Learning with Idea Station: What Can Children on One Canadian Playground Teach Us About Climate Change?

Idea Station, the student portion of a research project to revitalize one urban Canadian school’s outdated playground helps to re-envision new approaches to education, environment and climate change, shifting the education ‘of children’ in favour of learning ‘with children’—a shift that mirrors the language of a common world pedagogies. There is benefit from learning with non-human others. There is an organic and interdisciplinary way of thinking with the world. As adults and educators we need to value and foster more of this thinking with climate change. To ignore this approach of thinking with children we run the risk of losing their valuable insights. Idea Station reveals that children already think with natureculture and non-human others and can teach adults. Experiences from Idea Station have a number of practical applications and can model partnerships for future thinking with education and climate change. Idea Station presents opportunities for shifts in the ways we think about children and nature. The core learnings can all be refined down to a single shift to a more inclusive way of thinking for adults. Idea Station teaches us that the inclusive shift includes making room for (1) informal, out-of-curriculum learning; (2) the values in a child-to-adult model of learning; (3) a Common worlds pedagogy that includes a lens of natureculture, and; (4) the inclusion of technology. In thinking with Idea Station we can learn to think with bats, rats, coons, trees, roots, backstops, vines, plants, birds, bugs, technology and humans.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-32898-6_12 openalex: W2990525375 mag: 2990525375