Sherridan Emery

The impact of professional development on early childhood educators’ confidence, understanding and knowledge of education for sustainability

In recent times, Australia has recognised and enacted a range of initiatives at service, system and community levels that seek to embed sustainability into the early childhood sector. This paper explores the impact of a professional development (PD) session that provided opportunities for early childhood educators to learn and share ideas about the theory and practice of sustainability generally and early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS) specifically. The PD was entitled ‘Living and Learning about Sustainability in the Early Years’ and was offered on three occasions across Tasmania. A total of 99 participants attended the three PD sessions (one 5 hour; two 2 hour). The participants had varying levels of experience and included early childhood teachers, centre based educators and preservice teachers. At the start and end of the PD, participants were invited to complete a questionnaire that contained a series of likert scale questions that explored their content knowledge, level of understanding and confidence in regards to ECEfS. Participants were also asked at the start and end of the PD to ‘list five words you think of when you consider the word sustainability.’ A model of teacher professional growth was used to conceptualise the results related to the changes in knowledge, understanding and confidence (personal domain) as a result of the PD related to ECEfS (external domain). The likert-scale questions on the questionnaire revealed significant positive changes in levels of knowledge, understanding and confidence from the start to the end of the PD. Differences as a function of length of PD, level of experience and role are presented and discussed. The ‘5 words’ question showed that participants widened their understandings of ECEfS from a narrow environmental focus to a broader understanding of the social, political and economic dimensions. The early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector has been characterised as having a pedagogical advantage for EfS suggesting that early childhood educators are well placed to engage with EfS more readily than might educators in other education sectors. This article argues that PD is necessary to develop capability in educators in order to meet the imperatives around sustainability outlined in educational policy and curriculum documents in ECEC.

Sustainability as a Cross-Curricular Priority in the Australian Curriculum: A Tasmanian Investigation.

In this paper, we report on an investigation into sustainability education in schools in the Australian state of Tasmania following the implementation of the Australian Curriculum. Sustainability is one of three cross-curriculum priorities in the new national curriculum and is the focus of this research (sustainability cross-curriculum priority (CCP)). Principals and Curriculum Leaders (PCLs) from all schools in Tasmania were invited to complete a survey that asked them about their understanding of various aspects of sustainability and how the sustainability CCP was integrated across learning areas. Sixty-eight PCLs (24%) responded to the survey. They reported generally good understandings of sustainability and education for sustainability, but lesser understandings of the sustainability CCP and the nine organising ideas. Respondents’ understandings of sustainability were dominated by an environmental focus. The PCLs’ responses in relation to sustainability implementation across learning areas gave insights into ways that the sustainability CCP can serve as a pivot for cross-curricular teaching and learning, which is strongly advocated for achieving transformative sustainability education. We conclude this paper with a discussion of how the sustainability CCP is an important asset in the necessary reorientation of the Australian formal education system for a more sustainable future. We note the importance of professional support so that educators may better understand sustainability and its complexity as a cross-curricular priority and envision ways in which the sustainability CCP can be realised within education.

Transnational Dialogues for Sustainability Research in Early Childhood Education: A Model for Building Capacity for ESD in Universities?

Early childhood education (ECE) within tertiary education has proactively responded to calls to realign preservice teacher education towards more sustainable futures, with Early Childhood Education for Sustainability (ECEfS) developing rapidly as a field of research and practice. An international multi-university initiative that has been a key impetus for ECEfS since 2010 is the Transnational Dialogues in Research in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability (TND). The TND is an international group of experienced and early career researchers that fosters collaborations between individuals and groups of researchers, universities and ECE practitioners. In particular, the group aims to build researcher capacity for instigating projects that activate sustainability learning in ECE. This paper reports on three research projects emerging from the third TND and articulates strategies and processes for sustaining ongoing research dialogues in order to promulgate new fields of sustainability research through its collaborations. The authors believe that this kind of dialogic process offers other universities and disciplines a model for embedding sustainability into their processes and structures.

