Early Childhood Education and Care for Sustainability

International Perspectives

Valerie Huggins, David Evans, Valerie Huggins, David Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138239432
• eBook ISBN: 9781315295831
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This innovative and timely book explores issues and concerns surrounding Education for Sustainable Development in early childhood, providing a range of perspectives on how we can live and promote more healthy, just and sustainable lives. It examines the professional responsibility of Early Years practitioners to embed sustainability into their everyday practice and to ensure that young children are acquiring the knowledge and skills they need to become effective agents of change, committed problem-solvers and system-thinkers.

Bringing together international examples of best practice, drawing on cutting-edge research, and providing an array of practical examples, chapters focus on issues such as:

• the historical context of Early Education for Sustainability
• complexities and challenges involved in implementing sustainable approaches
• encouraging children to contribute to an enabling society
• adopting environmentally sustainable approaches in Early Years settings
• the future of sustainability in Early Years education.

This book offers essential support to Early Years educators, practitioners and students who are key players in shaping the fundamental attitudes and beliefs of our planet's future citizens, enabling them to assume their responsibilities, now and in the future, in regard to environmental, social and economic sustainability.

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Introduction

Valerie Huggins, David Evans

Introduction

Within the now substantial literature on Education for Sustainability there is not a great deal that addresses direct approaches with the youngest children. In this book, we are looking to support the wide range of educators involved with young children in addressing some of the complex issues raised by Education for Sustainability (EfS). Such educators will naturally include parents and members of the community, but we are particularly addressing the wide range of Early Childhood Education and Care professionals in education, teacher education, health and social care. We need to stress from the outset that this volume is not a handbook, attempting to cover all aspects of ECECfS, theoretical and practical. Rather, we look to support new thinking about many key elements, based upon recent international research. This follows our belief and experience that ECECfS cannot be achieved by the delivery of a laid-down common curriculum, but must be very largely constructed by practitioners in response to local contexts and needs.

We are aiming to introduce and comment on some of the current debates about ECECfS, present some new research and provide ideas for practice, anticipating that this will help practitioners introduce and develop ECECfS in an informed and ethical way and to adopt sustainable practices. We present material with a strong international dimension in order to avoid parochialism and to widen awareness of the rapidly increasing body of ideas in this field. We also offer leads to some of the wider aspects of EfS, at present and in the future.

Education for Sustainability: A central concern for educators?

Education for Sustainability is featuring increasingly in educational debate. Globally, there is growing recognition that we all have to address a wide range of issues and problems, often interlinked, if we are to avoid destroying ourselves and to create instead a more equitable and sustainable environmental, economic and social world. Whenever we look at the news, there is an item on aspects of this task:

• Global warming has resulted in bleaching two thirds of the Great Barrier Reef

• The Indian government announcing that by 2030 every car sold will be electric

• Nuclear tests in North Korea

• 8 million tons of plastic dumped in the oceans every year

• Costa Rica mostly running on renewable energy

• Famine in East Africa and Yemen

• Refugee crisis in Syria

This sharply reminds us that countries have passed the point when such matters could be dismissed as not the concern of the ordinary person, much less as not the concern of educators.

We are also acutely conscious as grandparents that young people will all too soon find themselves engaging in decision-making about sustainability issues and encountering, possibly painfully, the consequences of earlier decisions. Even our youngest grandchildren, now in ECEC provision, will be first-time voters in the early 2030s and may well move on to be policy makers, leading experts in their disciplines, business leaders, politicians. What kind of world will they be aspiring to live in, socially, environmentally, economically, politically? And how will their education have prepared them for such a responsibility? How will we have supported and shaped, or denied and constrained, their aspirations? What future lives do we envisage for them? Will they be ‘good lives’? As Siraj-Blatchford and Huggins (2015) argue, we need to engage now in the debate about what a ‘good life’ is and how we are preparing children for it. And for us, this requires underpinning all our work with the concerns and the principles of Education for Sustainability (EfS).

