To assess children's willingness to participate in decisionmaking about urban environments, Iranian children were invited to tell their stories about child inclusion in city affairs. The findings demonstrate children's enthusiasm to have a say, their suggestions of how their ideas can be integrated into planning, and their competency for participation.Despite their willingness, participants indicated awareness of patriarchal cultural views of children and childhood which continue to exclude them from planning involvement. Being denied the exercise of their rights to the city generates a marginalised status, alienating children from achieving appropriate engagement.
K E Y W O R D Schildren's participation, societal views, the right to the city, urban decision-making
This study of the rise and fall of nature schools across Iran in 2014–2019 shows the environmental and educational context of modernization during and before the Iranian Islamic Republic commenced in 1979. The account provides the historical and cultural context for understanding the nature school movement. Ecologist Hossein Vahabzadeh’s environmental entrepreneurship establishing nature schools strategically fitted these to institutional patterns of Iranian society. The later change of heart by the government, delicensing nature schools, curtailed an environmental education success story. Key discursive threads in Iranian culture, society and governance moulded the rise and course of the nature schools education initiative. Multiple intersecting causes identified continue in environmental education developments in the national education system. This outline of the social and cultural shaping of nature schools provides a basis for future scholarship to tell a fuller account. It identifies the nature school movement’s complexity, seeing beyond simple terms of good, bad or failed.
The Nature Schools movement in Iran commenced in 2014 and expanded steadily for half a decade, growing to almost 100 schools. Emulating similar educational inititives in Europe and North America, Nature Schools offered outdoor educational experiences for pre-school and primary school years, spreading across both metropolitan and regional Iran. Before the first Nature Schools were started, detailed initial planning between academics and the government Environment Department and Education Ministry was undertaken which projected the roll-out of many more Nature Schools. The results of this study demonstrated that the establishment and growth pattern of the Iranian Nature Schools had different causes stimulating its commencement, how these schools released a new pedagogical practice for teachers, children and their families and how this movement offered an alternative curriculum in nature with school children outdoors. Thus, despite the eclipse of the Nature School movement, a longer time-frame indicates positive aspects, including the establishment of green or eco-schools and the institutionalization of the environmental focus in pre-school education. Many educators saw Nature Schools benefitting students' personal learning and academic development. Political concerns after several years of growth led to some closures and slowing down of the growth of Nature Schools in 2018-19. At the same time, a new national environmental curriculum was being embedded across all age-levels of schooling in Iran.
Opening Day photographs appeared in Iran’s newspapers celebrating the succession of outdoor Nature Schools commencing each year from 2014. Using a narrative photographic approach, this qualitative study collected and analysed newspaper pictures for Iran’s Nature Schools in the half decade to 2017. At this time, government approval reflected careful planning to develop these new outdoor educational opportunities. Seven news media articles were thematically analysed from this period utilising twelve pictures. This photographic method provides another layer of understanding beyond official statements of intention, formal approval or written text. Through the local features of schools, a pattern of national intention and official endorsement can be seen, but also an awareness of invisible rules permitting outdoor learning experiences. What do these images tell us about this environmental opportunity for a new generation of schoolchildren? How do the pictures portray the urban need for the outdoors? Are there clues in these pictures of the subsequent shutting down of these outdoor schools, denying further expansion? These images tell their own story alongside formal narratives embodied in official Opening Day ceremonies and statements. We conclude these schools were meeting a strongly-felt need for the outdoors in highly urbanised contemporary Iran.
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