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CHILDREN, ICT AND
THE EVERYDAY NATURE OF SOCIAL EXCLUSION
S. S. Veselinovska
Introduction. For most of human existence, children spent a great deal of their childhood’s outdoors, connecting with nature on a regular basis as they explored fields, farms or wild areas close to their homes. During the last part of the twentieth century, children’s environments became increasingly urbanized at a rapid rate. Gradually, children’s access to the natural world has been shrinking, with alarming results. Researchers have found that a number of societal factors have resulted in a profound change in the way today’s children experience the natural world. The lives of children have radically changed over the course of the past century. No longer is free time spent outdoors inventing games with neighborhood friends or exploring the pockets of nature that existed in backyards or empty lots. A growing body of research has demonstrated that the natural world holds numerous benefits for both children and adults, alike. While it is still mysterious just how the mind, body and spirit gain from exposure to and experiences with nature, empirical evidence forces us to reexamine and rethink the lives of today’s children.
Nature deficit suggests that children are suffering from a lack of exposure to and experience with the natural world around them. Historically, humans have had an intimate connection with the flora and fauna around them. Ironically, though, the modern lifestyle is deficient of meaningful contact with plants and animals in our immediate surroundings. Unfortunately, the rate at which our lifestyles have changed has far outpaced the evolution of our cognitive, psychological, and physiological hard wiring.
Conversely, exposure to nature is the means by which this connection is established and fortified. The natural environments in which children are immersed need not be areas referred to as ‘wild spaces’ or even the wilderness found in state or national parks. Nature, in this context, can refer to the small (if not tiny) pockets of plant and animal life that can be found in urbanized areas, the green spaces in suburban developments, or the landscapes of rural areas, essentially, nature is everywhere though we often fail to attend to its presence in our daily lives. Despite its omnipresence, our children are just not connected to the natural world.
What are the reasons for the disconnection of children with nature. Today’s youth have been dubbed "digital generation” and "indoor children.” However society refers to them, this generation of children is unlike any other. Children have never been more technologically savvy than they are today. Nor has any other generation of children been more linked to the
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world around them, so long as that world is mediated by technology made possible by the internet. Facebook and YouTube unite them in ways we couldn’t have imagined when we were ourselves children. But all of this technological interaction has come at a price. The everyday lives of children have moved indoors and inside of a handheld device. This shift in lifestyle trickles down from adults to even the youngest children. A recent article in the pedagogical journal "An educational crossroads” reported that one-third of Macedonia children aged 3 to 6 years has a television in their bedroom. The ways in which children once connected with the natural world - curious exploration, free play outdoors, experiences with nature -have quietly faded into the background, if not disappeared altogether from the lives of our plugged-in youngsters.
But the open spaces have become foreign to most. Life and all that it entails for today’s children is represented by the urban. In the mind’s eye of the modern parent, free time possesses many dangers. Many feel that time spent unsupervised by an adult invites ‘stranger danger’ and threats from within the larger community (including violence/crime and exposure to drugs). A media frenzy in the 1980s surrounding rising rates of childhood abductions sparked parents’ fears that their child was unsafe playing unsupervised outdoors. This fear altered unstructured free time once spent playing on neighborhood streets as children were brought inside into private homes and play took on a new face. Even today, this fear remains exaggerated - true kidnappings are rare in the Macedonia, though incidences are highly publicized. A Macedonian survey of parents found that one in five parents keep their children indoors as much as possible out of fear of the world outside their front door (Stavreva Veselinovska, 2010). A "culture of fear” has parents afraid for their children’s safety. Due to "stranger danger”, many children are no longer free to roam their neighborhoods or even their own yards unless accompanied by adults. Many working families can’t supervise their children after school, giving rise to latchkey children who stay indoors or attend supervised afterschool activities. Furthermore, children’s lives have become structured and scheduled by adults, who hold the mistaken belief that this sport or that lesson will make their children more successful adults. The culture of childhood that played outside is gone and children’s everyday life has shifted to the indoors. As a result, children’s direct and spontaneous contact with nature is a vanishing experience of childhood. One researcher has gone so far as to refer to this sudden shift in children’s lives and their loss of free play in the outdoors as a "childhood of imprisonment” (Francis 1991). Research shows a dramatic decline in the amount of time children spend in the out-ofdoors.
