A Critical Analysis of Concepts Associated with Sustainability in Early Childhood Curriculum Frameworks Across Five National Contexts

The purpose of this study is to examine whether and how ideas of sustainability occur in five current early childhood curricula. This is done by comparing national curricula from Australia, England, Norway, Sweden and the US.

Overall, the document analysis shows that ideas about sustainability are more
implicitly present than explicitly described in most of the curricula studied, and that all five curricula are based on a child-centred, socio-cultural approach using social constructivist and Piagetian development theories.

The authors find that the Norwegian curriculum is one of the only curricula to explicitly refer to sustainability, as it describes that the kindergarten has an important task to promote values, attitudes and practices for more sustainable societies, and that the kindergarten should contribute to giving children an understanding that their actions today have consequences in the future. Even though the Swedish curriculum does not explicitly highlight sustainability, the authors find that the two Scandinavian curricula both have clear features of a strong nature-oriented outdoor education tradition and an ecological approach. According to the authors, both the Norwegian and the Swedish curricula acknowledge the importance of outdoor learning environments by having mandatory requirements that children should connect to their natural environment and that they should contribute to a sustainable future. Regarding views of the child, Sweden's curriculum comes closest to positioning children as world citizens who are encouraged to become active change agents. The analysis also shows that even though both Scandinavian curricula mention human-environment interconnections, they seem to fall short of recognising the reciprocity of the relationship. The authors conclude that the curricula should generally portray children more as "political agents" who can change the world by participating as active citizens.

The study is a comparative document study, and the data material consists of five national curricula, including the Norwegian National Curriculum for Kindergartens (2017) and the Swedish National Curriculum for the Preschool (Lpfö 1998, 2016). The individual authors each reviewed one of the five national curricula for passages with either explicit or implicit reference to sustainability, and then compared how the different countries conceptualised sustainability. The analysis has a post-humanism frame of understanding combined with a critical inquiry method. The analysis was based on four identified themes: (1) Presence of sustainability, (2) View of the child, (3) Human-environment relationships, and (4) Philosophical and theoretical underpinnings.

Weldemariam, K., Boyd, D., Hirst, N., Sageidet, B. M., Browder, J. K., Grogan, L., & Hughes, F. (2017). A Critical Analysis of Concepts Associated with Sustainability in Early Childhood Curriculum Frameworks Across Five National Contexts. International Journal of Early Childhood, 49(3), 333–351.