Widening our perceptions and definitions of EfS

In order to do this effectively we will all need to widen our consideration of EfS. Understandably, much of the previous discussion of sustainability has centred upon environmental aspects, and so educational responses, in the UK for example, have often focused solely upon providing environmental activities, as is acknowledged by Joyce (2012). Projects emphasising recycling, encouraging wildlife, gardening, Forest School experience and similar initiatives are clearly of enormous importance and educational value. However, Hedefalk, Almqvist and Östman (2015), in their review of the literature, clarify that this green-focused, holistic approach is increasingly being replaced by one that adds three further interrelated dimensions—economic, social and political. This is accompanied by a radical shift in the educators’ purposes. As Hedefalk, Almqvist and Östman (2015) suggest,

During the period studied, the research has evolved from teaching children facts about the environment and sustainability issues to educating children to act for change. This new approach reveals a more competent child who can think for him- or herself and make well-considered decisions. The decisions are made by investigating and participating in critical discussions about alternative ways of acting for change.

(Extract from Abstract)

This challenges common assumptions that educators simply should give children experience of and knowledge about the environment, influencing their behaviour by acting as role models and by directing them to act in particular ways. Instead, it suggests that they should educate children to think critically, make value judgements about actions, engage in meaningful projects, participate in debates and look at perspectives. This approach emphasises children’s potential for decision-making and problem-solving and is linked to children’s rights and responsibilities. It requires a democratic approach and collaborative work rather than an emphasis upon individual learning and development. It sees children as competent, to be empowered to act as agents of change within society. It also asserts that even within the early years of life children have greater powers than have often been assumed, so that ECEC must look to increase their agency, both in educational settings and in the wider community. In order to achieve this and to support active transformation in thinking and action we need educators globally and locally to be well-informed about why EfS is vital, and confident in how to embed it in their practice, whether as parents, teacher educators, practitioners or policy makers.

For us, a central aspect of this is that the process is research-led and informed by debates at local, international and global level. We have therefore included examples from Australia and Sweden, leaders in this field, and have brought in new voices from Hungary, Portugal and Africa, as well as from the UK. But it is increasingly argued that EfS has powerful implications for action and change outside the narrowly educational focus of EY settings, and in our final chapter we address some of the tensions and issues inherent in promoting and implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Preparing educators for EfS

Despite the challenges to sustainability highlighted every day by the media, and despite the publicity around the introduction of the Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2015), many educators are not yet engaging in the debate or transforming their practices. In some countries, and indeed in some settings in many countries, concern for such matters is absent or at best seen as an optional additional aspect of the curriculum, to be addressed only after the perceived priorities of literacy and numeracy have been fully dealt with. For some educators the newer remit of EfS demands a difficult move from simply discussing recycling and giving children experience of natural environments (relatively uncontroversial areas) into the analysis of social issues in a critical way and the discussion of the connections between environment and society. Practitioners may be aware of the need to do this, but feel lost or uncertain when faced with the major issues involved. It is therefore easy for them to see EfS within a setting as needing to be the individual pursuit of an expert, a ‘champion’, an eco-warrior or human rights activist, rather than part of everyone’s basic educational responsibilities.

Another area of uncertainty can be the belief that a wider definition of EfS will take them into areas which are ‘political’ and so not expected to be part of their remit as an Early Years (EY) educator. Thus they may use their genuine and powerful commitment to the narrowly environmental dimension of sustainability as a way of avoiding the complexity and potential controversy of the economic and socio-political dimensions. By contrast, we would argue that if as ECE practitioners we are to make EfS an essential part of mainstream thinking and practice we will have to be ‘political’, in terms of agreeing, asserting and advocating particular beliefs and values. If, as trainers and educators of EY teachers and practitioners we are preparing our students to be critically reflective in their practice, we have to be willing to challenge prevailing taken-for-granted views that may be limiting children’s learning opportunities. At the same time we must acknowledge that in the international context there will be countries where such ‘political’ activity will place teachers at risk.