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Parents are not the only ones that have become more afraid of "nature”. Children once had rich and diverse experiences in the natural world immediately surrounding their homes. Today, the media produces 15 second sound bytes about close encounters between nature life and people. The sensationalized details permeate urban legend lore which, in turn, intensifies people’s perceptions of the dangers of the natural world. This is despite statistics which repeatedly show children are more likely to be harmed by objects of modernity - the gun is exponentially riskier than the spider. Summarizing the profound influence fear has had on altering the fundamental shape of childhood - "fear is the emotion that separates a developing child from the full, essential benefits of nature. Fear of traffic, of crime, of stranger-danger and of nature itself”.
Parents’ role in scheduling the lives of children has also changed. Today’s parents are much more involved in the minute-to-minute details of youngsters - a change that delimits the unstructured, creative play that was once a hallmark of childhood. What had previously been inextricably linked with experiences in and with the natural world, ‘free play’ no longer involves fort building, tree climbing and picking cherries or peeking under rocks next to the back steps (Stavreva Veselinovska, 2010), all elements that tap into a child’s imagination and sense of wonder.
School Reforms. In a piece dedicated to deconstructing the ways our schools of today exacerbate the child - nature divide, points out that schools have turned up the thermostat on an already super hot technology driven Macedonian culture. As the counterbalance to the overly plugged in world, schools should "unplug” and focus their efforts on developing the health of children’s inner lives by giving them experiences with the real world, as well as the symbolic world. This federal education policy includes no direct mention of any form of environmental education. In fact, on the national level, environmental education is not even under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education in Macedonia. Matters of learning in and about the natural world are overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency, as mandated by the Environmental Education. Standardized tests that measure students’ proficiency in prescribed areas (also referred to as content standards, usually focused on literacy and math) rarely include topics defined as ‘environmental science’ and are, therefore, often excluded from a school’s curriculum. Above and beyond changes in standards and curriculum, school schedules have also changed. In a recent study of public elementary schools across the nation, nearly 15 percent of upper elementary children no longer have any recess time at all during the academic day (Stavreva Veselinovska, S., 2010). Even when playtime is permitted, air
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quality often forces children indoors. One of the last holdouts of childhood outdoor free play is being downsized or eliminated. Contact with the world outside of the built environment has been pared down, reorganized, reconfigured, and digitized.
The positive benefits of the relation of the children with nature.
In my best-selling text, captures the positive benefits of nature for children noting, "healing the broken bond between our young and nature is in our self interest not only because aesthetics or justice demands it, but also because our mental, physical, and spiritual health depend upon it and so does the health of the earth” Stavreva Veselinovska, S., (2009). Some claim that the benefits human reap from being connected to the natural world are hard-wired we’re evolutionarily predisposed to operating in a world filled with natural kinds. This affinity is referred to as the biophilia hypothesis and has been forwarded by such scholars as Kellert, Wilson, and Kahn (Kahn and Kellert, 2002; Kellert and Wilson, 1993). If warranted, this claim might lead to the connection between nature and human well being, both physiologically and emotionally. When we look more closely at these possible benefits, especially for children, we find empirical evidence that supports the child - nature connection. Several significant positive outcomes for connecting children to the natural world will be discussed physical and psychological well-being, inter and intrapersonal skills, and cognitive functioning.
Interpersonal and intrapersonal skills of children’s. The lives of today’s children are complex. They’re much more connected with the global community, yet this complexity demands greater skills in terms of both inter- and intrapersonal relations. And while the academic world has long been interested in investigating the social and emotional lives of children, it only recently took up the issue how the natural world might influence children’s socio-emotional wellbeing. Emerging evidence demonstrates a link between experiences in the natural world and children’s conflict resolution skills, their motivation and self efficacy.
Macedonia’ s children in nature campaign. All Macedonia children will be inspired to actively and creatively engage with and appreciate the natural environment. Such is the vision statement of the Macedonia children in nature -a campaign for action, a state-wide initiative of Macedonia parks. A primary goal of the Campaign is to make the child - nature connection issue accessible to all segments of Macedonia society. The initiative will coordinate and promote State Park programs that connect children with nature, provide resources to raise awareness and understanding of the critical need for this effort, work with partners to facilitate regional collaborations, and work directly with communities to bolster capacity and promote
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sustainability of efforts. The "Macedonia children’s outdoor bill of rights” is one of the campaign’s initiatives, outlining a list of activities and corroborating research that child should experience before the age of 14. The goal of the campaign is to focus on awareness and action, and to expand the scope and number of entities that can play an important role in overcoming barriers and/or providing direct services. Macedonia State Parks will also develop a best-practices evaluation mechanism to promote and assess programmatic outcomes at both the local and state-wide levels. By engaging diverse partners in the children in nature campaign, Macedonia state parks aims to raise awareness of the ‘children in nature’ issue at all levels of Macedonia society and to facilitate the actions necessary to bring about change.
