy with the more-­than-human, fostering feelings collective identities and resistance, despite muted agency. The research emphasizes that environmental education program should not only build awareness and conscientization among participants but also provide opportunities for expression of meaning-making. The significance of the research lies in it bringing children's voices to the fore as they attempt to examine the Anthropocene from their experiences of local ecologies and places in Chennai, India.
Abstractor: As Provided
Entry Date: 2024
Accession Number: EJ1452758
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0181568792;jee01nov.24;2024Dec13.02:57;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0181568792-1">Young authors & the Anthropocene: What story books reveal about the place-ecological meaning constructed by schoolchildren of Chennai </title> <p>This small study reveals the value of story writing as a pedagogical technique in environmental education. The qualitative research conducted in 2020 examines 14 Indian children's place-ecological meaning as expressed in the story books they authored. Thematic analysis of the story books, interviews, journals, creative writing assignments & group discussion revealed that the children's outdoor nature experiences shaped their place-ecological meaning and inspired a striking critique of the necropolitical-geontopolitical Anthropocene regime in local contexts. Children's sense of marginalization forged empathy with the more--than-human, fostering feelings collective identities and resistance, despite muted agency. The research emphasizes that environmental education program should not only build awareness and conscientization among participants but also provide opportunities for expression of meaning-making. The significance of the research lies in it bringing children's voices to the fore as they attempt to examine the Anthropocene from their experiences of local ecologies and places in Chennai, India.</p> <p>Keywords: place-ecological meaning; children's stories; Anthropocene; Indian children; posthumanism</p> <hd id="AN0181568792-2">Introduction</hd> <p>We live in the Anthropocene, the era in which human activity, notably human supremacy, industrialization, capitalism, and colonialism, shapes Planet Earth to suit human utility (Steffen, [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref1">42</reflink>]). Opposition to the Anthropocene lies in recognizing it, critiquing it, and becoming-with the more-than-human through ties of kinship and solidarity (Ball, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref2">4</reflink>]; Haraway, [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref3">18</reflink>]; Kirksey & Helmreich, [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref4">21</reflink>]). The <emph>place-ecological meaning</emph> construct can help explain how these kinship bonds can be initiated and forged. Place-ecological meaning is defined as "the extent to which ecosystem-related phenomena are viewed as valued or important characteristics of places" (Russ et al., [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref5">35</reflink>], p. 74).</p> <p>Place-ecological meaning integrates sense of place and nature connectedness by reflecting how strongly people ascribe ecological symbols and attributes to a place. Place-ecological meaning is fostered through direct experiences with nature, social interactions, storytelling and discussions, environmental action and by building an ecological-place related identity (Russ et al., [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref6">35</reflink>]). Place-ecological meaning was enhanced for teenagers after participating in stewardship, recreational and learning activities which engaged them with the Bronx (Kudryavtsev et al., [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref7">24</reflink>]). These students all had a strong sense of agency as they reimagined their role in creating an environmentally different Bronx (Russ et al., [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref8">35</reflink>]). Place-ecological meaning may be understood as a pedagogical tool to facilitate the creation of assemblages of children with the immediate marginal and more-than-human, forming the nascent nature-culture needed for ecological repair (Blanco-Wells, [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref9">5</reflink>]). However, there is a paucity of research highlighting children's place-ecological meaning or their views on the Anthropocene and their entanglements with the more-than-human (Kraftl et al., [<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref10">23</reflink>]; Sporre et al., [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref11">41</reflink>]). This is especially true when it comes to children from what Dados and Connell ([<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref12">11</reflink>]) defined as the Global South, i.e. the non-Western countries which have been economically, politically and culturally marginalized.</p> <p>Akin to Malone ([<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref13">29</reflink>]) findings in Bolivia, urban Indian children's place-ecological meaning is rooted in their urbanized existence. Urban spaces are often crowded, dirty and noisy, where humans, vehicles, cows and crows intermingle in concretized spaces. "Nature," a catchall term for the more-than-human from the hegemonic perspective, is not the colonial ideal of pristinity or the "noble savage," a metaphorical virginity to be exploited by the human (Tuck & McKenzie, [<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref14">48</reflink>]). Instead "nature" is both beautiful, but also dirty, smelly, dangerous, and is very much a part of children's lived experience. Unfortunately, children's meaning-making of their natural environment or the Anthropocene is "otherized" and marginalized in their formal schooling in which they participate as "subjects" (Aves, [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref15">3</reflink>]). The education system gives primacy to knowledge in textbooks conveyed through teachers (Pinar, [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref16">31</reflink>]). These textbooks reproduce dominant paradigms of anthropocentrism (Jamal et al., [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref17">20</reflink>]; Mallick, [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref18">28</reflink>]; Shekar, [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref19">40</reflink>]; Tandon, [<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref20">46</reflink>]). Moreover, the textbooks do not and cannot deal with local contexts - it is a logistical impossibility to create textbooks contextualized to each city. This leads to a disconnect between the knowledge which children construct through their lived experiences and meaning-making, and the knowledge they are told is important.</p> <p>Nevertheless, children do have positive experiences with "nature," by spending time on terraces and balconies, empty lots, parks, zoos, beaches and in biodiversity hotspots. Non-governmental environmental education organizations offer nature education programs which foster place-ecological meaning among school students through bird-watching programs, tree-identification field trips, shore walks etc. To different degrees, the organizations help children understand the cause and consequences of the Anthropocene through discussions about the global capitalist-industrial enterprise, by connecting children to marginalized communities, and by creating avenues for participation in environmental protests.