Young people from all over the world brought a child-centered vision to the Summit. Children are the first victims of climate change, but they are also the best listeners of Nature, the ones who can take adults by the hand and completely change their paradigm. Childhood is nature; it is in symbiosis with nature. Listening to childhood, recognizing its role in society, and strengthening quality education are essential steps to dealing with climate and all emergencies. Quality education is a response to all emergencies.
Ecohope or Ecoesperanza is a word that I carry in my heart after the joy of participating in the Summit “From Climate Change to Climate Resilience” convened by the Vatican through the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Together with the best academics, experts and witnesses of climate change around the world, I was alongside Catarina, Francisco, Lu, Daenisha, Carlos, Sashoi and Maria Helena, a beautiful group of very young people, from different countries, sensitive and competent in launching a direct appeal to us adults. An appeal that comes from the daily experience of each of them, in Boston or in Colombia or in the Amazon, but which also has roots in the participatory process linked to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which led to the General Comment[1] addressed to governments in order to consider the devastating consequences of climate change on children’s rights.
1. The importance of a child-centered vision
Listening to children and young people is the main mission adults can devote themselves to. This is my idea, my belief as a pedagogist, teacher, and president of Fondazione Reggio Children, a foundation that deals with educational emergencies, starting from an experience, the educational approach developed in my town, Reggio Emilia, which tries to be child-centered. To be child-centered is in its identity.
For this reason, I’ve been thrilled that childhood and adolescence have been at the center of the prestigious Summit. They were protagonists in a critical session that demonstrated the importance of being child-centered. This means we want to look at children with new and different eyes. Adolescents put children at the center as a starting point for a new peaceful cultural regeneration, a sort of quiet revolution.
These adolescents looked at children directly in their eyes, which made them able to look at the world with the eyes of children. They demonstrated how strong their thoughts are and how powerful their message is. They made a revolution in themselves and changed their role as if they were not necessarily the ones that have to learn from adults but the ones that have to teach them. They suggested us a new balance of power, a provocative expectation. They showed us another perspective, to see ecological hope or revolution as a change in our personal ecology, where the change is the research for a new equilibrium.
A complete change of paradigm is what young people offer us. We have to learn to trust them. They trust us a lot; they are generous. The holistic, ecological approach they offer us touches us through empathy. This is why we must embody this kind of revolution inside ourselves.
2. Listening to Children, Young People by Adults
For this to happen, we must develop a unique pedagogy, the pedagogy of listening, which is also a pedagogical practice.[2] It is a process that we are witnessing here. What does it really mean to listen? I also had the great opportunity to bring this issue to the attention of the Global Compact for Education.[3]
From our perspective, listening is not just hearing but being open to differences, giving value and importance to the Other, to Otherness. Listening, in the deepest sense, means being ready to change. It means accepting that the real encounter with the Other changes you.
So, listening as a metaphor is even more critical today, when our society can no longer listen to the Other, but everyone follows the flow of their thoughts.[4]
Listening means emotions, empathy, interdependence, and reciprocity. In this way, we get to reach that dimension of reciprocity in which the adults revisit their role as co-constructors of knowledge and culture together with children to the point of being guided by them.[5]
The same listening attitude must be adopted towards nature and the world around us to move towards Climate Resilience. To better understand the learning process in the relationship with toddlers, young people, and peers, we adults have to revisit our role, becoming the ones listening and encouraging questions, according to the “expansion of questions” that Jerome Bruner[6] always recommended to us in his frequent visits to Reggio Emilia. Cherish the questions, says the poet, the same one who writes, “We must become children if we want to reach the sublime.”[7]
The teacher learns to be a teacher with the children, by listening to them, by listening to their continuous, repetitive, and transformative questions. Children are the best and most natural researchers.
3. Children as the best listeners of nature
Children are the best listeners of nature, and this is why we should learn to listen to and learn from them. The multiple intelligences theorized by Howard Gardner, like The Hundred Languages that children can use, theorized by the pedagogist and philosopher Loris Malaguzzi,[8] are the thousands of ways to build relationships with living beings and elements. Children are nature and can become nature.
The encounter with the Child and the Youth is profound, an intercultural encounter. The cultures of childhood and adolescence are qualities of our lives, glimpses of the world that we adults have lost. Encountering them questions us on the fundamental issues of our existence, like our relationship with nature.
