1. The physical environment--in combination with its social make up--can support or hinder the processes of child development and identity formation.

2. Children's involvement in designing the environment can result in spaces and places that are more responsive to their needs, while developing their capacities as citizens.

3. As the ecological balances that sustain life are increasingly threatened, a good education should help children develop a socially critical understanding of environmental issues, through practical projects in their schools and communities.

4. University students can help children develop as environmentally aware civic actors in their schools and communities and, at the same time, develop their own leadership abilities.

Role of the Environment in Child Development and Identity Formation

All environments contain forces that support or undermine the processes of child development. These forces may work for or against assurance of the child's basic survival needs; for or against provision of emotional nurturance and continuity; for or against developmentally appropriate attempts at self-determination--in short, for or against the creation of a positive environment for growth and development. Forces that support children represent opportunities for adequate, or even enhanced, developmental experiences, while the absence of such characteristics or the presence of threatening forces presents environmental risks to the developing child (Garbarino, 1985, p. 126).

Relatively little is known about the importance of children's physical surroundings in comparison to the wealth of research on the social context of their development. Yet, social experiences are inseparable from their space/time dimensions, whether they occur in cyberspace or in specific geographic locales. Children acquire an understanding of who they are by virtue of their relationships with others, and also through their experiences with the physical world. Because "there is no social setting that is not also a physical setting . . . spaces and places must necessarily be fundamental considerations in [the] search for understanding the development of human behavior and experience" (Proshansky and Fabian, 1987, p. 23).

The places that children inhabit can have an enduring meaning throughout their lives (Marcus, 1997). They are not only an essential aspect of their cultural and physical identity, they inevitably contain data about their status in society (Lynch, 1979). The accumulated cognitions about important settings in children's lives helps shape what has been referred to as their place identity. Children's immediate surroundings "form the most repeated and powerful context for socialization and development, providing images that personally contribute to the child's sense of himself or herself" (Rivlin, 1987, p. 10). Place identity evolves, not merely in response to the physical properties of their surroundings, but also as a product of the social roles--their own and others--that help them understand how to behave.

Yet, children's environmental lives are increasingly regulated--by parents and a cadre of their professional surrogates who fear for their safety or want to ensure that their lives are filled with enrichments. "Children and even adolescents have less opportunity to improvise a social life of their own and to appropriate adult territory for their own use" (Simpson, 1997, p. 919). They no longer participate in work alongside adults as they once did but rather are segregated in child-appropriate environments (homes, schools, playgrounds). Many live in communities that lack basic pedestrian amenities, like sidewalks and public transportation, which increases their dependence upon adults--and increases adults' fear for their safety due to vehicular accidents.

Consequently, many children lack the opportunities for self-directed exploration that are essential to gaining a sense of competence in negotiating the social and physical world. While many educators recognize children's proclivity for re-creating their surroundings through planning and design activities, the increasing constraints on children's real exploration of the environment suggest that projected exploration through the planning and design process may be even more important.

Children's Participation in Planning and Design

In one view of childhood, children are seen as vulnerable, in need of adult protection. In an opposing view, children are seen as persons "who have not yet reached full intellectual maturity" (Simpson, 1997, p. 908). While these minors are not capable of full participation in matters that affect them, they can assume increasing responsibility for making decisions without adult intervention as they mature. Children's meaningful involvement in planning and designing reflects the latter view, and suggests that, with adult guidance, they can be involved in age-and culturally appropriate decision-making processes. Unfortunately, the former view of childhood dominates, limiting adult's capacity to see children as competent beings who can beneficially affect surroundings.

There are compelling reasons for involving children in the planning, design, construction, and maintenance of their schools and communities. Participation "is the means by which a democracy is built, and it is a standard against which democracies should be measured. Participation is a fundamental right of citizenship" (Hart, 1992, p. 5). It is also fundamental to creating multicultural communities in which differing identities due to ethnicity, gender, age, and tenure among other characteristics can be negotiated. Participation "is necessary, not only for the development of active citizenship amongst children and young people but for sustained community ownership of regeneration initiatives and the development of new forms of community governance" (Speak, 2000, pp. 31). Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that participation is an avenue to engendering ownership for the un-owned spaces of schools, where violence tends to occur.

