Browsing by Subject "ympäristötunteet"

Children have been found to be vulnerable to anxiety about nature and the environment, as their emotional skills have not yet been fully developed. Emotions related to the environment are called environmental emotions. Processing and wording those emotions is important for the well-being of the child. It is particularly important now that we are living in an eco-crisis, and many of us are facing irreversible changes in our environment. Strengthening the emotional skills, providing opportunities for discussion, and taking emotions into account is essential to dealing with environmental feelings. Children's literature could be used as one of the easily accessible tools for emotional processing. From children's literature a child can get some help with identifying their own feelings and can go through even untoward things. Children's literature also develops a child's emotional handling skills and readiness to face frightening things. This study examines the emotions related to environment and their descriptions, as well as environmental problems and the attempts to solve them in the Finnish children's literature on environmental problems published in the 2020s. This is a qualitative study utilizing an ecocritical perspective. In this study I analyze the characters emotions in six children's books dealing with environmental problems. I use content analysis as a method of analysis. In addition to the descriptions of the emotions related to environment that appeared in the texts of the works that served as material, various environmental problems and their solutions were also searched from the material. The notion is that the works could be used as tools for literary and environmental education as well. The emotional descriptions of the texts in the works found the most feelings of joy, which were described in all the works in the material. The next most were feelings of sadness and worry. Descriptions were also found of feelings of fear, guilt, anger, enthusiasm, vigor, and hope. Environmental problems were described as climate change, carbon dioxide emissions, species extinction, harmful alien species, waste entering water bodies, debris ending in nature and declining forests. The solutions were described as various everyday actions that everyone can implement in their own lives, as well as larger social solutions, such as laws and regulations.