Our Mission. To provide for the health, inspiration and education of the people of R. Macedonia by helping to preserve the state's extraordinary biological diversity, protecting its most valued natural and cultural resources, and creating opportunities for high-quality outdoor recreation.
Summary. Early experiences with the natural world have also been positively linked with the sense of wonder. This way of knowing, if recognized and honored, can serve as a life-long source of joy and enrichment, as well as an impetus, or motivation, for further learning. Sadly, the ability to experience the world...as a source of wonder tends to diminish over time. This seems to be especially true in Western cultures, where for the sake of objective understandings; children are encouraged to focus their learning on cognitive models, rather than on first-hand investigations of the natural environment.” Without continuous hands-on experience, it is impossible for children to acquire a deep intuitive understanding of the natural world that is the foundation of sustainable development. A critical aspect of the present-day crisis in education is that children are becoming separated from daily experience of the natural world.” How then, can parents and teachers help children develop a love for the natural world in a more intentional and appropriate way? Maria Montessori in her book, To Educate the Human Potential, says that only when the child is able to identify its own center with the center of the universe does education really begin. Such a comprehensive context enables "the mind of the child to become centered, to stop wandering in an aimless quest for knowledge.” The child needs to build a foundation of how all things are related and how the relationship of things to one another is so close that "no matter what we touch, an atom, or a cell, we cannot explain it without knowledge of the wide universe.” Children need to hear the "voices of the rivers, the mountains, the sea, the trees, the meadows,” water fountains, dirt, and all the other innumerable
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mysteries of the earth available to them in their native and natural locales. The purpose of this paper is to explore how we can support the beginning of this important journey in a child’s life, as we plan learning activities throughout the day and implement our curricula for every child. We have a unique opportunity to infuse young children with an appreciation for and enjoyment of the natural world, to connect them to nature, and to immerse them in the mysteries of the great outdoors. The childhood obesity crisis has brought much needed attention to the importance of outdoor physical activity in the lives of young children, but little focus has been given to the outdoors as a learning environment on par with the indoor environment. "Never before in history have children been...so out of touch with the natural world.” Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. He helps us to see what is so apparent - that this generation of children is in danger of being completely detached from nature and missing the value of experiences found in being outdoors.
All of us can look at our outdoor environments through a new lens and begin to assess our outdoor play areas and activities and how they support children’s learning and development. Everything you do inside can be done outside. But the opposite is not true. There are many activities that can be offered outside that cannot be offered inside. Let us all commit to moving our children outside and connecting them with the naturalized world.
References
Kahn, P.H., Jr. & Kellert, S.R. (Eds.) (2002) Children and Nature: Psychologi-cal,Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Kellert, S.R. & Wilson, E.O. (1993). The Biophilia Hypothesis. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Kellert, S.R. (2005). Nature and Childhood Development. In Kellert, S.R. (Ed.) Building for Life: Designing and Understanding the Human-Nature Connection. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Stavreva Veselinovska, S and all, (2010), How to help children understand and respect nature?, WCES-2010, World Conference on Educational Sciences, Bahcesehir University, Istanbul - Turkey, 04-08 February, Academic World Education & Research Center, Near East University Post Office, P.O. 943, Nicosia - Cyprus.
Snezana Stavreva-Veselinovska, (2009), Why children need nature and nature needs children, 3rd International conference CURRICULUMS AF THE EARLY AND COMPULSORY EDUCATION, 12-14 November, Zadar, Croatia, pp. 455-469
Stavreva-Veselinovska, S., (2007), Moving from biophobia to biophilia, Congress of ecologists of Macedona with international participation and marking the 80 anniversary of Prof, dr Ljupce Grupce’s life and 60 years scientific work, 6-9 october, Struga, Makedonia.
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