This article explores and reconsiders the view of children's encounters with place as central to a place-based pedagogy that seeks to dismantle rather than support constructions of a nature-culture binary. I unpack the current fervour for reinserting the child in nature and nature-based education as a significant phenomenon in environmental and outdoor education. I will draw on recent literature on place-based research and theorise using new materialist and posthumanist approaches that seek to disrupt anthropocentric views and support new ways of considering our encounters with the more-than-human world. Then, using these new approaches, I will theorise a recent place-based research project with children in the city of La Paz, Bolivia, to illustrate how it is possible to challenge current assumptions that are firmly entrenched in the child in nature movement. I will conclude by considering what intra-species relations, place encounters and child-body-animal-place relations can teach us about questioning anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. Finally, I consider how can we overcome these limitations of a narrow and nostalgic view of ‘child and nature’ and reimagine a more diverse approach to education for a sustainable future.

Children in middle class Australia, and many western countries around the world experience restricted opportunities to engage in free play in their neighbourhood streets and parks. The impact of this has been a drastic decrease in children's independent mobility and environmental play. Recent research has focused on the physical environment of neighbourhoods' in an attempt to understand how they might be designed to encourage children's play and increase their environmental learning. This paper explores these same issues but from a different perspective. That is, to explain some of the changes in childhood environmental behaviours I explore children and parent relationships, in particular, the phenomena of ‘bubble‐wrapping’ children to appease the anxieties of some middle class parents. I acknowledge when making these claims that parenting is a complex and highly individual enterprise with many variables, therefore this paper is only seeking to draw attention to a broad pattern of behaviour of a select group within society. I will conclude with an overview of some of the key attributes and competencies that are being lost when children lack independent mobility in their neighbourhoods and will subsequently argue why opening the front gates of our middle class suburbs is important to enhance children's environmental learning.

Drawing on the findings of an ARC funded project, 'Children's Environments and the Role of School Grounds for Enhancing Environmental Cognition', this paper explores the question: What is the role of school grounds as sites for teaching and learning? Observation and interview data for five Australian primary schools displayed large differences between schools in the types of play that 8- to 10-year-old children engaged in. In particular, play behaviours categorised as involving environmental cognition were not observed at all in one school, yet were the dominant play behaviour observed in another. The paper explores the relative importance of the school ground environment and the (outdoor) educational philosophy adopted by the school.

This paper reports on the Dapto dreaming project that was implemented in early 2011. Funded by Stockland, a large Australian urban developer, the project was a child-friendly research activity to support the building of a new urban development located in the outer suburbs of a large regional city in Australia. The urban developers provided a unique opportunity for children to have authentic input into the design of the urban development so that the development could incorporate the visions and experiences of the local neighbourhood children growing up in the area. Therefore, this was not a process of post-design consultation but a genuine participatory action research opportunity for children to be dreamers, designers and agents of change. The project was implemented through a series of child-focused participatory research workshops conducted with residents and children from Horsley, a neighbourhood in the suburban town of Dapto. This paper seeks to understand the relationship between the significant rich environmental experiences that children have as part of their everyday life in Horsley and how children were motivated and competent in enacting their role as effective environmental change agents and stewards in the protection of nature through the design of a child-friendly neighbourhood.

This paper theorizes children's interspecies relation with dogs in La Paz Bolivia utilizing post-humanism and new materialism as its approach. This approach allows for the deconstructing of human–nature binaries found in discourses central to the children in nature movement. Questioning the universalizing of children's experience in nature the paper considers three propositions. Firstly, what if children were viewed as nature rather than outside of it. Secondly, can the objects or ‘things’ of nature be viewed as animated. And finally, how sensitive is the contemporary imperative to reconnect children to a romanticized more natured life, to children's diverse worldly experiences. I explore these propositions drawing on a study where I have adopted a materialist ontology and theorized using the work of [Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] and her concept of intra-action as adopted by Rautio [2013a. “Children Who Carry Stones in Their Pockets: On Autotelic Material Practices in Everyday Life.” Children's Geographies 11 (4): 394–408]. Based on my child–dog interspecies exploration, I will conclude by re-addressing the three propositions.