As with other skills and values, the rights and responsibilities of citizenship tend not to emerge automatically in adulthood based on abstract principles of democracy learned in the classroom but rather develop out of age-appropriate practices of self-determination. While participation in decision-making processes can take many forms, participation in planning and design has the added benefit of creating spaces and places that are more suited to the needs of children. Not only do children's conceptions of space differ from adults', their needs are sometimes at odds with an adult world view. For example, adolescents might prefer more free recreational spaces at shopping malls, but shoppers might see such spaces as an added expense that would increase prices, and store owners might worry that boisterous teenagers would detract from business. By bringing all voices into the planning and design process, young people can experience first-hand how to resolve differences through intergroup dialogue. Finally, changes in the physical environment provides concrete evidence of children's competence, while also allowing them to make observable contributions to significant persons in their lives. In many instances, projects created by children have an absence of vandalism and graffiti, thus serving as visible reminders of children as assets in their communities.

Environmental Education as a Subject, Medium, and Goal

Safeguarding the natural and designed environment involves fundamental values relative to the inherent fairness of social, physical, economic, and political systems--values that are also reflected in educational practice. Drawing freely from the work of Timothy O'Riordan (1981), geographer, John Huckle (1983) conceptualized three approaches to environmental education and linked those pedagogues with three environmental ideologies.

Pedagogy and the Environment

According to John Huckle (1983), education about the environment, which is the most dominant approach, reflects a conventional approach to environmentalism. Including the environment as a subject within the curriculum, typically at the secondary level, is a well-funded, science-based enterprise that has produced an array of textbooks and syllabi. Underlying this pedagogy is a belief that ecological imbalances can be solved by scientific and technological expertise, including implementation of sound environmental management practices.

Education through the environment views the environment as a medium for encouraging personal and moral growth through theme-based, student-centered activities. This approach "prefers to deal with rural and historical environments and either ignores socio-political factors or treats them in a descriptive manner that emphasizes social consensus rather than conflict" (p. 105). Focused primarily in elementary and middle schools, education through the environment can involve community outreach as students engage in actions projects, such as resource mapping, recycling, and clean-up campaigns. This educational approach reflects utopian environmentalism, which seeks new self-reliant forms of society. These idealistic visions are typically appropriate for only a small minority and would likely widen the inequalities that already exist between rich and poor.

In education for the environment, environmental well-being is the goal. Rarely practiced, this approach seeks to equip students with the knowledge, values, and skills to participate in local decisions having considered the issue globally. While students work on issues in their local communities, these issues are also examined in the larger world, thus revealing inequities among societies. Underlying this pedagogy is a radical approach to the environment in which limits on consumer behavior and economic development are seen as ways to stabilize natural and social systems. Radical environmentalism focuses on raising awareness of issues among a broad cross-section of the populace, who can then become informed participants in decision-making processes. Raising awareness for the purpose of action taking is the overarching goal of education for the environment.

Acknowledging that real life does not fit into these neat categories--"elements of all three will generally be found together and the curriculum will reflect the differing sources of ideas and materials on which teachers have drawn at different times" (p. 106)--Huckle clearly advocates for the latter approach. Children and their families make countless, often subconscious, decisions that affect environmental quality. Environmental education should--and must--help children be aware of the affect of their consumer behavior on less privileged persons and nature, and it should also engage them in creating alternatives in their own schools and communities.

Public Service as a Venue for Leadership Development

In response to the gulf that has emerged between academic concerns and those of policymakers and the public, many institutions of higher education have sought to reconnect to the communities of which they are a part. Making this linkage necessarily results in new courses and programs that involve students in what has been referred to as community service learning, or CSL. "A connection has been made between how direct experience can . . . cultivate leadership and civic skills to contribute to larger societal purposes through new curricular designs that promote learning in community settings" (Ramaley, 1998, p. 94-5). Among the characteristics of a successful CSL experience is a mutually beneficial exchange in which students and faculty facilitate their community clients' goals, while also learning from those clients.

Although many universities and individual faculty have developed outreach programs to K-12, little has been written about the benefits to students, especially graduate and professional students who are not in the field of education. However from casual observations, it would seem that an exchange between university students and K-12 school children has the potential of being a unique venue for the leadership development of both groups. The process of demystifying the concepts of one's discipline so they can be understood by children can help students understand some of the false barriers that have been created between professionals and their subjects, patients, clients, consumers, and audiences. In working on environmental issues, university students may find themselves inspired by children's idealism and capacity for keen observation. On the other hand, the students, not yet full members of consumer society, may serve as better scaffolds to environmental justice than classroom teachers, who are more constrained by the culture and academic performance requirements of the school.