</p> <p>Studies which have examined children's meaning-making of the Anthropocene have used texts which foregrounded children's point of view but were authored by adults (Sultan & Ammari, [<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref21">44</reflink>]). Another way in which children's voices have been studied is through interviews (Lindgren Leavenworth & Manni, [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref22">27</reflink>]; Sporre et al., [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref23">41</reflink>]), analysis of letters (Renshaw, [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref24">33</reflink>]; Tooth & Renshaw, [<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref25">47</reflink>]) and artwork (Demneh & Darani, [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref26">12</reflink>]). A third method in which children's meaning-making has been analyzed is through (re)storying of their daily encounters with the more-than-human (Nxumalo & Rubin, [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref27">30</reflink>]). However, in all these cases, children's meaning-making was cast into a narrative by an adult.</p> <p>One way that children's meaning-making and their views on the Anthropocene can be studied is by examining the stories children create themselves. Children naturally use storytelling to understand and shape the meaning of significant experiences (Engel, [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref28">13</reflink>]). Stories create linkages between their personal experiences and broader narratives (Byman et al., [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref29">8</reflink>]). Children engage in what Stein ([<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref30">43</reflink>]) calls "resemiotization" to rework their meaning-making into different modalities. Their narrative voice acts upon experiences to modify them, create new interpretations and build alternative representations. The voice dictates the use of language, the perspective, the flow of the story. The characters, setting, plot and the resolution are shaped by the child's meaning-making and stance--taking (Engel, [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref31">13</reflink>]). Illustrations convey the meaning-making as visual representation of the text. When it comes to difficult knowledge, like that of the Anthropocene, storytelling creates imaginary spaces in which ideas can be explored, new imaginaries can be created, and kinship with the more-than-human can be expressed (Facer, [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref32">14</reflink>]; Lindgren Leavenworth & Manni, [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref33">27</reflink>]) in resistance to the imposed hegemonic imaginary (Arcuri & Hendlin, [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref34">2</reflink>]; Hendlin, [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref35">19</reflink>]) in a child-constructed imaginary world outside the panopticon of the Anthropocene's power-knowledge structures (Ball, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref36">4</reflink>]). Kumpulainen et al. ([<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref37">25</reflink>]) assert that children's narratives about the Anthropocene highlight the human-material-spatial-temporal assemblages. They found that children's stories are based on their identities, experiences, cultural knowledge and critical understanding. These narratives are not simplistic or romantic, rather they call on moral reasoning, assign agency and express a range of emotion from love and caring for the more-than-human to grief and anger at the damage humans have wrought.</p> <p>Given the lack of prior research into Indian children's meaning-making of place and nature, we went into this research with the goal of trying to understand, prima facie, how children express their place--ecological meaning in stories they create. As we worked with the children and their data, we realized that their place-ecological meaning was deeply intertwined with children's indictment of the Anthropocene. Our research questions were:</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> What do Indian child-authored story books tell us about their place-ecological meaning?</item> <p></p> <item> How does this place-ecological meaning relate to their meaning-making of the Anthropocene?</item> </ulist> <hd id="AN0181568792-3">Method</hd> <p></p> <hd id="AN0181568792-4">The project</hd> <p>From 2018 to 2020, the entire cohort of 60 5th-8th graders in a small alternative school in Chennai took part in a place-based nature education program conducted by a non-governmental, environmental education organization. This program had familiarized participants with Chennai's ecology, the impact of human activity on the more-than-human, and ecological restoration work. Full-day classes were held twice a month at Adyar Poonga, a restored urban wetland in Chennai. Learning experiences included excursions to beaches, wetlands, rivers, urban-forest, birdwatching, community engagement and interactions with environmental activists.</p> <p>The six-month book-authoring program was conducted online in 2020 during the pandemic school lockdowns by two non-governmental environmental education organizations in collaboration with the school. The goal was to enable students to express their learnings from the earlier place-based nature education program by writing story books. Learning experiences consisted of full class sessions on the importance of storytelling for the environment, creative writing and publishing. Individual mentoring sessions enabled participants to bounce their ideas off the mentors and get feedback. Assignments included regular journaling, reflective writing, storyboarding, creative writing, artwork, review and revision. Children were exposed to writers like Rachel Carson and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie among others. Students were given freedom to choose the theme of their story books, the plots and characters with the constraint that the story must relate to their learnings from the place-based nature program and must be set in Tamil Nadu or Chennai. Table 1 has a list of the names and broad themes of the books the children wrote.</p> <p>Table 1. Participant grades, book names & book themes.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead><tr><td>Age</td><td>Grade</td><td>Picture book title & theme</td></tr></thead><tbody valign="top"><tr><td char=".">15</td><td char=".">11</td><td><italic>Pulikathai:</italic> Dilemma of a conservationist who has to kill a man-eating tiger.</td></tr><tr><td char=".">14</td><td char=".">8</td><td><italic>The Eggs-pedition:</italic> The story of the last crow's egg in Chennai.</td></tr><tr><td char=".">13</td><td char=".">8</td><td><italic>Dependent:</italic> A child addicted to social media finds restoration in nature.</td></tr><tr><td char=".">13</td><td char=".">8</td><td><italic>A Cat, A Backpack & a Tale</italic>: A backpack narrates its experiences of ecology field trips in Chennai to a cat in an urban forest-wetland</td></tr><tr><td char=".">13</td><td char=".">8</td><td><italic>The Hidden Wild:</italic> A smorgasbord of first-person accounts narrated by animals residing in Chennai's urban national park.</td></tr><tr><td char=".">12</td><td char=".">8</td><td><italic>A Turtle Walk with a Fly:</italic> A boy-turned-fly discovers a sinister plot to develop Chennai's beach.</td></tr><tr><td char=".">12</td><td char=".">7</td><td><italic>A Lapwing's Tale:</italic> A lapwing narrates its experience of migrating to Chennai for the winter.