Wild Becomings: How the Everyday Experience of Common Wild Animals at Summer Camp Acts as an Entrance to the More-than-Human World

This paper describes the partial results of a research project which investigated conceptions of nature and the role of place in environmental education in children who attended Camp Arowhon. Through interviews and observations, utilizing a hybrid research drawing from phenomenography and ethnography, local common wild animals emerged as playing an important role in campers' embodied connection to place. Through structured "nature programs" and unstructured "free-play," campers discovered and increased their familiarity of common local animals. Using the deleuzeoguattarian concept of "becoming," these interactions are proposed to serve as a starting point through which a child can move on to engage with increasingly abstract aspects of the natural world. Implications for urban environmental education, where these children spend the majority of their year, are discussed. (Contains 3 tables and 7 notes.)