Learning for Sustainability: Transformative Early Childhood Education for the Global Good

"Transforming Learning Environments in Early Childhood Contexts Through the Arts: Responding to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals" by Susan Narelle Chapman & Lyndal O’Gorman is available open access here.

This piece shares an overview of research on the importance of art in education before exploring how early childhood educators can rise to the many challenges faced in the field when teaching through arts for sustainability. "These challenges include: the ways in which adults think about children; how they consider children’s capabilities for addressing the complex issues facing the planet; and how children’s resilience and imagining might be supported and developed. These challenges also have implications for ECE; how to provide opportunities for children to have a say about what is happening in the world so that they can enact their global citizenship, and how to resist conservative, narrow views of children’s learning," (Chapman & O'Gorman, 2022). The authors argue that the arts provide an avenue for early childhood educators to address these challenges

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The authors go on to provide evidence that the arts are vital to providing the high-quality early childhood education set out in Sustainable Development Goal 4. "The heroic and imaginative efforts required to meet the SDGs will need a new kind of education that is visionary and transformative. A key part of this transformation will be addressing the challenges we have outlined here. The arts have a role to play in these efforts as high-quality arts programs can engage young children in opportunities for critical thinking, problem-solving and openness to change (Dinham, 2020; Gibson & Ewing, 2020). Arts focus can help children to use these foundational skills to actively imagine and create their futures (Wright, 2012)," (Chapman & O'Gorman, 2022).

I found this piece particularly powerful and I feel it speaks to the needs of the wider profession as well as to the need for art as a language versus art as a project. Transformation is what the profession needs and this piece is definitely an empowering read- you can find the full text here. After you've read, head on over to our community on Instagram and share your thoughts with us @earlyedem.

References:

Chapman, S.N., O’Gorman, L. Transforming Learning Environments in Early Childhood Contexts Through the Arts: Responding to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. IJEC 54, 33–50 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13158-022-00320-3