A further set of factors may affect those who work with very young children. It is not uncommon to find the argument made that issues of sustainability are irrelevant to such work because young children are cognitively and affectively unable to appreciate them and because they are not yet capable of taking action to make a difference in their world. Importantly, in this book we challenge such a blanket dismissal. In the first place our contributors give a number of examples from practice which refute such arguments. In the second place we have encountered situations where practitioners have not explicitly linked to a sustainability agenda aspects of their existing practice which are already successful with this age group. A close colleague of ours, who is a contributor to this book and who has researched in the field of outdoor learning for many years, only recently realised during a staff workshop on Sustainability in Higher Education (HE) that her work was closely related to EfS. We are all in danger of crouching in our silos of research and practice and not looking up or making such new connections unless we are willing to engage in dialogic spaces, as she clearly was. In the third place, we argue that as in many others areas of the ECEC curriculum the role of the practitioner is as much that of fostering underpinning dispositions, understandings and skills as that of engaging in full-scale activities characteristic of the curriculum area. For instance, fostering young children’s love of books and stories is as important a literacy activity as the later decoding of print.

Duhn (2012) identifies yet another belief that can marginalise or prevent consideration of the issues of sustainability with young children. This belief is often triggered by the depictions of famine, environmental damage caused by climate change or the noxious rubbish dumps caused by our throw-away society. There is a strong tendency for adults to see young children as innocent, vulnerable and in need of protection from unpleasant experiences and harsh realities. Parents and ECEC practitioners often define themselves as largely being in a protective, caring role, sheltering children for as long as possible. We suggest that in doing so they fail to recognise the robustness of young children, who are from the beginning producers of complex meaning from their experiences (Christensen, 2004) and that concerned adults may not sufficiently acknowledge that, as Siraj-Blatchford and Huggins (2015, p. 3) note, ‘[I]t is in the early years that fundamental attitudes towards the environment, towards consumption and waste and towards fairness are formed.’

In this book we argue that educators have the responsibility to make ECEC a significant contributor to EfS, and we reason that young children are well able to engage in appropriately chosen areas of this field and to take action to make a difference in their world. It is important of course not to overload them or to make inappropriate demands, and this means we have a delicate professional responsibility. As Davis and Elliott (2014) warn, we have to avoid burdening young children with a role of saviours for sustainability, charged with repairing the damage done to the world by their predecessors. We have to avoid pressuring them into becoming ‘worriers’ or ‘warriors’ (Davis & Elliott, 2014), instead supporting them in developing the ability to make considered and informed responses to the challenges that we know they will face but that we cannot define with any precision.

This requires practitioners who are knowledgeable and passionate about EfS and who wish to promote it in their work with children and families, but who are also sensitive to the complexities of work with young children. In order to underpin ECEC with sustainability, there need to be significant shifts in many practitioners’ mind-sets, involving them in critical reflection upon existing values and beliefs, in an opening up to the ideas of ECECfS, in giving them opportunities for safe dialogical spaces and in developing a new understanding of how ECECfS can enhance their practice and benefit children’s lives. It is also important for educators to be exposed to the work of colleagues working in this field in Africa, Australia and Europe. Such an international dimension is powerful because the disequilibrium caused by learning about approaches in a different country can force us to evaluate our taken-for-granted ways of working (Huggins, 2013) and so provoke the shifts in thinking needed for transformative learning (Mezirow, 1990) and for the generation of new ways of taking action. In a global context of accelerating change educators cannot afford to be rooted in the past, or bounded by taken-for-granted practices derived almost entirely from their own local experiences and traditions. This process of reorientation takes time; hopefully, this book will provide a catalyst towards new ways of conceptualising ECECfS and so support changes in practice. Dyment et al. (2014), in their research on the professional development of teachers, argue that to change teachers’ thinking and pedagogies and to ensure that ECECfS is valued, understood and implemented, we need strong communities of practice, partnerships between environmentalists and ECEC settings, new resources and system-wide pre-service and in-service teacher education. This text is one such resource as we build such active communities of practice in ECECfS.

