“Betwixt-and-Between”. The pedagogical function of the relation between Children and Nature in Children’s literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The world of classic and contemporary children’s literature, picturebooks or anime films, sometimes tell children’s stories that are misunderstood by adults. These narratives tend to return childhood directly to the heart of natural world; these stories claim an ancestral affiliation of the child with Nature. So, why do children, more than adults, feel an almost primordial attraction towards Nature?From Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio to James Matthew Barrie’s Peter Pan, from The Little Mermaid of H. C. Andersen to Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies, from Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke to Ponyo on the cliff by the sea, we find narrated childhoods that feel “at home” (Cantatore, 2015) in Nature, linked to it by a strong and irrevocable sense of belonging. Children, pueri aeterni (Hillmann, 1964), are emblematic figures of passages, threshold crossings, mutations and changes: a “Betwixt‐and‐Between”, constantly subject to metamorphosis. Through their literature, children are indeed the representations of what Calvino call Lightness (Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1988). They are amphibious creatures suspended between multiple kingdoms, in a constant game of being something or something else, someone or someone else, not in a world intended as given and with each creature in the “right place”, but possible transformation and elusiveness.A Reading Key searches in works for children’s – like children’s books or films – , through the interpretative category of narrated pedagogy, for the meaning of literary and artistic descriptions as historical testimonies of the pedagogical function of the relation between Children and Nature.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".