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Environmental Education Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Environmental Education

My Octopus Teacher (2020) Directed By Pippa Ehrlich And James Reed, Peter Shea Jan 2025

My Octopus Teacher (2020) Directed By Pippa Ehrlich And James Reed, Peter Shea

Picture Books

My Octopus Teacher combines a carefully structured love story with astonishing information about undersea life, documenting a year of encounters between a photographer and an octopus. It is important as a non-standard love story and as a reflection on the possibility of deep connection with non-human creatures.


Walk In The Woods (2023) By Nikki Grimes, Maughn Rollins Gregory Jan 2025

Walk In The Woods (2023) By Nikki Grimes, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

An unnamed Black boy walks in the woods near his home a week after his father’s funeral. Because the boy knows how to be mindful in nature—to move slowly, step carefully, and pay close attention—he becomes more connected to the woods and the creatures in it. Rediscovering is his father’s legacy of ecstatic, aesthetic reverence for nature begins to assuage the boy's anger-tinged grief.


Big Tracks, Little Tracks: Following Animal Prints (1999) By Millicent E. Selsam, Maughn Rollins Gregory Jan 2025

Big Tracks, Little Tracks: Following Animal Prints (1999) By Millicent E. Selsam, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

Coming up with the most reasonable explanation of the available clues is something we all do on a daily basis. This book describes animal tracks as clues from which children can make inferences about what kind of animal left them and what they were doing when they did.


Possum That Didn't (1950/2016) By Arthur Frank Tashlin, Maughn Rollins Gregory, Peter Shea Jan 2025

Possum That Didn't (1950/2016) By Arthur Frank Tashlin, Maughn Rollins Gregory, Peter Shea

Picture Books

The possum ‘that didn’t’ is a very contented animal who smiles in sunshine and rain, but when a group of human picnickers spot him hanging by his tail, they read his smile as a frown and call him stupid for insisting that he is happy. They decide to take him to the city to find amusement and, because he won’t climb down from the tree, they excavate it and transport tree and hanging possum together. Frank Tashlin's book goes philosophical in two different directions. One is the direction of satire: We laugh at humans taking a possum to a nightclub, …


How Beautiful (2021) By Antonella Capetti, Maughn Rollins Gregory Jan 2025

How Beautiful (2021) By Antonella Capetti, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

The question of what is and isn’t beautiful occurs to the caterpillar in this elaborate picture book when a giant Unknown Thing (human) lifts him out of his familiar leaf bed world and tells him, “You’re so beautiful.” The caterpillar wonders, “But what does beautiful mean?” The question leads him on a day-long trek through the forest, where other animals offer a variety of perplexing answers.


Depth Of The Lake And The Height Of The Sky (2017) By Kim Jihyun, Megan Jane Laverty Jan 2025

Depth Of The Lake And The Height Of The Sky (2017) By Kim Jihyun, Megan Jane Laverty

Picture Books

The Depth of the Lake and the Height of the Sky (2017) is KimJihyun’s first picture book; it is composed entirely of pictures. It “tells” the story of a young boy and his dog who spend a day swimming and sunbathing at a lake that is within walking distance from his grandparents' home, whom he is visiting with his parents. At first glance, the story might seem unremarkable, recounting an experience familiar to many. However, Kim’s illustrations challenge this assumption by drawing us into the boy’s encounter with nature. She creates a visual journey that guides us through a perceptual …


I'M Trying To Love Garbage (2021) By Bethany Barton, Peter Shea Jan 2025

I'M Trying To Love Garbage (2021) By Bethany Barton, Peter Shea

Picture Books

Bethany Barton writes great books for kids about how minds change. In this one, the character’s arc is from thinking about garbage as just smelly icky stuff through empathizing (a little) with the creatures that feed on garbage, to eventually coming to see that all garbage is not equal; some needs special handling or it will clutter life up for a long time. The conclusion: I want to act like someone who thinks more about garbage, about what trash I create and where it ends up.”


How To Be A Nature Detective (1966) By Millicent E. Selsam, Maughn Rollins Gregory Jan 2025

How To Be A Nature Detective (1966) By Millicent E. Selsam, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

Coming up with the most reasonable explanation of the available clues is something we all do on a daily basis. This book describes animal tracks as clues from which children can make inferences about what kind of animal left them and what they were doing when they did.


