Tori Derr

The goal of restoration should be to create a self-sustaining ecosystem that functions well and needs little maintenance. Monitoring is essential in order to see if projects are achieving improved ecological conditions. There are at least three ecosystems that projects of the Collaborative Forest Restoration Program are working to restore...

An illustrated, essential guide to engaging children and youth in the process of urban design From a history of children’s rights to case studies discussing international initiatives that aim to create child-friendly cities, Placemaking with Children and Youth offers comprehensive guidance in how to engage children and youth in the planning and design of local environments. It explains the importance of children’s active participation in their societies and presents ways to bring all generations together to plan cities with a high quality of life for people of all ages. Not only does it delineate best practices in establishing programs and partnerships, it also provides principles for working ethically with children, youth, and families, paying particular attention to the inclusion of marginalized populations. Drawing on case studies from around the world—in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, Puerto Rico, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the United States—Placemaking with Chil...

In the Hispano homeland of northern New Mexico, children's lives are shaped by land, by family, by culture, and by community. The way these forces work together forms each child's sense of place and place attachments. Using short case examples, this article presents a brief overview of children's place experiences and preferences and describes some of the factors that contribute

Living laboratories employ applied and transdisciplinary research, experiential learning, and co-creation of the campus.

Campus landscapes can serve as living laboratories for project-based learning and environmental stewardship.

Landscapes as living laboratories provide opportunities to consider, implement.

Landscapes as living laboratories could more strongly connect to campus sustainability plans and policies.

This article presents an exploration of diverse adults’ motivations for action to promote social and environmental change at a California public university. Semi-structured interviews with current or graduated university students reveal how they navigate their own identities and intersectionalities in developing an activist orientation and their views on collective action. Significant contributing factors in sustaining action include experiences that allowed participants to experiment with and learn from action, and settings in which participants see themselves as part of a community. This research contributes to an understanding of how diverse individuals develop commitment to social and environmental action with implications for environmental education practice.

This article presents an exploration of diverse adults’ motivations for action to promote social and environmental change at a California public university. Semi-structured interviews with current or graduated university students reveal how they navigate their own identities and intersectionalities in developing an activist orientation, and their views on collective action. Significant contributing factors in sustaining action include experiences that allowed participants to experiment with and learn from action, and settings in which participants see themselves as part of a community. This research contributes to an understanding of how diverse individuals develop commitment to social and environmental action with implications for environmental education practice.

Nature school settings provide opportunities for experiential learning across many developmental domains. This study focused on an afterschool nature program in Santa Cruz County, California, which serves kindergarten through fifth grade students. The study was designed as a pilot to both learn about the program’s effectiveness, and to test the feasibility and effectiveness of methods for sustained program evaluation. The study showed positive and statistically significant results for most developmental areas and that teachers considered most effective those lessons that engage multiple developmental domains. Future program assessments should examine the number of developmental domains lessons engage and should partner with a local university or expert for periodic in-depth evaluation.

Photovoice, a Participatory Action Research method developed by Wang and Burris, has gained popularity as a pedagogical tool to engage youth with environmental, sustainability, and conservation issues. Influenced by Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, feminist theory, and documentary photography, photovoice supports reflection about place, critical dialogue about community issues, and social change by reaching policymakers. Some scholars have modified the method and applied varying frameworks to increase relevance for diverse participants. However, adaptation also may lose the original tenets. Through a scoping review, this study examined methodological applications to science, conservation, and sustainability education and whether emerging approaches align with Wang and Burris’ original goals. The scoping review identified and analyzed four applications of photovoice: i) place as pedagogy, ii) conservation and sustainability, iii) STEM teaching; and iv) decolonizing education. Current scholarship shows promise for photovoice in environmental education applications to support participatory, diverse, and equitable educational settings, but some projects would benefit from more explicit attention to the original emancipatory intents of the method.

Built environment education can deepen young people's understanding of everyday environments. It allows them to pursue their interests, to explore the environment, and to practice skills and group action. Participatory practices, when integrated into built environment education, address young people's rights to influence decisions that affect them and provide young people with opportunities to develop action competence, which can influence long-term environmental action. Green spaces within cities provide rich learning laboratories as sites that support opportunities for young people to explore, play and learn about nature within the city. Case studies from Growing Up Boulder illustrate how green spaces can be used as sites for participatory built environment education in which students consider nature, social and cultural environments as part of their urban experience. While many models for environmental education exist, built environment education holds promise as an integrative context for participatory learning in the city. https://www.icevirtuallibrary.com/doi/full/10.1680/jurdp.17.00009

Resilience planning is increasingly employed as a means for cities to anticipate and plan for environmental and social challenges.  Children’s perspectives are under-represented in this domain.  Through drawings, murals, photographs, videos, and dialogues, children shared their perspectives on resilience in two disparate cities – Boulder, Colorado, USA and Mexico City, Mexico.  Elements that support and negate resilience were consistent between cities.  However, the negative aspects of physical and social safety were more acutely felt in Mexico City.  While children were clear about what composes a resilient city, integration of these ideas into resilience planning was more challenging, especially in Mexico City.

