PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION IN CHILDREN'S EVERYDAY LIVES

• Helping children evaluate their own everyday environment
• Using children's rights as the basis for problem identification
• Comparing their lives with the memories of elderly community residents

It is not always clear to children, however, why they should document their own lives. "Who would be interested?" they ask. One answer is that other children are interested. In a correspondence exchange project between pairs of schools in the USA the project began with each child preparing a drawing and a written statement summarizing their evaluation of their own environment and an image of their "twin" environment. These were simultaneously exchanged, by mail, with their corresponding environmental "pen pals". This enabled the children to engage in comparisons of perspectives of their own community with their "twin" community (Go to the Case Study of a Community Exchange Approach to Environmental Education in the U.S.A.).

Figure 13: A drawing and card-sorting exercise for evaluating the environment (designed by PMT, the National Program of Working Children, in Ecuador).

• Get started by having children make an inventory of the positive and negative features of their environment for play and recreation. One way is for children to each make drawings on cards of positive and negative features as they walk through their everyday environment.
• They can also mark these features on a community base map (see to Unit Four). A collage method can also be used with these maps: pinning or gluing photos or drawings of places made by the children on to the appropriate location on the base maps.
• After individually evaluating their environment, the children can work together in small groups. These groups can discuss their different evaluations and make a collective map by plotting them on a community base map. Each group might specialize with a theme such as "dangerous locations" or "dirty or polluted play places". These base maps can then be subsequently combined with one another to form the first version of a map of "Children's Evaluation of Recreational Resources".

Figure 14: Pages from PMT children's environmental problem identification workbook.

Another strategy is for both children and senior residents to identify problems in their own lives today. They can then work together on each other's problems. This is the approach used by the Neighborhoods 2000 project in Hawaii. By working together children and seniors are able to generate useful neighborhood planning proposals. Activities included in this program are photographic neighborhood surveys, reminiscence interviews where seniors recount their community memories and experiences, autobiographical walking tours, and joint model building.

The products should clearly belong to each child. One solution is to encourage them to construct their own personal book on their environment even if, for non-literate children, this book is largely made up of pictures and maps. By building upon an analysis of their own daily lives, working children may be able to develop joint plans for the improvement of their living conditions. From such experiences it becomes more realistic to expect these children to collaborate in projects for some larger community beyond themselves.

But all children have rights, and children's research on their everyday environment can also be of importance to children of wealthy families. In Sweden, for example, schools have a strategy for reducing the number of injuries and deaths. Children from as young as seven years of age are involved in research on the areas where they walk and play in order to identify dangerous places and features. The data is then used to inform parents, other children and public officials, including traffic planners, school ground officials and the police.

Figure 15: A Geographic Diary by a 9 year-old girl in the Bronx, New York City.

In the case of working children, a personal map might include the locations of people who serve as their social supports, their work locations, occasional sleeping places and eating-places. Some of the problems in the child's life will appear obvious when mapped, such as prohibitive transportation distances between home and workplace. Other spatial problems may be less obvious and only be revealed by encouraging the children to take a close look at their maps with each other. For more privileged children, this kind of mapping can also be used to identify problems in their personal lives such as prohibition from valued play locations because of dangerous traffic.

Using their diaries and maps as sources of information, the children can work in small groups to make lists of issues that they deem to be problematic:

• Places they consider dangerous and dare not visit
• Places they like to play but which need improvement of some kind
• Places they like but are not allowed to use
• Places they cannot gain access to due to lack of transport
• Places they would most like to play if available

They may decide that it would be worthwhile to make collective maps of some of these issues. The size of the map to use will depend upon the children's regular spatial range of free movement in their community. In the case of working children this may mean a map of a whole city. When they look at the data collected for the whole class or group of children they might see patterns that they could not see in their personal maps and which they have not thought of before. For example it may be learned that most children are working in those locations in the community that have the highest concentrations of air pollution.

If children have access to the use of a camera they can photograph their most significant community places and activities so that they can glue them to the map as annotations. This is valuable not only for helping other children become aware of places and issues outside of their personal sphere of activity but also for the subsequent community presentation of data.