Includes bibliographical references.

Front Matter -- Copyright page -- Advance Praise for Children and Mother Nature -- Dedication -- Foreword / Ajay Sharma -- Acknowledgements -- Figures -- Notes on Contributors -- Introduction / Rouhollah Aghasaleh -- “Nasreddin Hodja and Walnut Tree” / Zeynep Temiz, Güliz Karaarslan Semiz and Simge Yilmaz -- From So Real to Sorrel / Natalie S. King, Nadine Ebri and Ulett Williams -- Yu the Great Managed the Flood / Xiaoli Gong, Martina D. Booker, Janiya A. Brown, Gabrielle C. Mann and Alexander M. Gastfield -- Retelling of the Magic Spring (젊어지는 샘물) / MinSoo Kim-Bossard, Lauren Madden, Louise Ammentorp and Tabitha Dell’Angelo -- Representing Cultural Values through Children’s Stories / Amani K. H. Alghamdi and Ibtesam Hussain -- “Yannis and the Forty Dragons” / Nausica Kapsala, Apostolia Karagianni and Evangelia Mavrikaki -- “The Theft of the Fire” / Philipe Pereira Borba de Araújo and Marco Antônio Margarido Costa -- Notes for Living on Planet Earth / Dawnene D. Hassett, Steffenie Williams, Scott Enger, Marilee Cronin and John Porco -- Back Matter -- Glossary of terms.

It is an old, yet relevant, argument that education needs to focus more on real-world issues in students’ lives and communities. Nevertheless, conventional school curricula in many countries create superficial boundaries to separate natural and social worlds. A call for science learning approaches that acknowledge societal standpoints accumulate that human activities are driving environmental and evolutionary change which has lead scholars to investigate how different societies respond to environmental change. Children and Mother Nature is a multilingual volume that represents indigenous knowledges from various ethnic, linguistic, geographical, and national groups of educators and students through storytelling. Authors have identified indigenous stories, fables, and folk tales with a theme of human-nature interaction and facilitated storytelling sessions with groups of students in K–8 grade (5–14 years old) in Turkey, Greece, US, Jamaica, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Chinese and Korean language speaking communities in the US. Students have discussed and rewritten/retold the stories collaboratively and illustrated their own stories. All student-told stories are presented in the original language along with an English translation. This volume provides authentic materials for teachers to use in their classrooms and could also be of interest to educational, literary, and environmental researchers to conduct comparative and international studies.