The Naturalistic Notebook as an Inclusive Tool for Biodiversity Education: Supporting Children's Outdoor Explorations

The paper aims to reflect on scientific notebooks (Guerra and Luini, 2024) in outdoor experiences of biodiversity education, as an inclusive and participatory documentation tool for children to keep track of discoveries, hypotheses and questions through heterogeneous languages capable of supporting biodiverse explorations. Education for biodiversity is a multidimensional concept (Navarro-Perez and Tidball, 2012) with multiple interpretations (Persico, 2024), inviting experiential and participatory approaches. The experiential dimension through place-based approaches (Guerra, 2024) can foster connections, awareness and change in individual behavior. Recording outdoor experiences through different languages enables everyone, through inclusive documentation tools, to return their meaningfulness. Through an experiential and participatory approach, children’s and notebooks observations gathered by the BEAT (Biodiversity Education and Awareness Toolkit) research group, within the NBFC (National Biodiversity Future Centre) framework, exploit the use of a methodological toolkit to raise awareness of the biodiversity’s value through the use of heterogeneous documentation tools. The research was conducted following the Italian pedagogical society’s guidelines, asking for the families' consent and children’s assent, whose names were anonymised. Scientific notebooks support children's outdoor research on biodiversity by enabling documentation processes through drawings, words, pictures, maps, and collections (Guerra, 2020). This creative, scientific and inclusive tool makes it possible to trace living encounters, fosters deeper connection to nature and highlights the relationships between people and environments from a child's perspective, the basis of biodiversity education processes. The use of nature notebooks can support inclusive biodiversity education by fostering active exploration, experiential learning outdoor and conversation spaces for children in dialogue with policy makers.