With people: Research with children and youth

This section draws on critical childhood studies to describe the social relation between youth and adult educator-researchers and from this description, outlines the understanding that informs this study. This interrogation is necessary because our conceptions of children and youth matter, as described in the quote below.

[A]s adults we bring to our encounters with children a particular package of attitudes and feelings, constructed through our own personal childhood history and our

contemporary perspective on childhood, often coloured by one of more of the various prevailing ideologies of childhood. (Greene and Hill, 2005, p. 8)

In South Africa children live in a polarised and unequal society and are facing the obstacles created by systems that are older than they are. There is an urgency to address these systemic root causes which partly lie outside of the world to which children are confined (Ansell, 2009).

Despite this, there is evidence that the active role of children and youth in the past and the present is shaping of South Africa and the world. Children hold knowledge of the world including its injustices. Research has shown that children are aware of complex dynamics such as the impact of unemployment and the relationship between poverty and wealth (Moran-Ellis and Sünker, 2018). In the United States it has been shown that children by the age of four years, experience the strong message in society that there are less obstacles if one holds white privilege in this world (DiAngelo, 2011, p. 63). Children have engaged with responses in relation to understanding in the world. In Cape Town, high school learners that attend school in badly insulated containers have mobilised and marched to government buildings for their right to have classrooms in which they can work (Hendricks, 2017, 6 March). Similar campaigns continue to be led by organisations such as Equal Education in partnership with the Social Justice Coalition (Equal Education, 2016). Around the world, youth have made themselves heard on the climate emergency.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (1989) (Aitken, 2017) and parallel trends in scholarship such as the ‘new sociology of childhood’ (Ansell, 2009) all point to rising attempts to enhance the active participation by children and youth in decisions that affect their lives. Despite international attempts to acknowledge children and youth and their place as active participants in the world, we are caught within socio-cultural trends that maintain the contradiction of children being unable to participate in discussions about the causes of their experiences of injustice in the world.

In South Africa, participation of children in decisions that affect their lives is limited and largely under-researched since 2009 (Moses, 2008). Moldonado-Torres (2016, p. 2), in his writing on decoloniality and youth-led social movements, alerted us to an obstruction in listening across generations, between youth and adults:

There is much talk in liberal societies about youth representing the future. In truth, however, this is considered the case only to the extent that youth seek to continue the same priorities and frameworks of understanding the world as the dominant voices in the current dominant generation.

There is a mismatch between where we ideologically place children and youth in our societies and the practices that obstruct our listening to them and obstruct the realisation of their self-determination and agency. And this is where adult educator-researchers have work to do in partnership with youth.

This mismatch can be further understood through critical interrogations into the absences and assumptions relating to the category of childhood. While this category operates discursively, it has important material effects (Nxumalo and ross, 2019). Aitken (2017), a critical

children’s geographer, has pointed to the complex tensions between the various conceptualisations of children in society, such as: children are neither ignorant of, nor perfectly attuned to, nature; seldom are children living carefree lives, and yet we cannot ask them to bear all the responsibility for the future. Despite being contradictory,

conceptualisations of children and youth have a meaningful impact in terms of

subjectification in pedagogical spaces and society. Burman (2016, p. 226), in her analysis of childhood in Fanon’s writing, noted that there is general consensus that “models of children, childhoods and educational theory and practice have long been implicated in colonialism”. I understand this to mean that our common conceptions of the relationship between adults and children, played out most strongly in educational contexts, get transferred onto relationships within race and gender dimensions of essentialised difference due to authoritarian power within the social material configurations of these relations. Nxumalo and ross (2019) wrote that discourses of childhood, especially assumptions of the child as innocent, are also

products of racist ideology – they are racialised. This has the result of excluding children who do not have the quintessential experience of the child as innocent and carefree. In the world today these are largely Black children, children in the global South, or ‘children out of place’

as Connolly and Ennew (1996) term children who do not have the experience of western conceptions of childhood.

In the context of pedagogical research and practice, Burman (2016, p. 269) stated that “the pedagogical address to the child (or children) has been a site for philosophical subversion … and involves attention to irrational, culturally sedimented ideas as explicit theories”.

Nxumalo and ross (2019) have troubled some of the “irrational, culturally sedimented ideas”

in environmental education. Environmental education has tended to avoid working in “messy and mundane urban spaces” which fall outside of the western conception of ‘nature’ denying the lived experience of many children in the world who are, despite their urban and concrete

surrounds, entangled with the biophysical world. Further than neglecting learning in and about urban spaces, theories such as nature deficit disorder claim that nature can fix the child (Fletcher, 2017), and education in the ‘outdoors’ (away from urban) colludes with other problematic valuations such as high exam scores, when other forms of well-being, such as play, are side-lined as beneficial. Thus ‘culturally sedimented ideas’ which restrict

environmental education around nature deficit conceptualisations of children serve to further erase and dishonour the knowledge brought by the child of their living environments that are already ecological.

In response to these absences, Nxumalo and ross (2019) proposed that environmental education embraces a re-oriented pedagogy, “testifying to and witnessing the survival of black life amidst anti-blackness” as key to bringing an intersectional resonance into environmental learning for children and youth in South Africa. This reoriented pedagogy might be a starting point from which to develop a situated re-definition of sustainability;

rather than a modern and technicist environmentalism (Jickling, 1992), sustainability is considered here as centred on removing the violence against survival through an engagement with those who are on the frontlines of this struggle (Di Chiro, 2006; Dei, 2010). Working with environmental pedagogies as testifying to and witnessing would be an acknowledgement of the notion that children and youth have agency and are affected by social structures that are older than they are.

As far as the experiences and opinions of children, researchers are mostly scrambling around in the dark, rather than better-knowing elders. However, as adults and researchers, we may have influence over the enabling or dis-enabling structures that affect world-making action of children and youth (Aitken, 2017). Through this relationship, we develop a deeper change- oriented research practice, as the mediator and messenger aspiring to a with-ness.

2.4 Environmental education and the context of educational change in South Africa