Children are our cultural mediators regarding nature because they know how to listen to it. We keep saying, “We and nature,” while children are able “to be and to become nature.” It is necessary to have the courage to listen to nature through the words of children and youth. As we said, it is not just about hearing but also about listening, acknowledging deeply, and acting accordingly.
3.1 Children in dialogue with peers and trees
While trying to better explain the meaning of listening also as a pedagogical attitude and that children are the best researchers, as they bring wonder and enthusiasm, I had the opportunity during the Summit to share some images and a video showing the power of childhood imagination. When we talk about the culture of childhood, we are really talking about a different culture acquired through the hundred languages that children have. Through this video documentation, “Imagine a forest”, we can truly appreciate not only the research carried out by the protagonists, the children, but the great work of listening and processing by the teachers behind the scenes.
In “Imagine a forest,” which celebrates trees and the natural world, with the voices and drawings of children from all the preschools and infant-toddler centers of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia together with Reggio Children,[9] you can admire this ability of very young people to be nature. Five-year-old children dialogue with each other and say that “trees have a memory to survive,” “have brains,” that “beauty is the voice of the trees”, and that “trees speak the Treesese language”. They say that the strength of trees is not muscles, but “fortitude”. They know that trees need friends like “suns, clouds, stars and moons”. Children know that “for a habitat you need food, water and air” and that if you don’t have a habitat “you have to go and live somewhere else”. Children discover the Livingence as a kind of era that unites “living beings, everything and everyone”.
3.2 Together without hierarchy
Not the humans-nature relationship but the children-youth-nature relationship shall characterize our era. Childhood still has the ability to interpret nature with all senses, the good look of nature. Children know how to see the invisible, open themselves to the Other, and be transformed by this encounter. The child’s relationship with nature is a question that concerns biology: the instinctual, protective relationship with the living. Also, the fact that the child activates all their senses allows them to be immersed in nature, in a reciprocity that is complete, a quality of the embrace that is the same symbiosis as the embrace of the mother who nourishes the child, in a reciprocal immersion of listening, of trust, of the ability to abandon oneself, and which includes all living beings. So, we must move from “humanity and nature” to “humanity is nature”. Childhood is nature, on the basis of the relationships whose interdependence and lack of hierarchy you perceive.
3.3 The role of adults and a policy for childhood
This invites us adults to question ourselves seriously and concretely on what to do, how to do it, and the relationship between rights and responsibility. It is the right-duty of being adults to humbly take a step back, to have the courage to listen to nature through the words of children and youth, as we did during the Summit, accrediting an enhancement policy of childhood and adolescence, with all the importance and beauty of the fragility they bear. Beauty and fragility are combined in the uniqueness of every person and every creature, as the Holy Father Francis teaches us, in a vision of the “throwaway culture” that is profoundly ecological, as well as ethical, social, political and metaphysical.[10] Fragility is a quality in the face of what is powerful and devastating. Everything that most moves us in Creation is fragile: a child, an old person, a drop of dew, a ray of sunshine. Fragility is a quality to be valued and taken responsibility for. The partners that we, as adults, have in this challenge are childhood and adolescence, and childhood and adolescence are a resource.
Thinking about them with them, leaving childhood and youth their leading role, is the only way forward in the path we want to follow of Mitigation, Adaptation, and Social Transformation. Acting alongside them and building responses with them is the necessary change that also affects us. The path set by the Summit is the right one: a culture of childhood, a child-centered approach, and a children’s rights-based approach to the environment. Dropping this premise and promise, disappointing these future adults’ request to change, would be the most severe crime that our society could commit.
Our challenge is to love childhood mightily. Therefore, investing in quality education is indispensable to helping society take on this responsibility.
4. Recognizing children in our societies
Nowadays, emergencies can no longer be considered anomalies but a permanent status. Quality education for all children remains a difficult target to reach and, in addition, childhood is the most affected by emergencies. Carola Suárez-Orozco’s documented report on educational poverty and on the impact of climate change on young people brought this evidence to light at the Summit. This target of quality education for all children must be tirelessly supported, and fundamental questions and cultural issues need to be faced. Where is the acknowledgment of children and young people in our society? In my opinion, childhood still does not garner the necessary social and political prominence. Recognizing childhood as a quality of life, as a culture to be preserved throughout life, recognizing that young girls and boys are citizens endowed with great and unrepeatable potential, competent to learn with others, bearers of rights from birth and of the right to quality education, is a step that must be taken by our societies. Let us start from here. It is an ecological issue, a question of the ecology of the mind. Furthermore, we are deeply convinced that education is the answer that helps us deal with all emergencies, as we wrote in our chapter “Quality education, a global challenge”.[11] It implies a vision of humanity starting from childhood. This is the job of quality education, which has a key role in the fight against educational poverty, contributing to building democratic societies and citizenship based on participation and solidarity.