In 1989, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child lay the groundwork for children´s access to education, to play, to express themselves, and to have their views heard. This article explores participation as a supportive framework for democracy, environmental justice, and cultural inclusion. It presents methods that have fostered cultural inclusion and connection to nature, by analyzing three projects in Boulder, Colorado and Salinas, California. Participatory methods included nicho boxes, photovoice, and garden art. These cases demonstrate how children's rights to participation, through nature and the arts, help create just sustainabilities through the creation of culturally relevant practices that bridge social and environmental justice.

While an engaged citizenry is often the goal of community service learning, the rights of children to be active agents in this process are largely considered in a separate academic literature. Yet community service learning and children's participation share much in their goals and approaches to engagement. This paper analyzes a campus-community partnership between undergraduate environmental design and middle school applied science students. The partnership began as a way to promote participatory design processes for the redesign of a middle school and evolved to a proactive co-design program. We describe the goals and approaches to service-learning employed through the partnership, and critique the evolution of the program through the realm of a participation model that has emerged from three decades of children's participation research. By analyzing a campus-community partnership through this framework, we hope to deepen the discourse on approaches to and evaluation of successful service-learning programs. Introduction Campus-community partnerships are typically undertaken to promote meaningful engagement and to enrich traditional pedagogies through expe-riential learning. Similarly, children's participation research and advocacy promotes engaged learning through the inclusion of children in decision-making and transformative education (Malone & Hartung, 2010). Both bodies of literature address many of the same topics and goals. Rarely do the two literatures intersect. This paper brings together these two literatures through the analysis of a campus community partnership between university undergraduates and middle school students. We identify the common threads of each literature, describe the goals of each type of initiative, and critique the evolution of a seven-year partnership using a Seven Realms of Participation model that emerged from analysis of 30 years of children's participation research (Francis & Lorenzo, 2002). This model is used to illustrate a process of growth and to inform awareness about the strengths and shortcomings of campus-community partnerships.

This paper explores the role of green schools in promoting education for sustainability by reflecting on a university-middle school partnership focused on sustainable design. Undergraduates and middle school students met weekly for a semester to learn about sustainability through simple design projects and activities that focused on sustainability features of the school. Instructor and university student reflections explore the value and challenges in integrating education for sustainability and green schools that teach.

Growing Up Boulder – a child-and youth-friendly city initiative in Boulder, Colorado, USA – engaged 95 children, ages 4-17, in a planning process with the City of Boulder's Open Space and Mountain Parks (OSMP) department. The goal was to understand current uses of the area and to identify specific strategies for the plan. This report describes specific methods of engagement, outcomes for the plan, and reflections on the process. Overall, youth perspectives led to concrete changes to the plan and to organizational shifts within OSMP, for greater youth engagement in the future.

This paper shares outcomes from a year-long participatory planning process – one that brought together children and youth engagement, city planning, campus planning, and a university environmental design course to explore child-friendly, dense and affordable housing for a city of approximately 100,000 residents.  This process of engagement asked design students to include youth participation and child-friendly cities as an integrated component of sustainable cities.  The article shows varying degrees of transformation, views of children as credible participants, and values gained from the project.  Many undergraduates changed their thinking about the role of young people in design process and outcomes.

Young people have much to offer urban planning yet are not often included in such processes.  A unique partnership in Boulder provides a venue for young people’s participation in city planning.  Boulder is in many ways a learning laboratory with progressive ideals and sustainability thinking.  As the city began planning for its comprehensive housing strategy is underway, tensions about the future of density within the city emerged.  Including the visions of young people in this process not only helps to contribute to places they will ultimately inhabit, but also highlights the importance of a participatory and co-educational process in planning 21st Century cities.Participatory planning can have significant impacts on children and can also contribute new ideas to planning processes.  In this study, This study reflects these ideas through young people demonstrated attitudinal changes toward government, increased recognition of diverse needs within a city, and demonstrated potential for integrating integration of social and environmental sustainability education into participatory their recommendations for neighbourhood planning.

Latin American Transnational Children and Youth focuses on understanding young people’s connection to nature and place within a transnational and Latin American context.

It serves to diversify, elaborate, and sometimes challenge the assumptions made in researching people and place, and unearths the complexities of a world in which the identity of many is not shaped by a single place or culture, but instead by complex interactions among these. Spanning across ages and geographies, the book explores the central themes of sense of place, identity, and environmental action, with an emphasis on Latinx and Indigenous communities. This book balances theoretical questions with geographically contextual empirical research. Each section is situated in current interdisciplinary research and provides geographically specific examples of children and youth’s perspectives on place relations, migration, transnationalism, and an emerging demographic of environmentalists.

Contributors from Latin America and the United States advance the fields of childhood and youth studies, environmental psychology, geography, sociology, planning, and education. This book looks across the Americas, to see how young people experience their worlds and constructively contribute to their places and environments.