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, AErlemalm-Hagser, 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.