</td></tr><tr><td char=".">12</td><td char=".">7</td><td><italic>The Adventures of Polly CO<sub>2</sub>:</italic> A molecule of Carbon Dioxide (CO<sub>2</sub>) discovers its role in the air pollution in Chennai.</td></tr><tr><td char=".">11</td><td char=".">6</td><td><italic>An Eagle's Voice:</italic> A white bellied sea-eagle is displaced from its sand dune and has to find another home in Chennai.</td></tr><tr><td char=".">11</td><td char=".">6</td><td><italic>A Croc in Need:</italic> A young marsh crocodile rescues his family from a leather making factory.</td></tr><tr><td char=".">11</td><td char=".">6</td><td><italic>A Flutter in the Poonga</italic>: A common wanderer hatches and discovers the beauty of the Adyar Poonga, a restored wetland in Chennai.</td></tr><tr><td char=".">10</td><td char=".">6</td><td><italic>Olivia the Storyteller:</italic> An Olive Ridley born on Chennai's Besant Nagar beach recounts its encounters with humans.</td></tr><tr><td char=".">10</td><td char=".">5</td><td><italic>Amira's Green Friends:</italic> A schoolgirl mobilizes friends to save the trees in a neighboring lot.</td></tr><tr><td char=".">10</td><td char=".">5</td><td><italic>How Haju Weaved the World:</italic> A fisherfolk girl discovers the disaster that humans cause in a coral reef in the Andamans.</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <hd id="AN0181568792-5">Participants</hd> <p>An open call for participation was issued by the school to the students who had participated in the place-based nature education program. 14 students from that group registered for the book authoring project. While the participant size was small, qualitative studies provide flexibility on the sample size depending on the nature and goal of the study (Creswell & Poth, [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref38">10</reflink>]). All the participants were from middle class family backgrounds and resided in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Their ages ranged from 10 to 15 years with the majority of the children being pre-adolescent. All the participants had all attended or were attending a small, alternative, constructivist school. Table 1 lists the age and grades of the participants.</p> <hd id="AN0181568792-6">Data collection</hd> <p>The data collection took place during the book-writing project in 2020. The primary source of data were the story books authored by the participants. Additional data, called the non-book data, were collected from:</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> Creative writing assignments at the beginning of the project.</item> <p></p> <item> Journals which students maintained during the course of the project.</item> <p></p> <item> A semi-structured interview which was conducted online using Google Forms with open-ended questions with responses from all 14 participants.</item> <p></p> <item> Focus group discussion which was conducted at the end of the book writing project in July 2020 via Zoom. All 14 participants attended. The group discussion was conducted by the facilitator of the book writing program and two of the researchers were participant-observers. The discussion deliberately included all the students so their shared meaning-making could be expressed. The discussion lasted for 1.5 hours was recorded after obtaining permission from the students.</item> </ulist> <p>Extracts from the non-book data are and links to the student authored books have been included in the Supplementary Material.</p> <hd id="AN0181568792-7">Data analysis</hd> <p>For analysis of both sets of data, researchers independently coded the data, maintained analytic memos and then resolved differences through discussions. The non-book data, consisting of interviews, journals and written assignments, was analyzed inductively at a phrase level in an open-ended manner using in-vivo coding (Saldaña, [<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref39">38</reflink>]) and resulted in six major themes. A list of themes, sub-themes and examples from the non-book data set are listed in Table 2.</p> <p>Table 2. Themes from "non-book" data set.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead><tr><td>Theme</td><td>Sub themes</td><td>Sample quotations</td></tr></thead><tbody valign="top"><tr><td>Full Body memories</td><td>Smells, taste, bodily experiences, aural, visual</td><td>"cold, damp mud around my palms"</td></tr><tr><td>Discoveries</td><td>Place, More-than-human, Self</td><td>"I was surprised to see the park so green and filled with trees!. I had never seen a place like that in chennai, In fact, i never knew there was."</td></tr><tr><td>Emotions</td><td>Fascination, love, excitement, curiosity, gratitude, peace, Anger, grief, frustration</td><td>"river shimmering in brilliant blue weaving across the land like embroidery on a dress."</td></tr><tr><td>Interactions</td><td>Friends, Mentors, More-than-human</td><td>"On most trips, adventurous Vaishnavi akka would astonish us by swallowing whole weird looking beady seeds/fruits as she was familiar with what <italic>was</italic> and what <italic>was not</italic> safe to consume."</td></tr><tr><td>Perspectives</td><td>Mine, Me-as-an-assemblage, Mentors, More-than-Human: Biotic, Abiotic systems, abiotic individuals</td><td>"'Aaah what a beautiful day! I think I'll just weave around to see my friend: The Adyar Poonga. Hold on! Let me and the sky put my best shade of blue.' Blue shimmers on the water. 'Oh that's perfect! Hold this position, Sky! Now head into the poonga, under the bridges, over the lowlands, and sometimes into the forest! Oh No! There is a plastic bag on my head, remove it! REMOVE IT IMMEDIATELY!'"</td></tr><tr><td>My story</td><td>Why I wrote</td><td>"But now that I'm doing this book, I see that I can change stuff in very little ways, but it's still a change."</td></tr><tr><td /><td>Roots of my story</td><td>"I took the W's - why, how, what, when. So I thought, "Where was it?" That was the Pallikarnai Marsh? I took each aspect of it "Who was it?" I saw birds. I had to settle on a specific bird. And then "What is the problem there?" I tried to recollect, what I saw while being on the Pallikarnai Marsh. I saw a lot of construction and stuff. So I decided to use that as my problem."</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <p>An initial reading of the story books using Thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref40">6</reflink>]; Guest et al., [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref41">17</reflink>]) was used to understand inductively emergent themes from the story books. Thereafter, we deductively applied Gaard ([<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref42">16</reflink>])'s framework to the story books. This framework has been used for examining adult authored environmental fiction. The framework suggests three dimensions:</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> <emph>Identity</emph>: How is the human identity represented in the narrative in relation to the more-than-human and in what way does this representation challenge narratives of domination.</item> <p></p> <item> <emph>Issue & its resolution</emph>: How does the narrative define the ecological issue and how does it resolve it, especially in terms of hierarchical-non-hierarchical relationships between humans, children, and more-than-humans?</item> <p></p> <item> <emph>Agency</emph>: What agency does the narrative attribute to the more-than-human?</item> </ulist> <p>We applied this framework to see what the representations of the characters, the choice of environmental problem & its resolution, and the notion of agency tell us about the young authors' place-ecological meaning and how it related to the Anthropocene. The list of themes from the book data set is listed in Table 3.