4.1 Emergencies Affecting Childhood
Major emergencies that affect entire societies, and in particular childhood, are to be found in refugee camps: migrations and famines, wars, regimes, discrimination, climate disasters, the exploitation of labor and trafficking in human beings, the globalization of indifference, in the retreat towards individualism and isolation. And, of course, there are other forms of poverty in our advanced societies: there is an educational poverty linked to economic hardship and the fragility of communities and families; lack of relationships, individual and psychological fragility, which emerged and exacerbated with the consequences of the pandemic, the digital divide and the lack of digital culture.
There is the poverty of beauty and care in public and private spaces, there is the poverty that concerns the disappearance of the relationship with nature and with the community of the living beings, and there is also the poverty and loneliness of children at the center of too many stimuli and too much attention.
4.2 Education as the Most Serious Emergency
A choral action needs to be taken in favor of and alongside children, to defend their rights, to give them a voice, and to listen to their voice, which, as we have seen, shows us the way to the solution of our common problems. This dream is not condemned to remain a utopia but can be achieved collectively, with a common action and a cultural change.
Suppose it is true that the climate change emergency, which affects the lives of millions of people, leading to migration and poverty, depends on human behavior. In that case, the most serious planetary emergency is the educational one. “Education is one of the most effective ways to humanize the world and history”, Pope Francis wrote in his message for the Global Compact for Education.
We have all seen how young people have been the first to passionately embrace the ecological cause. We are therefore called to collective action to make childhood and young people visible and protagonists by listening to and talking to them. Paraphrasing ourselves, we could say that we are making childhood visible. The invitation is to have the courage of the future to look for new paradigms, letting ourselves be taken by the hand by childhood, to welcome the present and the future without being overwhelmed by indifference and resignation.
5. Acknowledgments
In closing, I would like to express my deep gratitude to Professor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, together with Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan, for the immense work done and the magnificent framework given to the Climate Change Summit. A special thank you from me, both for the invitation to this high-level meeting and for connecting me with young people who are passionate about saving life on the planet. A group of young people, who, thanks to the Pontifical Academies, has been given the opportunity to speak to the great thinkers and decision-makers of our time, is a development that gives us hope, Ecohope, and trust.
[1] OHCHR, General comment No. 26 (2023) on children’s rights and the environment with a special focus on climate change” to the Convention on the Rights of Child. www.ohchr.org
[2] Rinaldi C.,2021, In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia, Listening, Researching and Learning, 2nd edition, Routledge, OX.
[3] Rinaldi C., 2022, Early Childhood in Reggio Emilia and in the World, in Suárez-Orozco M. and Suárez-Orozco C., Education. A Global Compact for A Time of Crisis. Columbia University Press, NY.
[4] Chul-Han B., 2016 Die Austreibung des Anderen, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt a. Main, Germany.
[5] Dewey, J. (1916), Democracy and education, McMillan, New York.
[6] Bruner, J.S. (1996), The culture of education, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
[7] Rilke, R.M. Lettere a un giovane poeta. Piccola Biblioteca Adelphi, 110, 1980.
[8] Gardner, H. (1983), Frames of mind. The theory of multiple intelligences, Basic Books, New York.
[9] “Imagine a forest” is made by children, teachers, atelieristas and pedagogists of the municipal infant-toddler centres and preschools of the city of Reggio Emilia. Concept and video editing: Sara De Poi. Motion graphics: Sara De Poi and Simone Pace. Soundtrack created by the boys and girls of the Ernesto Balducci municipal kindergarten. © Scuole e Nidi d'infanzia – Istituzione del Comune di Reggio Emilia and Reggio Children. www.reggiochildren.it
[10] Francis, 2015, Laudato si’, Encyclical letter of the Holy Father Francis on Care for Our Common Home, nr 22.
[11] Fondazione Reggio Children, 2022, Quality Education, a global challenge. www.frchildren.org