Children, Youth and Environments

Inside this issue, you will find diverse scholarly work spanning across the globe. We start our trip with a scoping review where Williams and colleagues identified studies where children were active participants in the design, creation, and production processes in the construction of a physical environment. Findings aided in the creation of a reporting checklist for studies including children in the “co” processes. Next, we head to Denmark where Christensen and Simovska qualitatively studied children’s wellbeing at school to reveal that school facilities, workload, rhythms, time schedules and numerous transitions all play pivotal roles in student experiences of wellbeing, as well as their ability to be involved in decision making processes at school. Heading across the Atlantic, we arrive at an urban medical clinic in the United States where Barriage and colleagues asked children to draw where they liked to play. Findings revealed that physical, outdoor environments were common elements in the drawings while playing with other children was not. Traveling south to Brazil, Macena and colleagues investigated children’s contact with nature during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings revealed that children had frequent contact with nature during this time and suggest there was a period of (re)connection with nature.

Returning to the United States, Traub and Mainzer conducted a meta-analysis focusing on outdoor nature spaces and their impacts on students across disciplines to reveal that though there is rising diversity amongst approaches to studying holistic wellness, there continues to be gaps within the discipline for the broader conceptualization. We then cross the Atlantic to arrive in Kerman, Iran where Mani and colleagues developed a new valid and reliable measure to capture children’s perceived restorativeness in their everyday environments. Results showed that the different environments included in the study scored differently based on their size, degree of naturalness, and the available play equipment. We head back to Brazil to end our world tour where Stencel and colleagues studied rural children’s first experiences with urban elementary school spaces. Data from multiple methods revealed that rural children found the urban spaces restrictive and controlled which led to the children having a difficult time constructing new meaning for the spaces. Stencel and colleagues suggest that educators in the urban educational space should provide opportunities for children to manage certain spaces to support their development, increase satisfaction with the school environment, and ease this new transition for the children.

The issue continues with three reports from the field. First, Martz and colleagues used a qualitative GIS approach to evaluate environmental education programs. Next, Orr and colleagues share how they were able to reduce nature aversion with elementary students during environmental education programs. Lastly, Banerjee and colleagues share how their program was able to empower adolescent girls during COVID-19. We close our issue with Derr’s review of Teaching in the Anthropocene: Education in the Face of Environmental Crisis, edited by Alysha Farrell, Candy Skyhar, and Michelle Lam. Happy Reading!