1st Edition
Researching Early Childhood Education for Sustainability Challenging Assumptions and Orthodoxies
This book captures the now burgeoning research field of early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS) and comprises insights from an ever-widening and diverse pool of researchers, who are promoting, engaging, and explaining the latest ECEfS research in the light of local, national, and United Nations global policy directives. With the increasing urgency of global climate disruptions, resource depletions, and biodiversity losses alongside greater human dislocation, the international scope of research and theory in this book provides a comprehensive guide to the role of sustainability in early childhood education, at a time when it is needed more than ever.
Elliott, Ärlemalm-Hagsér, and Davis have brought together a collection of studies that offer new insights and approaches to ECEfS which challenge dominant narratives surrounding early childhood education and sustainability, including topics such as:
- how diverse worldviews and cultures challenge perceptions of sustainability;
- how bold national early education policies and urgent shifts in teacher education are imperative for driving transformative practices; and,
- how ECEfS curriculum and pedagogy can be incorporated successfully into early years settings.
This book will both inspire researchers and more deeply enable early years’ educators to practise sustainability with children, and so will be of great interest to scholars, lecturers, and researchers, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students, across the increasingly intersecting fields of sustainability and early childhood education.
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Foreword
Eva Johansson
Re-framing the Text, a Second Time
Sue Elliott, Eva Ärlemalm-Hagsér, and Julie Davis
Cluster I Ethics and Values
Chapter 1 Analysis of Historical and Contemporary Early Childhood Education Theories in the Anthropocene
Eva Ärlemalm-Hagsér and Sue Elliott
Chapter 2 From Autonomous Child to a Child Entangled within an Agentic World: Implications for Early Childhood Education for Sustainability
Kassahun Weldemariam and Arjen Wals
Chapter 3 Unsettling Settlers’ Ideas of Land and Relearning Land with Indigenous Ways of Knowing in ECEfS
Debra Harwood, Pam Whitty, Carie Green, and Enid Elliot
Chapter 4 Alternative Worldviews on EDEfS: Reviewing and Re-examining Concepts around Human-nature Relationships, Images of Children, and Sustainability
Sylvia Christine Almeida
Cluster II Historical and Sociocultural Contexts
Chapter 5 Synopsis: An Update on Countries Previously Represented in the First Volume (Australia, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom, plus China)
Sue Elliott, Eva Ärlemalm-Hagsér, Okjong Ji, Wei Wang, and Glynne Mackey
Chapter 6 ESD Coalition of Preschool and Municipality: A German Perspective on Early Childhood Education for Sustainability
Ute Stoltenberg and Barbara Benoist-Kosler
Chapter 7 Research in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability: Policies and Perspectives from India
Sylvia Christine Almeida and Yuki Ohara
Chapter 8 Early Childhood Environmental Education in the USA: Baby Steps Toward a Sustainable Worldview
Victoria Carr and Linda Plevyak
Cluster III Curriculum and Pedagogy
Chapter 9 Early Childhood Teacher Education and Education for Sustainability: A Review of the Literature and Mapping of Courses
Julie Margaret Davis and Juliet Elizabeth Davis
Chapter 10 Physical Education and Natural Sciences in Norwegian Early Childhood Teacher Education: Mutually Supporting EfS?
Barbara Maria Sageidet, Marianne Presthus Heggen, Ingunn Berrefjord Ugelstad, Kristin Grøsvik, and Synnøve Eikeland
Chapter 11 Pedagogies for ECEfS in Bush Kinder Contexts: A Comparative Report on Two Australian Studies
Leanne Grogan and Fran Hughes
Chapter 12 Unruly Voices: Growing Climate Action Pedagogies with Trees and Children
Narda Nelson and B. Denise Hodgins
Chapter 13 A Project Narrative about Digital Tools, Children’s Participation and Sustainability in a Swedish Preschool
Linda Andersson, Ulrika Johannesson, Eva Ärlemalm-Hagsér, and Sue Elliott
Chapter 14 Stories of Disruption: Perspectives on the Use of Images to Prompt Children’s Action Taking for Sustainability
Lyndal May O’Gorman
Chapter 15 The Place of ECEfS in the Turkish Teacher Education System
Şule Alici
Chapter 16 Children’s Voices about Fish and Tadpoles in an Australian Pond Ecosystem: It’s All About Balancing and Belonging
Sue Elliott and Rosanne Pugh
Index
Biography
Sue Elliott is Senior Lecturer and Course Co-ordinator in Early Childhood Education at the University of New England, Australia. She is an experienced practitioner, academic, author, and researcher in early childhood education with a focus on education for sustainability, outdoor playspaces, and forest preschools.
Eva Ärlemalm-Hagsér is Professor in early childhood teacher education at Mälardalen University, Sweden. Her research focus is on education for sustainability and children's participation and agency within policy and practices.
Julie Davis is Adjunct Professor in the School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. She is an active researcher in ECEfS through ongoing research projects, publications, and conference presentations both in Australia and internationally.