Embedding EfS in ECEC

But even if we accept the central importance of EfS with young children there still needs to be a reorientation in ECEC content and pedagogy in order to embed sustainability in ECEC curricula and practices. Such orientation remains very patchy. Aspects of a sustainability approach are included in some ECEC curricula and practice—for example, in Australia (ACARA, 2010; DEEWR, 2009), in Sweden (Ärlemalm-Hagsér, 2014) and South Korea (Yoo et al., 2013)—but in many countries this approach is only just emerging. For instance, Duhn (2012) notes that in New Zealand ECEC is virtually untouched by EfS, and in the Majority World there is at present little direct involvement, perhaps because very many governments do not yet offer pre-primary provision (for children aged 4–6), and in those that do there is still a major emphasis upon the teaching and resourcing of basic literacy and numeracy. Again, where EfS does figure in EY settings it is often restricted to the environmental dimensions, excluding the wider economic and socio-political aspects. As previously noted, this is a common pattern in the UK.

A top-down, determinist schooling system, such as that currently operating in the UK, would probably see this as requiring the imposition upon settings of a Sustainability Curriculum, with the associated activities, assessments and standards. We would argue that whilst this might be partially effective with older children, its impact upon ECEC would be limited and potentially negative. This is because a prescriptive curriculum is likely to divert educators’ focus towards the sustainability content—the environmental, economic and socio-political ideas and knowledge—which are inevitably complex and therefore difficult for young children to appreciate and so difficult for EY practitioners to incorporate in educational activities. Implementing such a curriculum would deflect us from a key aspect. ECECfS is a socially transformative approach (Davis, 2015) and requires a curriculum and pedagogy that is holistic, encourages critical thinking and creative responses to solutions, and promotes collaborative engagement. Thus, whilst constantly keeping in mind the vital issues and knowledge central to the Sustainability agenda, the key question is how what we do prepares children to live and work within a sustainability context. We would argue that effective early years pedagogy already does a good deal of this, in contrast to later schooling which can be too focused on subject-based knowledge and the pursuit of individual academic achievements. But there does need to be a reorientation in ECEC content and pedagogy so that it is consciously underpinned by EfS, and it is vital that this reorientation is research-led and informed by debates at both global and local level. It will require practitioners who are 1) passionate about EfS and their role in promoting such work with children and families; 2) knowledgeable about the issues; and 3) skilled in providing project-based activities that engage children in collaborative and/or independent inquiry and problem-solving.

This does not demand any one particular pedagogical approach. Educational approaches depend upon the values and ideologies that underpin them, so those of us who value play will provide more play-based opportunities (Moyles, 2010), and those who believe in the benefits to be gained from learning outside the classroom will privilege outdoor environments (Waite et al., 2014). Education systems, such as some in the Majority World, where both tradition and limited resources impose constraints upon classroom practice, may adopt a more adult-centred, didactic approach. Rather, it requires that educators think consistently about how their chosen approaches are currently fostering the qualities and understandings necessary if children are to act for sustainability, both now and as they take more mature responsibilities, and so look to expand their provision in ways that strengthen such development.

Existing research into pedagogical approaches to EfS (e.g. Summers & Cuttin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Early childhood education and care for sustainability: Historical context and current challenges
• 3. Towards a pedagogy of hope: Sustainability education in the early years
• 4. The place of expressive arts in early childhood education and care for sustainability
• 5. Nestling into the world: The importance of place and mutuality in the early years
• 6. Yes we can!: Young children learning to contribute to an enabling society
• 7. Education for sustainability in Hungarian kindergartens
• 8. Complexities in implementing early childhood education for sustainability in a Majority World context
• 9. The contribution of Forest School to Early Childhood Education for Sustainability
• 10. Sustainable leadership in the early years
• 11. Designing environmentally sustainable multimodal provocations for early years learning environments
• 12. Looking forward: The future development of ECECfS in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals
• Afterword
• Index