“If you litter you’ll cause floods”: Children and the construction of environmental awareness in elementary school classrooms

Abstract

What children say and do about, for example, environmental topics? What do they build from the “common knowledge” they bring to school in relation to curricular content? What concerns and beliefs do they mobilize in the classroom? These are some of the questions behind our interest in understanding the meaning that students assign to curricular content in their narratives about the events of daily life. From an ethnographic approach, I analyze how children build environmental knowledge when they mobilize their explanations of these contents in their interactions. For example, they believe that the environment is damaged because “we buy many things” and “litter”. They also express (critical) opinions about the habits of adults: “they throw garbage in the streets” or “they don’t separate their waste”. These situations that are brought to the classrooms show the appropriation of environmental discourses, particularly on people's daily practices, the attribution of responsibility for environmental pollution, and the generation of habits considered beneficial for the environment. Also, these aspects show some public socialization of environmental problems, which might be seen in a context of consumption and waste disposal habits caused by a systemic factor.