“Okay tengo estas flores”: Exploring urban multilingual children’s perspectives on nature in cities amidst the climate crisis

Purpose Drawing from a larger study of young children’s climate justice literacies, the purpose of this paper is to explore the perspectives that urban, multilingual children hold toward nature in cities and to share how a critical urban ecopedagogies approach can be responsive to students’ lived histories, experiences and the natural world around them. Further, the article shows how adults can elicit and learn from urban multilingual children’s alternative ecological epistemologies about their natural environment that often challenge dominant environmental narratives. Design/methodology/approach Blending practitioner inquiry and ethnography in a study conducted in a first-grade classroom, this study adopted urban ecopedagogy specifically by foregrounding children’s engagement with diverse environmental picturebooks that centered on nature in cities and providing children with digital cameras to elicit children’s perspectives on nature across their social worlds of their school, home and community. Findings The findings demonstrate that children connected to nature expansively, moving beyond conceptualizations of nature as abundant green spaces and instead understood nature to be inclusive of small aspects of nature found amidst the built environment or in urban commercial spaces. Moving beyond mononational and monolingual environmental sensemaking, children also revealed how their transnational and translingual language and literacy practices intrinsically shaped their conceptions of and connection to their natural worlds. Through their documentation of the nature around them, children also showed how digital tools (e.g. digital cameras, social media platforms) allowed them to challenge adult-driven narratives of their danger of technology by enhancing and deepening their connection with nature, rather than distracting them from it. Originality/value This paper shows the importance of challenging dominant, adult-regulated environmental narratives by eliciting the perspectives of multilingual children on the urban spaces that they experience in their everyday lives. It also reveals how a focus on nature in urban landscapes can be a way to nurture young children’s thinking about the environment, providing an entryway into and supporting discussions of climate justice literature more broadly.