</p> <p>Table 3. List of themes & sub-themes from the books data set.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead><tr><td>Meta-theme</td><td>Subtheme</td></tr></thead><tbody valign="top"><tr><td>Identity</td><td><list list-type="Bullet"><list-item><p>Popular Endangered animal</p></list-item><list-item><p>Abiotic</p></list-item><list-item><p>Multiple identities</p></list-item><list-item><p>Marginalized</p></list-item><list-item><p>Child on the cusp</p></list-item><list-item><p>Transhuman</p></list-item></list></td></tr><tr><td>Issue & Resolution</td><td><list list-type="Bullet"><list-item><p>Rumi's elephant</p></list-item><list-item><p>The specter of the Anthropocene</p></list-item><list-item><p>Death</p></list-item><list-item><p>Amorphous resolution</p></list-item><list-item><p>Construction of the Adult</p></list-item><list-item><p>Resistance & Resilience</p></list-item></list></td></tr><tr><td>Agency</td><td><list list-type="Bullet"><list-item><p>The Perpetrator of destruction</p></list-item><list-item><p>The Resistor to destruction</p></list-item></list></td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <hd id="AN0181568792-8">Ethics & researcher role, quality & reflexivity</hd> <p>All students and parents signed Consent Forms to express their willingness to participate in the study and permitted the sharing of the data including the children's names and list of their story books. The story books are in the public domain and can be read online. However, in the interests of privacy, direct quotations from the participants in this article have been kept anonymous. The first researcher was a participant observer in the projects enabling her to get close to and develop relationships with the students to gain a deeper understanding of their experience (Lincoln & Guba, [<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref43">26</reflink>]). The second researcher used his background in basic sciences and work in posthumanism and multispecies ethnography to add those perspectives to the research. The third researcher as a university professor was the mentor and guide for the study. To address issues of trustworthiness and credibility, the researchers have provided descriptive data about the participants and their books within the bounds of maintaining confidentiality, as well as outlined the researchers' roles and perspectives (Saldaña, [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref44">37</reflink>]). The use of reflective memos, revisiting the data several times through multiple readings and discussions between the researchers helped maintain researcher reflexivity.</p> <hd id="AN0181568792-9">Results</hd> <p></p> <hd id="AN0181568792-10">Results from non-books dataset</hd> <p>Results from the non-book data revealed participants' place-ecological meaning about Chennai was rooted in their memories of their field-trips which were highly kinesthetic, emotional and related to interactions with friends and mentors. The nature experiences had been memorable and created a powerful impact as the students discovered the hidden pockets of natural beauty in their hometown. The experiences generated strong positive emotions of excitement, love and peace but also negative emotions of anger, frustration and grief. The participants remembered the interactions with their mentors and friends vividly.</p> <p>While humans trying to speak for the more-than-human is usually considered subtly reinforcing of human hegemony (Rose & International Association for Envirnmental Philosophy, [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref45">34</reflink>]), these participants were able to effectively speak with, rather than for, the more-than-human. through a variety of perspectives. While the animal point of view was common, the interesting perspectives were those of the abiotic components of the environment. These included the large abiotic systems like clouds or the river, the abiotic individuals like stones and abiotic extensions of themselves like their own shoe. The participants' empathy for the more-than-human and grief at seeing the damage humans are doing, led them to use symbolization and metaphors to anthropomorphize the more-than-human and give it a voice (Tam et al., [<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref46">45</reflink>]). However, the more-than-human perspective was also nuanced as it recognized that humans may be caring, loving, and exciting.</p> <p>The participants felt a strong need to communicate their experiences to the wider world. They knew their place-based experience had been rare and they wanted others also to share the joy and satisfaction they had derived from discovering the more-than-human in the familiar concrete jungle of their city, and to make readers think and care about the negative impact of human activities on the more-than-humans. This included talking about the marginalized human and more-than-human world within their city, and an innate belief in their power to create change through their story books.</p> <hd id="AN0181568792-11">Results from the books dataset</hd> <p>The books are an expression of children's place-ecological meaning which shaped their stories. The environmental problems that the students chose to address in their books also highlight the particular environmental issue that held special meaning for them (Table 1). The characters in the books were created from their memories interplaying with both their imagination and their real-world experiences. Almost all of the authors rooted their plot, illustration, location, experiences, and language in Chennai. Use of Tamil and other local terms for the more-than-human are present in several of the books. The children's experiences with the place-based nature education program gave rise to powerful place-based notions of the more-than-human around them rather than a mythologized other. This led to an understanding of place that reflects surprisingly mature comprehensions of urban ecology. The children were attached to familiar spaces under threat from the Anthropocene's forces, and a sense of place belonging permeates throughout their books' prose and illustrations. Many illustrations featured local threatened spaces, beaches, wetlands and forests, reflecting the rootedness in Chennai's ecology. For example, in <emph>Amira's Green Friends,</emph> the child-protagonists, being given spare land by a powerful adult to "keep them out of trouble," turn it into a flourishing urban garden. The same book features a rich description of the hidden ecology that forms around a leaking water tank. Children's place-ecological meaning was also expressed as emotions of grief and anger over lost homes and lives. As the children mourned the damage wrought to the more-than-human, expressing frustration and anxiety over the seemingly heedless machine of human supremacy, their books are an indictment of the Anthropocene and a call to action. The emergent themes are discussed in greater detail below:</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> <emph>Identity ("Who am I?"):</emph> The first meta-theme involved the characters in the books. These were created by anthropomorphizing diverse more-than-human elements who observed the Anthropocene from the perspective of the Other. While the majority of children wrote from the perspective of an animal (mostly popular endangered species such as turtles and eagles), <emph>The Turtle Walk and a Fly</emph>, is written from the perspective of "undesirable" nonhuman animals. In this book, a child undergoes a Kafkaesque transformation into a fly, a nonhuman universally considered vermin by humans, and views human space from the perspective of a fly, feasting on food considered delicious by flies but not humans, observing his human friends attending a lecture by an environmental activist on human-driven marine habitat destruction (fig. 1). In some books the children recognize the marginality of nonhumans and offer up an ambiguous identity of a child, sometimes human and nonhuman, always in solidarity with the more-than-human. For example, in <emph>Amira's Green Friends</emph> and <emph>How Haju Weaved the World</emph> the child-protagonists were positioned not as humans, but as change-agents speaking with the more-than-humans. <emph>Dependent</emph> explored themes of transhumanism and digital identity, interplaying a depressed child's diary entries alongside cheery social media posts. The children adopted perspectives that challenged the foregrounding and reification of hegemonic ideas of the human and human supremacy, with some books being written from the perspective of abiotic agents furious at the Anthropocene, or as in the case of <emph>Adventures of Polly CO<subs>2</subs></emph> and <emph>A Cat, A Backpack & a Tale</emph>, abiotic witnesses narrating the tale of environmental damage.