Nature in Children’s Literature and Culture (NaChiLitCul)

NaChiLitCul was established at Bergen University College, now Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL), in 2013. It was founded in response to an identified lack of both national and international coverage of Nordic children’s ecocritical writings and children’s texts. NaChiLitCul is now a leading environment for research on children’s literature nationally.

The main objectives of Nature in Children’s Literature and Culture are to map out and analyse the representations of nature in children’s and young adult literature and culture and explore how the interaction of student teachers, children and young adults with literary texts and outdoor didactic practices shape their environmental awareness.

NaChiLitCul challenges the seemingly implied and positive connection between children and nature within the field of educational and ecocritical thinking and theory and examines whether the various representations of nature found in children’s and YA literature and culture correspond with those found in educational practices.

The outcome is increased knowledge of how nature is represented and understood in children’s and YA literature and culture, and augmented understanding of how literature and educational practices may shape both student teachers’ and children’s ability to verbalize their conceptions and awareness of nature and of current environmental challenges.

Ongoing prosject: Ecocritical Dialogues in Education

Project leader: Nina Goga

Project period: August 2019-December 2022

The project Ecocritical Dialogues in Education – A methodological cross-curricular tool to promote teaching qualifications for sustainable development (ECO-DIALOGUES) arises out of the research group Nature in Children’s Literature and Culture (NaChiLitCul) at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL). The main objectives of ECO-DIALOGUES are to develop and implement ecocritical dialogues as a new methodology in the Norwegian five-year teacher-training master programme (MGLU 1-7 and MGLU 5-10) and to analyse how this methodology enables teacher educators and student teachers to plan, implement, and assess teaching practices concerning sustainable development as a cross-curricular theme. The ecocritical dialogues will be applied to literature studies and outdoor practices and developed on the basis of the NaChiLitCul’s research expertise and the cross-curricular analytical tool the Nature in Culture (NatCul) Matrix (see Fig. 2). ECO-DIALOGUES aims to integrate the new cross-curricular theme of “sustainable development” into Norwegian teacher education and rests on NaChiLitCul’s research into how connective sustainable natureculture relationships are represented in children’s and young adult (YA) culture. The concept of natureculture denotes the melding of nature and culture in intertwined processes (Haraway, 2008). The concept is suited to discussing human-nature relationships in educational contexts as the ‘pure’ categories of ‘wild’ and ‘domestic’ have become blurred due to human intervention in and interaction with nature (Haraway, 2008, 387-388; Kolbert, 2014; Heise, 2016). ECO-DIALOGUES brings teacher educators and student teachers into dialogue with such theoretical advances within the fields of ecocriticism and ecopedagogy.

The Nature in Culture Matrix (NatCul Matrix, see http://blogg.hvl.no/nachilit/) is a conceptual tool developed by the NaChiLitCul, The matrix is based on the group’s joint readings and discussions of key ecocritical concepts and texts, and on our complex knowledge and combined expertise in the fields of children’s and YA literature and culture. The matrix takes the form of a system of coordinates in which a variety of cultural expressions can be discussed in relation to a vertical continuum ranging from a celebration to a problematization of nature, and a horizontal continuum ranging from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric horizon. The lines in the coordinate system are a way of depicting how views of nature are dependent on how humans position themselves in nature both at ontological and quotidian levels. The matrix is circumscribed by a third dimension, that of techne. The concept of techne stems from rhetorical theory and is here understood as the art of shaping and manufacturing. The dimension of techne signals the fact that children’s and YA texts and cultures are already mediated, hence are crafted, representations of nature. Furthermore, it calls attention to recent developments within biotechnology, in which nature is, to an ever-increasing extent, subject to cultural influence and human manipulation. The matrix is conceived as an organic thought figure as it has evolved over time and in response to different texts (literary and critical) and scholarly discussions.