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.

Cluster I Ethics and Values 1. Analysis of Historical and Contemporary Early Childhood Education Theories in the Anthropocene 2. From Autonomous Child to a Child Entangled within an Agentic World: Implications for Early Childhood Education for Sustainability 3. Unsettling Settlers’ Ideas of Land and Relearning Land with Indigenous Ways of Knowing in ECEfS 4. Alternative Worldviews on EDEfS: Reviewing and Re-examining Concepts around Human-nature Relationships, Images of Children, and Sustainability Cluster II Historical and Sociocultural Contexts 5. Synopsis: An Update on Countries Previously Represented in the First Volume (Australia, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom, plus China) 6. ESD Coalition of Preschool and Municipality: A German Perspective on Early Childhood Education for Sustainability 7. Research in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability: Policies and Perspectives from India 8. Early Childhood Environmental Education in the USA: Baby Steps Toward a Sustainable Worldview Cluster III Curriculum and Pedagogy 9. Early Childhood Teacher Education and Education for Sustainability: A Review of the Literature and Mapping of Courses 10. Physical Education and Natural Sciences in Norwegian Early Childhood Teacher Education: Mutually Supporting EfS? 11. Pedagogies for ECEfS in Bush Kinder Contexts: A Comparative Report on Two Australian Studies 12. Unruly Voices: Growing Climate Action Pedagogies with Trees and Children 13. A Project Narrative about Digital Tools, Children’s Participation and Sustainability in a Swedish Preschool 14. Stories of Disruption: Perspectives on the Use of Images to Prompt Children’s Action Taking for Sustainability 15. The Place of ECEfS in the Turkish Teacher Education System 16. Children’s Voices about Fish and Tadpoles in an Australian Pond Ecosystem: It’s All About Balancing and Belonging

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.