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Culture Shapes Kids’ Views of Nature

Hi, I’m Scientific American podcast editor Steve Mirsky. And here’s a short piece from the April issue of the magazine, in the section we call Advances: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Science, Technology and Medicine.

Nature and nurture by Jason G. Goldman.

How do young children understand the natural world?

Most research into this question has focused on urban, white, middle-class American children living near large universities.

Even when psychologists include kids from other communities, too often these experimental procedures originally developed for urban children.

Now, researchers have developed a methodology for studying rural Native American kids perspectives on nature and have compared their responses with those of their city dwelling peers.

The findings offer some rare cross-cultural insight into early childhood environmental education.

Northwestern University developmental psychologist, Sandra Waxman and her colleagues have long collaborated with the Menominee Native American nation in Wisconsin, when the researchers presented plans for this study to tribe members who were trained research assistants. The assistance protested that the experiment which involved watching children play with toy animals is not culturally appropriate.

Waxman said that it did not make sense to the Menominee to think of animals is divorced from their ecological contexts.

Instead, one of the Menominee researchers constructed a diorama that included realistic trees, grass and rocks as well as the original toy animals.

The researchers watched as three groups of four year olds played with the diorama, rural Menominee as well as Native Americans and other Americans living in Chicago and its suburbs.

All three groups were more likely to enact realistic scenarios with the toy animals than imaginary scenarios. But both groups of Native American kids were more likely to imagine they were the animals rather than give the animals human attributes, in the rural Menominee were especially talkative during the experiment.

Contrary to previous research that characterize these children as less verbal than their non-Native American peers.

Results were published in the Journal of cognition and development.

I was State University stem scholars program director Cory Welch who is a member of the Northern Cheyenne said the involvement of tribal communities in all aspects of the research, planning, design, execution, analysis, and dissemination has to be the minimum requirement of all research involving native people.

That was nature and nurture by Jason G. Goldman