Ecological Identity of Children

In our newest book, The Goodness of Rain: Developing an Ecological identity in Young Children, Ann Pelo offers this charge:

"We teach children to write and to read and to navigate mathematical systems so that they can access the world of ideas and questions and intellectual exchange.  We teach children how to behave with other people so that they can grow joyful and nourishing relationships.  We teach children history, so that they know where they come from, and we teach them art, so that they can imagine what might be, and we teach them science so that they understand the intricate workings of the physical world.  This teaching honors and strengthens children's innate social, intellectual and cultural, and aesthetic identities, identities that we value as a society.  We don't leave their development to happenstance or luck.  Just so, we must nurture children's intrinsic ecological identities with intention and action.

"This is our work as parents, caregivers, teachers: to invite children to braid their identities together with the place where they live by calling their attention to the air, the sky, the cracks in the sidewalk where the earth bursts out of its cement cage.

"When we live this way with children, we align ourselves with the instinct to know the place where we live.  Inviting children to know their home ground is our way home, as well."

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