Does Earth Feel? (2021) By Marc Majewski, Alaina Gostomski Jan 2024

Does Earth Feel? (2021) By Marc Majewski, Alaina Gostomski

Picture Books

With spare prose and evocative paintings, author-illustrator Marc Majewski asks fourteen critical questions -- including Does Earth feel calm? Does Earth feel curious? Does Earth feel hurt? Does Earth feel heard? -- to encourage active thinking and discussion about our planet.


Blackout (2011) By John Rocco, Peter Shea Jan 2024

Blackout (2011) By John Rocco, Peter Shea

Picture Books

In this Caldecott Honor Book, Blackout, a hot urban night takes an interesting turn when the power goes out and an urban family -- each busy with something that requires electricity -- discover new things about themselves and their community.


Hurricane (2021) By John Rocco, Peter Shea Jan 2024

Hurricane (2021) By John Rocco, Peter Shea

Picture Books

This book pictures the devastation of today's powerful storms. The hurricane wrecks things and drives people from their homes. The boy in the story finds his beloved dock broken up, where he used to swim and fish. The story centers on cooperation and neighborhood resilience: people can get through disasters if they work together.


Something, Someday (2023) By Amanda Gorman, Maughn Rollins Gregory Jan 2024

Something, Someday (2023) By Amanda Gorman, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

When children think philosophically they inevitably will, and unquestionably should engage in social criticism. In this picture book by the first U.S. National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, a Black child in an urban apartment complex surrounded by garbage cleans it up and plants a vegetable and flower garden, enlisting the help of others and overcoming some setbacks. Gorman's text warns children that some adults may say they're too small, or that it’s none of their business, or that what they're trying won’t work, but she reassures them that sometimes it’s OK to ignore those people.


We Are Water Protectors (2020) By Carole Lindstrom, Peter Shea Jan 2024

We Are Water Protectors (2020) By Carole Lindstrom, Peter Shea

Picture Books

We Are Water Protectors is a beautiful and partisan book, and the teacher or parent who wants to help children to think better could not find a better place to start, giving the child of whatever age the opportunity to feel the force of this plea, and then to recognize the need to understand the political context within which this issue arises, and the honest differences of opinion about policy that arise in an already disrupted world.


Becoming A Good Creature (2020) By Sy Montgomery, Samantha Piede Jan 2024

Becoming A Good Creature (2020) By Sy Montgomery, Samantha Piede

Picture Books

Becoming a Good Creature outlines moral lessons Sy Montgomery has learned from interactions with animals, both domestic and wild, such as “Love Little Lives,” “Don’t Be Afraid,” and “Make Your Own Family.” Our willingness to be attentive to other creatures – not just the ones like us with “two legs,” but also “four or even eight” – opens up the possibility of finding something ethically significant in these encounters. She tells us that “all have taught me something important about how to be a good creature in the world.”


Greta Thunberg (2021) By Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara, Maughn Rollins Gregory Jan 2024

Greta Thunberg (2021) By Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

Greta Thunberg learned about climate change in school at the age of eight, when she persuaded her parents to make lifestyle changes to reduce their carbon footprint. At fifteen, after winning a writing competition about the environment, she came up with the idea of a school strike, inspired by student walkouts in the United States to protest legislative inaction on gun control. Though she couldn’t interest anyone else in the idea, her one-child strikes soon gained international attention. Greta’s story demonstrates some of the challenges and gifts that neurodiverse children bring to activism. This book also prods adults to think …


Snail With The Right Heart (2021) By Maria Popova, Maughn Rollins Gregory Jan 2023

Snail With The Right Heart (2021) By Maria Popova, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

When a London scientist found a garden snail whose shell that spiraled left to right—opposite from others of its species—he sent it to the University of Nottingham for study. The snail’s internal organs were also arranged on the opposite side from other snails, including a heart on the right side of its body—a one-in-a-million condition known as situs inversus, which also occurs in humans. In explaining the snail’s story in terms of genetic evolution and biological reproduction, The Snail with the Right Heart also raises philosophical questions about the role of genetics, education, and personal choice in determining who …