scholarly journals “All the places I’ve been to [in the tropics] are not really a special place”: Investigating Children’s Place Attachments through Collage and Stories

Author(s):  
Tamara Brooks ◽  
Reesa Sorin

At the end of his book, ‘Last Child in the Woods’, Louv (2005, cited in Kellert, Heerwagen &amp; Mador, 2008, p.154) stated “it is evident that we are at a turning point in history where opportunities for children to explore the natural world, until recently taken for granted, must now be intentionally created”. This statement was intended to communicate to the general<br />public a disturbing reality – the growing disconnect between children and their local, natural environments. Sorin (2004) explains that children, particularly young children do not always have the words to describe what they see think or feel. Collage, an arts-based methodology has been found to reflect the ways in which our worlds are experienced (Butler-Kisber &amp; Poldma, 2009). This paper explores a researcher’s investigation of young children’s (7-9 years) ‘special places’- better known as place attachments, using a qualitative, arts-based methodology. Methods of data collection and analysis will be discussed, as well as results that highlight the potential of the Arts to be used as research tools.

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 174-191
Author(s):  
Natalie M. Susmann

AbstractArchaeologists have long acknowledged the significance of mountains in siting Greek cult. Mountains were where the gods preferred to make contact and there people constructed sanctuaries to inspire intervention. Greece is a land full of mountains, but we lack insight on the ancient Greeks’ view—what visible and topographic characteristics made particular mountains ideal places for worship over others, and whether worshiper preferences ever changed. This article describes a data collection and analysis methodology for landscapes where visualscape was a significant factor in situating culturally significant activities. Using a big-data approach, four geospatial analyses are applied to every cultic place in the Peloponnesian regions of the Argolid and Messenia, spanning 2800–146 BC. The fully described methodology combines a number of experiences—looking out, looking toward, and climbing up—and measures how these change through time. The result is an active historic model of Greek religious landscape, describing how individuals moved, saw, and integrated the built and natural world in different ways. Applied elsewhere, and even on nonreligious locales, this is a replicable mode for treating the natural landscape as an artifact of human decision: as a space impacting the siting of meaningful locales through history.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
N. B. Mswela

<p>Globally, Early Childhood Education (ECE) has been governed by National Association of the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). This organisation concerned about the welfare and education of young children (0-8years) produced guidelines for practitioners and all involved in the teaching of young children on how best to teach and educate young children. These guidelines state that children need to be taught content that is developmentally appropriate. This means that content should be designed to suit the age, individual nature of the child as well as the culture of the child. While Botswana has taken bold steps in providing ECE to children who would not have been able to enrol in ECE one wonders whether the provision afforded meets the requirement of providing these children with Developmentally Appropriate Practices (DAP) as mandated by NAEYC. The absence of such practices may impact on the learning of young children. This paper argues for the importance of the DAP practices in the current ECE provision. It is suggested that the DAP can provide children with quality education that they deserve; it can also allow children to learn at their own pace. The absence of such a practice can impact the quality of ECE consequently impacting on the proper development of children holistically. Data collection and analysis used mixed methods being qualitative and quantitative. Questionnaires and interviews were uses as data collection instruments. A total of 15 questionnaires were distributed to ECE teachers in the Greater Gaborone Zone of which 11 were returned. A total of 11 interviews were conducted. The participants were mostly women with a few men. </p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0736/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>


2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kumara S. Ward

AbstractThis article showcases a creative approach to early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS). It reports on the author's doctoral research program, which examined the effectiveness of arts-based pedagogies for exploring and understanding the natural world in an early childhood education program. Motivated by their existing commitment to education for sustainability (EfS), the participating educators used the arts for further exploration and understanding of the natural world in teaching and learning. They explored the role of the arts in knowledge production and embodied experience, and reinterpreted and built on their own funds of knowledge about their environment. The result was meaningful curriculum steeped in content about the natural environments that were local to the children and their educators. The findings further signify the challenges educators needed to overcome in order to intensify their connection with their own local environments, and the effect that this enhanced connection had on their capacity to reflect local natural environments in their programs with the children.


1997 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 34-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven H. Long ◽  
Lesley B. Olswang ◽  
Julianne Brian ◽  
Philip S. Dale

This study investigated whether young children with specific expressive language impairment (SELI) learn to combine words according to general positional rules or specific, grammatic relation rules. The language of 20 children with SELI (4 females, 16 males, mean age of 33 months, mean MLU of 1.34) was sampled weekly for 9 weeks. Sixteen of these children also received treatment for two-word combinations (agent+action or possessor+possession). Two different metrics were used to determine the productivity of combinatorial utterances. One metric assessed productivity based on positional consistency alone; another assessed productivity based on positional and semantic consistency. Data were analyzed session-by-session as well as cumulatively. The results suggest that these children learned to combine words according to grammatic relation rules. Results of the session-by-session analysis were less informative than those of the cumulative analysis. For children with SELI ready to make the transition to multiword utterances, these findings support a cumulative method of data collection and a treatment approach that targets specific grammatic relation rules rather than general word combinations.


2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Kuntsche ◽  
Florian Labhart

Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) is a way of collecting data in people’s natural environments in real time and has become very popular in social and health sciences. The emergence of personal digital assistants has led to more complex and sophisticated EMA protocols but has also highlighted some important drawbacks. Modern cell phones combine the functionalities of advanced communication systems with those of a handheld computer and offer various additional features to capture and record sound, pictures, locations, and movements. Moreover, most people own a cell phone, are familiar with the different functions, and always carry it with them. This paper describes ways in which cell phones have been used for data collection purposes in the field of social sciences. This includes automated data capture techniques, for example, geolocation for the study of mobility patterns and the use of external sensors for remote health-monitoring research. The paper also describes cell phones as efficient and user-friendly tools for prompt manual data collection, that is, by asking participants to produce or to provide data. This can either be done by means of dedicated applications or by simply using the web browser. We conclude that cell phones offer a variety of advantages and have a great deal of potential for innovative research designs, suggesting they will be among the standard data collection devices for EMA in the coming years.


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