</item> </ulist> <p>PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 1. Transformation into a fly.</p> <p>The choice of perpetrators was also interesting. <emph>Adventures of Polly CO<subs>2</subs></emph> features a molecule of carbon di-oxide who discovers herself to be the perpetrator of pollution, causing suffering for humans (fig. 2). The perpetrator in the <emph>A Cat, A Backpack & a Tale</emph> was distant, impersonal, and systemic: "bright green, freshly mowed, and immaculately maintained private lawns bordering the Mambalam Canal were dropping toxic pesticides into the river, already laden with noxious wastes from leather factories." In both books, the human role in creating environmental damage was not explicit. This complex and possibly ambivalent representation in both books could be attributed to the notion of "difficult knowledge" (Britzman, [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref47">7</reflink>]) which evokes psychological defenses to downplay harsh truths about ourselves as humans and our role in the Anthropocene and possibly explains how children distanced themselves from identifying as adults/humans.</p> <p>PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 2. Polly CO2 as the perpetrator.</p> <p>Nonetheless, an unconscious expression of class and caste positionality can also be found in these books penned by predominantly middle-class students. In one book, the instructor and his assistants were illustrated darker than the students, a trait often subconsciously associated with caste and class in India. <emph>An Eagle's Voice</emph> briefly mentions the Chennai floods of 2015, a disaster that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people, as an Anthropocene-triggered plot device that changes some human minds, ignoring the uneven impact of the event on the marginalized. Similarly, the crocodiles in <emph>The Croc in Need</emph> wished for the wholesale extermination of humans with little nuance. Most books replicated the child-in-nature trope to some extent despite its issues.</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> <emph>Issue & Resolution:</emph> The second meta-theme can be understood as a sum of the issue and the resolution. Systemic themes are present in some form in every book. Most children understood the Anthropocene through its various individual impacts, akin to Rumi's story of the elephant in the dark. The majority wrote about pollution of some sort, poaching, or human induced habitat loss, while others explored the link between the Anthropocene and capitalism. <emph>Pulikathai</emph> & <emph>A Backpack, A Cat & a Tale</emph> described industrialized exploitation and destruction, the latter narrating the destruction of a river with far-reaching implications for marginalized fisherfolk communities in Chennai. <emph>Dependent</emph> is a story about depression in the digital age, reflecting Marxist ideas of alienation, the dichotomy between lived and virtual neighborhoods (Appadurai, [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref48">1</reflink>]) and transhumanist ideas of technology as an extension of the self (Ferrando, [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref49">15</reflink>]).</item> </ulist> <p>Most prominent was the issue of Death. Seven of the 14 books deal with death. <emph>The Croc in Need</emph> draws a parallel between the killing of a crocodile for skin with the killings during the Holocaust (fig. 3). The Anthropocene is depicted as a juggernaut that murders nonhumans indiscriminately, even that which is not considered alive to begin with - the river in <emph>A Backpack, A Cat & a Tale</emph> and the unhatched egg in <emph>The Eggs-pedition</emph>. These books challenge the idea of abiotic nonhumans, such as the sea or air, being incapable of "dying" at the hands of the Anthropocene, with "death" becoming a force that neutralizes inconvenient existences. It is surprising and sobering to find children writing complex and emotional stories involving death and grieving, challenging Anthropocentric dehumanization of nonhumans.</p> <p>PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 3. Killing of the crocodile.</p> <p>The finest example of this is surely <emph>Eggs-pedition</emph>, which highlights the fallacy of protecting the environment solely for the purpose of human benefit, describing a hypothetical dystopia dictated by human utility, a sort of "Dictatorship of the Human." In the book, a crow's egg (a nonhuman element that straddles the abiotic and biotic, originating from an oft reviled human-adjacent nonhuman animal) makes friends with a stone in a world where humans are no longer dependent in any way on the environment and have colonized the planet into a sterile dystopia based solely on human utility. The pair are separated, with the stone trapped in the floor of a car and the egg placed in a suffocating exhibit in a museum before being smashed in a human argument. This is oddly relevant amidst debates over conservation efforts in academia (Safina, [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref50">36</reflink>]).</p> <p>The story resolutions indicated that the children were all aware of the extent and complexity of the Anthropocene. Two books ended gloomily, three with small-scale positive developments, but the majority of the books had open-ended non-resolutions of some kind, in which small-scale positive resolutions gave some hope for larger, systemic change. Most endings expressed solidarity with the nonhuman as either a human or a fellow nonhuman, with the authors appealing in the "Message from the Author" to adult readers to change the Anthropocene, which they see as a Herculean task ignored by powerful, negligent grown-ups. This can be understood as an organic, child-constructed form of "messianicity sans messiah" and "becoming-with," themes common in posthuman scholarship about combating the Anthropocene (Haraway, [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref51">18</reflink>]; Kirksey et al., [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref52">22</reflink>]).