kb/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_geographies-2.md

title	chunk	source	category	tags	date_saved	instance
Children's geographies	3/3	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_geographies	reference	science, encyclopedia	2026-05-05T15:35:51.368735+00:00	kb-cron

=== Importance of school environment === Although schools are a relatively large institution in society, it has been noted that this environment has received little recognition in comparison to institutions of health (Collins and Coleman, 2008). Collins and Coleman also note the centrality of schools in everyday life, as they are 'found in almost every urban and suburban neighbourhood' and most children experience considerable time within this environment in their day-to-day lives. The role of the school environment in children's life is central to their development, especially in respect to society's inclusionary and exclusionary processes experienced firsthand in schools (MacCrae, Maguire and Milbourne, 2002). The manifestation of social exclusion as bullying is an interpersonal sociospatial aspect the implications of which have been extensively researched both within school boundaries and technological enablement (Olweus and Limber, 2010; Black, Washington, Trent, Harner and Pollock, 2009). School, therefore, is not only a place where children learn quantifiable subjects but also a learning ground for life interaction skills needed later on. Research in children's geographies has been central to the development of scholarship on 'geographies of education'. For many commentators, this work—which spans social geography, cultural geography, political geography and urban geography—does not yet constitute an identifiable subdiscipline of human geography. However, geographers have held an enduring concern with education spaces, extending to and beyond school, as Collins and Coleman identify. This work has burgeoned in recent years, with a number of special issues dedicated to education and emotion, embodiment and the cultural geographies of education. Yet, as Holloway et al. (2010) argue, the role and significance of children, young people and families has been underplayed in debate on geographies of education. Not only have children's geographers undertaken a huge range of research in schools but also has that work been central in developing geographers' understandings of education spaces more widely and schools in particular.

=== Alternative educational spaces === Although most research by children's and youth geographers on education has focussed on institutions like schools and universities, it has been challenged in a number of ways by scholarship on the geographies of alternative education. Examining a diverse range of non-state-funded, explicitly 'alternative', education spaces in the UK (like homeschooling, Waldorf education, Montessori education, forest school and care farming), Peter Kraftl examines the connections and disconnections between 'mainstream' and 'alternative' education sectors. Drawing on non-representational children's geographies, he explores how alternative educators work to intervene into children's bodily habits, how they create spaces in which mess and disorder are valorised, and how they work with conceptions of 'nature' that both resonate with and critically counter mainstream assumptions about children's disengagement with 'nature' in Western societies (see nature deficit disorder). In doing so, alternative educators are attempting to create 'alter-childhoods'—alternative constructions, imaginations and ways of treating childhood that are knowingly different from a perceived mainstream. The implications of homeschooling have largely been a field of assumptions, taking after common myths (Romanowki, 2010), although later work by geographers has examined in considerable detail the significance of space, place, emotion and materiality to the experiences of homeschoolers. The variance between public and private sector institutions and the implications of social status of children within the school community has also been a contentious field (Nissan and Carter, 2010).

=== School-based social interaction === As children grow, they look to the influential adults in their lives (parents, caregivers and teachers) for guidance. Most researchers and adults alike agree that communication is key to healthy child development across all modal environments, especially within schools (Lasky, 2000; Hargreaves, 2000; Hargreaves and Fullan, 1998; Hargreaves and Lasky, 2004). Lasky's focus remains on the cultural and emotional dynamic between teachers and the parents of their students, whereas Hargreaves continuously exemplifies through his data the significant improvement in child performance at school because of an equal power-play communication between teachers and parents/caregivers. Where there may be a lack of influential adults, children may look to older-age groups within the school environment to observe acceptable behaviours and attention-seeking ones. Research has begun to display the components of the 'high-quality experience' provided by controlled school-based mentoring relationships (Ahrens et al., 2011). However, other research disputes that the experience is as helpful as it claims to be, suggesting child-mentoring situations often fall short or are only temporarily beneficial (Spencer, 2007; Pryce, 2012). Pryce's research highlights that the mentor's attunement to the other's needs highly indicates the beneficial nature of the mentor relationship.

=== Introduction of technology in children's learning === The introduction of technology into children's lives has provided a new platform upon which the school environment is no longer contained within a physical space. The previous temporal and geographical constrictions of place have been mobilised by use of the Internet. The outcomes of this mobilisation have been both constructive and destructive in the availability of learning material to children (Sancho, 2004) and more extrapersonal interactions among children. The educational benefit of ICT (information and communications technology) in the classroom has been a subject supported by various researchers (Aviram and Talmi, 2004).

=== Schools' role in creation of social identity === The school is an institution in which children observe one another and experiment continuously with their self-image (Hernandez, 2004). Hernandez's research recognises a need to view children as individuals and to incorporate their 'personal maps' into the educational process, so the gap between the school environment and the external environment does not dangerously widen. Awareness of the centrality of schools to social geography is very important. Public institutions in Canada and the USA were defined as 'nation-building institutions, which sought to create common citizens from ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse populations' (Moore, 2000; Sweet, 1997). The connection between nation-building and public education has held the view that schools shape the knowledge and identities of children (Collins and Coleman, 2008). Whether the connection is seen to create negative, destructive social norms or positive, constructive progressive values is dependent 'on one's broader political/moral compass' (Collins, 2006; Hunter 1991).

== See also == Children's culture Children's street culture Cultural geography Feminist geography Home zone Student transport

== References ==