The children-nature interrelationship in outdoor early childhood education: when children and bamboo co-construct a ‘secret hideaway’

Abstract

ABSTRACT The growing interest in outdoor early childhood education, even in countries with a weak environmental tradition such as Portugal, tends to be associated with a concern over the alienation between urban/Western children and nature. While educational projects in nature criticize this separation, they still maintain a bad culture vs good nature dichotomy to which we object. Resorting to such different fields as critical childhood studies, new materialisms, posthumanisms, and ecological epistemologies, we converge on the inseparability of nature/children and the material/discursive world. We then pay attention to the experiences which children and more-than-human beings shared during ethnographic research in a private outdoor kindergarten. Through photos and excerpts from the field notes, we tell stories of children and bamboo playing in a place free of adult interference, a ‘secret hideaway’ in which they co-produced their nature-cultures by being collectively with the world and from which we have much to learn.