</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> <emph>Agency:</emph> The third meta-theme had the authors grapple with the question of agency and also of responsibility. No author saw the nonhuman as completely capable of countering human supremacist systems, and only one book, <emph>Amira's Green Friends,</emph> involved a child succeeding in effecting positive change. The majority either saw the Anthropocene as the responsibility of adults or the result of an Anthropocentric Industrial-Capitalist system much larger than individuals, including adults, of whom some were evil, some were indifferent, and some were good. It is important to note that, in the stories, many adults only carried out positive action after being convinced by the children. In contrast, in <emph>Pulikathai</emph>, there is no child involved. In this story, an Indian Muslim conservationist teams up with an Adivasi man to track down and eventually shoot a man-eating tiger which is terrorizing Adivasi and farmer communities. The shooting traumatizes the conservationist and draws outrage on social media through which both men become keenly aware of their vulnerable position in Indian society. It is revealed that everyone involved, including the tiger, are affected by mining activity, a common story in India's ravaged forests. The book draws on a common experience for many Indian Muslims and Adivasis, and deals with the intersection of systems of marginalization in a country caught in a net of neocolonialism, internal colonialism, capitalism, caste, and far-right politics, in the context of an increasingly digitized world (Appadurai, [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref53">1</reflink>]).</item> </ulist> <p>Many of the books carried themes of resistance and resilience by the marginalized and by sympathetic human adults. Animal resistance is portrayed as brave but futile, and human resistance can only carry out small positive actions that do not impact the larger Anthropocene. Nonetheless, the animals hope that with the advent of the "good humans" and symbolic acts of resistance, the Anthropocene may be mitigated and perhaps reversed in the future by human consensus. On the other hand, the author in <emph>The Eggs-pedition</emph>, is skeptical about the intentions of the good humans, whose motive for conservation is for human benefit alone. The more-than-human is perceived by many authors as resilient in the face of human violence, with <emph>A Lapwing's Tale</emph> describing the protagonist, a bird, growing to appreciate an endangered wetland despite its blemishment by pollution and human development.</p> <hd id="AN0181568792-12">Discussion</hd> <p>To summarize the results, the children's place ecological meaning was an intertwining of their identities with the more-than-human in opposition to the Anthropocene, an evil system of gargantuan proportions, which must be resisted, albeit with little hopes of success. The children can be understood as budding organic intellectuals, who used their life experiences and education to develop and express a sense of place-ecological meaning, which in turn gave them a fresh perspective of the Anthropocene. The first question that comes to mind on examining the results is on how these pre-adolescents and adolescents could produce such a scathing critique of the Anthropocene. The mandate given in the book authoring program which provided the boundaries for their creative endeavor (Sharples, [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref54">39</reflink>]) was broad i.e. the books had to be around Tamil Nadu/Chennai and rooted in their nature experiences. However, this mandate wasn't cast in stone as two of the students created settings that didn't belong to Tamil Nadu and one student brought in nature only at the end of the story as the resolution. The answer lies in the powerful experiences created by the place-based nature education program. The program had been structured to expose children to the beautiful spots of hidden biodiversity in Chennai as well as the damage caused by urbanization in the form of polluted rivers, seashores and roads. Discussions with the mentors in that program and environmental activists had provided the children the context to the environmental damage they witnessed and this helped the children realize that the problem was systemic. Reflective writing assignments during the book authoring program activated memories about the program. This was the "pool of inspiration" into which the children dived to create their narratives. The process of writing a book shaped the memories into narratives, provided inspiration for characters and settings. It also necessitated independent research through readings, audio--visual resources, internet searches and conversations with mentors on the specific issue each child chose to write on. This process deepened children's understanding and shaped their worldview. The book-authoring program fostered a strong sense of agency that as authors they could make a difference, "increase awareness," and "change lives." The learning from the results is that while the nature education program shaped children's worldview and hence the narratives, the book authoring program created the opportunities for its expression.</p> <p>The second question that comes to mind is why the issues and resolutions chosen by the children focussed on loss, destruction and death of the more-than-human. Two concepts derived from Foucault, can help us frame our understanding. One is the notion of geontopolitical forces as defined by Povinelli ([<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref55">32</reflink>]) which shape a human-exclusivist future through rigid categorization of Life and Non-life, and prioritize what is deemed as Living. The other is the concept of necropolitics which explains how the forces of the Anthropocene use death to modify and shape the more-than-human to suit human needs. Both forces reify human-nonhuman distinctions spatially, and are intertwined with other systems of exploitation, such as colonialism. Global-scale necropolitical and geontopolitical forces have induced an environmental catastrophe that disproportionately affects the Global South, and within the Global South, marginalized groups, especially children (Carvalho & Riquito, [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref56">9</reflink>]).</p> <p>The place-ecological meaning developed through the experiences with the place-based nature program included human-nonhuman perspectives, in defiance of geontopolitical binaries. The children saw themselves as a marginalized assemblage, rooted in time-spaces, or knots in ethical time (Rose & International Association for Envirnmental Philosophy, [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref57">34</reflink>]) carved out of their urban surroundings, interconnected with the more-than-human world through a complex network of relationships within an outwardly unitary assemblage. In other words, they were subconsciously involved in the process of becoming-with the nonhuman other, in defiance of the human supremacist hegemony that shapes most human narratives. They associated the "world-system" as the culprit for myriad effects of the Anthropocene. This made the impacts of the Anthropocene a personal loss to them, the destruction of part of the Self, that they became increasingly conscious of and keen to contain and eventually reverse. The place-based nature program they had attended and the book-authoring project became a venue for interactions with other students and adult mentors to share perspectives and mourn the destruction of the more-than-human, and allowed them the experience of passionate immersion in the Anthropocene. The characters in their books transformed over time from Western names and settings to local ones, reflecting this growing passion and awareness, causing a rudimentary creative literary decolonization (Rose & International Association for Envirnmental Philosophy, [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref58">34</reflink>]; van Dooren et al., [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref59">49</reflink>]). The frequent mention of death was a tool to critique the necropolitics that shapes the Anthropocene, lying in the intersection of colonialism, capitalism, marginalization, and human supremacy.