Experiencing Environment and Place through Children's Literature

Recent scholarship on childrens literature displays a wide variety of interests in classic and contemporary childrens books. While environmental and ecological concerns have led to an interest in ecocriticism, as yet there is little on the significance of the ecological imagination and experience to both the authors and readers young and old of these texts. This edited collection brings together a set of original international research-based chapters to explore the role of childrens literature in learning about environments and places, with a focus on how childrens literature may inform and enrich our imagination, experiences and responses to environmental challenges and injustice. Contributions from Australia, Canada, USA and UK explore the diverse ways in which childrens literature can provide what are arguably some of the first and possibly most formative engagements that some children might have with nature. Chapters examine classic and new storybooks, mythic tales, and image-based and/or written texts read at home, in school and in the field. Contributors focus on exploring how childrens literature mediates and informs our imagination and understandings of diverse environments and places, and how it might open our eyes and lives to other presences, understandings and priorities through stories, their telling and re-telling, and their analysis. This book was originally published as a special issue of Environmental Education Research.