Tiki figures Kula Botanic Garden, Maui HI
If you are interested in environmental education or informal learning environments, such as botanic gardens, I invite you to read the essay Navigating Nature, Culture and Education in Contemporary Botanic Gardens in Environmental Education Research by Dawn L. Sanders, Amy E. Ryken and Katherine Stewart. Increasingly, humans are an urban species prone to ‘plant blindness.’ This demographic shift has implications for both individual and collective perceptions of nature, as well as for addressing ‘ecophobia’ and encouraging ‘biophilia’ through education. This editorial, and its associated collection of papers, considers the critical relationships between nature, culture and education in contemporary botanic gardens and the ways in which visitors navigate these learning environments.
Palm House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London
Contributions to this collection of articles focused on learning in botanic gardens include:
Beauty in the Foreground, Science Behind the Scenes: Families’ Views of Science Learning in a Botanic Garden
Naomi Haywood explores the question, what are families’ views of Kew Gardens as a setting for family science learning? She describes how intentionally developed interpretative materials, that encourage families to engage with taxonomic plaques, connect family members’ focus on the beauty of plants with learning about science.
Youths’ Navigations of Botanical Gardens: Bids for Recognition, Ways to Desettle Practice
Jrène Rahm explores how urban youth of colour in the Botanic Garden of Montreal create space to engage with nature. She advocates for desettling underlying botanic garden epistemologies to acknowledge how youth engage with plants and nature, and to disrupt the cultural production of a narrative that frames youth as disconnected from nature.
Wild Botanic Gardens as Valuable Resources for Innovative Environmental Education Programmes in Latin America
Rafael Suárez-López & Marcia Eugenio critique the capitalist and ethnocentric frameworks of environmental education. They consider how wild botanic gardens in Latin America can promote knowledge decolonisation by engaging a variety of epistemologies, from science to the voices of social activism to popular education initiatives, as well as traditional and indigenous knowledge of nature.
Protea at Kula Botanic Garden, Maui HI
- Navigating Nature, Culture and Education in Contemporary Botanic Gardens - June 9, 2018
- Vashon Island Perspective - March 18, 2018
- Teaching and Learning in Nearby Nature - March 12, 2017
