Children's Special Places: Exploring the Role of Forts, Dens, and Bush Houses in Middle Childhood
Sobel, David (1993).
Tucson: Zephyr Press; 169 pages. $17.95. ISBN 0-913705-81-0.
Zephyr Press, a small press that markets innovative books in education, has issued Children's Special Places by David Sobel, Co-Chair of the Department of Education at Antioch New England Graduate School. The book covers four areas. It describes Sobel's research among 5- to 15-year-olds in Devon, England and on the island of Carriacou in the Grenadas. His research showed that the Grenadine children had difficulty describing their favorite places in maps and interviews, but when 7- to 11- year-olds led the author through the landscape, their expressions of attachment to playhouses, dens, and forts of their own creation transcended culture. Sobel also presents adult testimonies to the importance of such childhood places, reviews the literature on the subject, and describes school programs that build upon school-age children's place-making proclivities.
Sobel's review covers familiar territory on environmental autobiography, childhood place-making, and theories about childhood bonding with the earth, e.g., Edith Cobb, Clare Cooper Marcus, Roger Hart, and Joseph Chilton Pearce. He uses this literature, his field research in Devon and Carriacou, and adult reminiscence to elaborate on the importance of place-making in middle childhood. For this reader, Sobel's new contribution to this literature is the final section of the book, in which he describes six innovative school programs. These capitalize on children's delight in making personal places and miniature communities to integrate learning across all subject areas and to foster knowledge and respect for the landscape.
The book's design requires special mention. It is attractively laid out with wide margins and black and white line drawings in the spirit of a child's storybook, suggesting the union of landscape experience and imagination that children's place-making involves.
Reviewer Information
Whitney Young College; Kentucky State University