</p> <p>While the place-ecological meaning intertwined with their notions about the Anthropocene led to a range of negative emotions associated with grieving, the books also held cautious hope of a better future, despite the unclear sense of agency. This sense of cautious hope did not have a definite image, but rather was akin to the idea of Derrida's messianicity-sans-messiah, in which future changes are indefinite and unknown. The children can be understood as proto-organic-intellectuals, whose experiences with more-than-human and marginalization have given them a unique outlook on the Anthropocene, and who have the potential to formalize their hidden knowledge.</p> <p>The philosopher Donna Haraway once called the Anthropocene the "Chthulucene," an era in which things are going South but haven't reached the South Pole <emph>yet</emph>, in which the many different, metaphorically tentacular, assemblages that grace this world face an uncertain fate, and grief over the fallen is interwoven in the fraying edges of the network of the more-than-human. Children are often called the future, and if things do not change, this future is under dire threat. The children we worked with were keenly aware of this, the urgency of the problem, the kin they lose with each passing extinction, the death of spaces they have developed kinship with. They showed an extraordinarily nuanced understanding of the workings of necropolitical and geontopolitical systems with the Anthropocene, expressed as a jeremiad. The book-authoring project gave them a voice to express their grief, their hopes and their perspectives on the catastrophic Anthropocene, something the regular Indian education system tends to suffocate. An important context of this study is the positionality of the students as members of a small school community in Chennai. Their meaning-making reflects broader possibilities for education in subaltern spaces of the Global South, which are often most threatened by Anthropocene forces such as climate change.</p> <hd id="AN0181568792-13">Conclusion</hd> <p>This research sheds light on children's expression of their place-ecological meaning-making in their stories as a complex interweaving of multiple players in the light of the Anthropocene. It highlights the intricate web children created of intertwined identities of themselves with the more-than-humans they encountered during their place-based nature education program, the animals, trees, rivers, pollution, streets, and other children. In the story books authored by the children, the more-than-human entities became more than simply objects molded by humans, but as agents in their own right, shaping an exchange (and sometimes co-merging) with children. Children's own sense of lack of agency in an adult world, disempowered and acted upon by adults, forged empathy with the nonhuman, other children, and other marginalized humans, critiquing both the Anthropocene as well as their own lack of agency. The common "enemy" in the form of powerful adults, and the industries, politicians, and processes of the Anthropocene, shaped a collective sense of activism and resistance.</p> <p>The results of this research reinforce theoretical and empirical work on the process of place-ecological meaning but add further dimensions. Firstly, it is a qualitative study that brings the voices of children and their meaning-making of the Anthropocene to the fore. Secondly, the study localizes the meaning--making of the Anthropocene using experiences, places and local ecologies. While this study is not universally generalizable, these results can be used by researchers and curriculum makers to add context to their overarching knowledge about how children make and express meaning about nature and place experiences in the era of Anthropocene.</p> <p>Four suggestions emerge from the study. First, environmental education programs must offer children opportunities to learn deeply about local environmental issues and to express their learning in meaningful ways. The other suggestions are more methodological. While the place-ecological meaning scale was deliberately worded positively (Kudryavtsev et al., [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref60">24</reflink>]), we recommend at possibly modifying the scale to capture the sense-making of the Anthropocene in urban spaces which includes negative associations. Another suggestion is to use qualitative semi-structured interview protocol for uncovering the place--ecological meaning, rather than the existing quantitative scale, in order to get a deeper understanding of dimensions of the meaning. Third, using a postcolonial analysis of knowledge-gathering systems, we found Gaard ([<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref61">16</reflink>])'s framework for analyzing environmental fiction broadly applicable. However, we feel it is important to revise the framework to include place-ecological meaning, which we found was a major component of the young authors stories of the Anthropocene, and roots their universal knowledge with their local experience.</p> <p>We hope pedagogical practices like the book authoring project and the place-based nature education program, if implemented well, can help future generations understand the Anthropocene in local contexts, combat the looming environmental crisis faced by India and the rest of the Global South, and try to undo the disasters of this dystopian era.</p> <hd id="AN0181568792-14">Acknowledgements & note</hd> <p>The child is the mother of woman, and we hope to raise the heirs to the current batch of Multispecies scholars, whom we thank, the Haraways, the Roses, the Sinhas, the Kirkseys, the Helmreichs, along with the wonderful folks we became-with during out time at Adyar Poonga and at the small, alternative school they had attended.</p> <hd id="AN0181568792-15">Disclosure statement of funding</hd> <p>No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).</p> <hd id="AN0181568792-16">Data availability statement</hd> <p>The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Mendeley Data at https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/mrp5bj3szw/1</p> <ref id="AN0181568792-17"> <title> Footnotes </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref48" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2024.2364190.</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <ref id="AN0181568792-18"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibtext> Appadurai, A. 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Items – Name: Title
  Label: Title
  Group: Ti
  Data: Young Authors & the Anthropocene: What Story Books Reveal about the Place-Ecological Meaning Constructed by Schoolchildren of Chennai
– Name: Language
  Label: Language
  Group: Lang
  Data: English
– Name: Author
  Label: Authors
  Group: Au
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Aneesa+Jamal%22">Aneesa Jamal</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2673-4024">0000-0002-2673-4024</externalLink>)<br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Abubakr+Mohammed+Jamal%22">Abubakr Mohammed Jamal</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5168-2190">0000-0002-5168-2190</externalLink>)<br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Sanitah+Mohd+Yusof%22">Sanitah Mohd Yusof</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1185-7790">0000-0003-1185-7790</externalLink>)
– Name: TitleSource
  Label: Source
  Group: Src
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Journal+of+Environmental+Education%22"><i>Journal of Environmental Education</i></searchLink>. 2024 55(6):480-493.
