How Did the Young Children Encounter the Japanese Urban Landscape?: A Study on Emergent Pedagogy for Sustainability Transformation

Abstract

This research evaluates how children’s new subjectivities emerge through exploring urban landscapes in the river basin in Tokyo. Research has stressed the importance of children as active agents, while posthuman perspectives include all elements of human–nature entangled world as potential agents. This analysis indicates how an assemblage of human and non-human agents contributes to enacting children as critical agents for sustainability issues. The theoretical framework for this study is the theory of landscape, including traditional Japanese discourses and the assemblage theory inspired by Félix Guattari’s ecosophy. One of the authors conducted nine-month ethnographic research at a Japanese nursery in 2018, accompanying a five-year-old class whose curiosity drove the expedition at the river basin all the way to the Tokyo Bay. The authors applied the method of multiple interpretations of the documentation, including photos and children’s drawings. This exploration and subsequent events during the journey transformed the children’s fragmented interpretation of the environment into an interconnected one and translated it into tangible action. This study illustrated that stimulating children’s subjectivity toward the landscape and fostering their positive but critical relationship with it through emergent first-hand exploration provided them with potential grounds to be resilient by ethically and ecologically responding to changes in vulnerable environments and potential commons in the community and to take actions for sustainable lifestyles at present and in the future.