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  Label: Availability
  Group: Avail
  Data: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
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  Label: Peer Reviewed
  Group: SrcInfo
  Data: Y
– Name: Pages
  Label: Page Count
  Group: Src
  Data: 14
– Name: DatePubCY
  Label: Publication Date
  Group: Date
  Data: 2024
– Name: TypeDocument
  Label: Document Type
  Group: TypDoc
  Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Research
– Name: Audience
  Label: Education Level
  Group: Audnce
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Elementary+Education%22">Elementary Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Grade+5%22">Grade 5</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Intermediate+Grades%22">Intermediate Grades</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Middle+Schools%22">Middle Schools</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Grade+6%22">Grade 6</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Grade+7%22">Grade 7</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Junior+High+Schools%22">Junior High Schools</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Secondary+Education%22">Secondary Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Grade+8%22">Grade 8</searchLink>
– Name: Subject
  Label: Descriptors
  Group: Su
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Teaching+Methods%22">Teaching Methods</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Childrens+Writing%22">Childrens Writing</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Story+Grammar%22">Story Grammar</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Environmental+Education%22">Environmental Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Animals%22">Animals</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Geographic+Location%22">Geographic Location</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Ecology%22">Ecology</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Childrens+Literature%22">Childrens Literature</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Creative+Writing%22">Creative Writing</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Empathy%22">Empathy</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Psychological+Patterns%22">Psychological Patterns</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Self+Concept%22">Self Concept</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Resistance+%28Psychology%29%22">Resistance (Psychology)</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Concept+Formation%22">Concept Formation</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Foreign+Countries%22">Foreign Countries</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Grade+5%22">Grade 5</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Grade+6%22">Grade 6</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Grade+7%22">Grade 7</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Grade+8%22">Grade 8</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Science+Education%22">Science Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Elementary+School+Science%22">Elementary School Science</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Middle+School+Students%22">Middle School Students</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Elementary+School+Students%22">Elementary School Students</searchLink>
– Name: Subject
  Label: Geographic Terms
  Group: Su
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22India%22">India</searchLink>
– Name: DOI
  Label: DOI
  Group: ID
  Data: 10.1080/00958964.2024.2364190
– Name: ISSN
  Label: ISSN
  Group: ISSN
  Data: 0095-8964<br />1940-1892
– Name: Abstract
  Label: Abstract
  Group: Ab
  Data: This small study reveals the value of story writing as a pedagogical technique in environmental education. The qualitative research conducted in 2020 examines 14 Indian children's place-ecological meaning as expressed in the story books they authored. Thematic analysis of the story books, interviews, journals, creative writing assignments & group discussion revealed that the children's outdoor nature experiences shaped their place-ecological meaning and inspired a striking critique of the necropolitical-geontopolitical Anthropocene regime in local contexts. Children's sense of marginalization forged empathy with the more-­than-human, fostering feelings collective identities and resistance, despite muted agency. The research emphasizes that environmental education program should not only build awareness and conscientization among participants but also provide opportunities for expression of meaning-making. The significance of the research lies in it bringing children's voices to the fore as they attempt to examine the Anthropocene from their experiences of local ecologies and places in Chennai, India.
– Name: AbstractInfo
  Label: Abstractor
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  Data: As Provided
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  Label: Entry Date
  Group: Date
  Data: 2024
– Name: AN
  Label: Accession Number
  Group: ID
  Data: EJ1452758
PLink https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=eric&AN=EJ1452758
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    Identifiers:
      – Type: doi
        Value: 10.1080/00958964.2024.2364190
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      – Text: English
    PhysicalDescription:
      Pagination:
        PageCount: 14
        StartPage: 480
    Subjects:
      – SubjectFull: Teaching Methods
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Childrens Writing
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Story Grammar
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Environmental Education
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Animals
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      – SubjectFull: Geographic Location
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      – SubjectFull: Ecology
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Childrens Literature
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      – SubjectFull: Creative Writing
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      – SubjectFull: Empathy
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Psychological Patterns
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Self Concept
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      – SubjectFull: Resistance (Psychology)
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      – SubjectFull: Concept Formation
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      – SubjectFull: Foreign Countries
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      – SubjectFull: Grade 5
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      – SubjectFull: Grade 6
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      – SubjectFull: Grade 7
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      – SubjectFull: Grade 8
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      – SubjectFull: Science Education
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      – SubjectFull: Elementary School Science
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      – SubjectFull: Middle School Students
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Elementary School Students
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: India
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      – TitleFull: Young Authors & the Anthropocene: What Story Books Reveal about the Place-Ecological Meaning Constructed by Schoolchildren of Chennai
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            NameFull: Sanitah Mohd Yusof
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