Fluid Methods to Make Sense of an Unknown: An Emergent Grounded Theory Study of Cultural Wellbeing

What is an appropriate structure for reporting a study of educators’ perceptions of cultural wellbeing, following an interpretive paradigm, and a grounded theory methodology?

(What’s at) The Heart of the Matter? Sustainability, Arts, and the Case for Change

We need only experience a 24-hour news cycle for evidence of the unsustainable state of life on this planet. Environmental disasters, civil unrest, economic doubt and reports of violence within and among nation states and faith communities dominate in sensationalised news bites created for our limited attention spans. What troubles a critical viewer is that complex issues of social and environmental unrest are often reduced to disaster snapshots, while graphs of upward trending company profits and consumer indexes get celebrated in featured finance news. The relationship between these graphs and the rise of poverty, inequality, violence, and environmental degradation simply do not feature in the sensationalising news stories that are sold.

Towards a Radical Compliance

Throughout this book we have called for an integration of arts and sustainability education and documented a number of case examples. We have highlighted the values underpinning the partnerships of teachers, students, artists, and others at each site, and we have discussed the concepts of change as they relate to arts and sustainability principles and practices. We have been curious about these examples as everyday innovations, not as major interventions or grandly funded projects. But when we speak of the future and “innovation”, we wish to distinguish our meaning from the widespread co-option of the term as part of the metrics of a neoliberal education agenda. In this final chapter, we explore the ways in which innovation might be reclaimed from such an agenda and instead operate in a politicised everyday way to bring creativity and teacher agency to the fore. This is an approach of radical compliance that can enable and sustain arts–sustainability pedagogies, and is evident in the case studies in this book.

Reorienting Teacher Professional Learning (Partnerships for Change)

This final case study is an exploration of the sustainability education principle of partnerships for change. It focuses on our (the authors’) experience planning and hosting a teacher professional learning event on the integration of arts and sustainability education. With our discussion of this event, we hope to illustrate how committing to these ARIES sustainability principles means enacting them in one’s own daily spheres of activity and influence; and, for us, this is in working with teachers, artists, and researchers. Here, we describe our process of planning for the event to illustrate our own partnership for change. We then address this principle in greater detail through examples from the day’s events (Fig. 7.1).

Education, Arts and Sustainability

This book addresses this challenge by proposing an integration of sustainability and arts education in both principle and practice. In a global context of intensifying social, economic and environmental crises, education is key to raising awareness and motivating individuals and communities to act in sustaining life in our more-than-human world. But how is this done when the complexity and need for change becomes overwhelming, and schooling systems become complicit in supporting the status quo? Drawing on critical education theory and precepts of creativity, curiosity and change, it documents a series of case examples that demonstrate how five principles of Education for Sustainability - critical thinking, systems thinking, community partnership, participation, and envisioning better futures - are found at the heart of much arts practice in schools. Featuring the creative work and voices of teachers working in arts-based enquiry and diverse community-engaged contexts, the book investigates how sustainability principles are embedded in contemporary arts education thinking and pedagogy. The authors are unapologetically optimistic in forming an alliance of arts and sustainability education as a creative response to the challenge of our times, arguing that while they may have operated on the margins of conventional pedagogy and curriculum, they have more than marginal impact.

The Festival of Wood (Envisioning Better Futures)

Lilydale is a rural community in northern Tasmania that is experiencing a significant shift in its economy. The timber industry was one of the major employers in the region, but the community is transitioning out of a reliance on old growth logging. The Festival of Wood celebrates the region’s connections to the forests that have been central to Lilydale’s history. For the Lilydale District School, an invitation to participate in the festival became the focus for an inquiry about envisioning better futures. Led by the school’s visual arts teacher, Kim Schneiders, the students partnered with artists and local community members to visually map their community, create public art on the town’s lampposts, and collaborate on an installation that repurposed old books and paper as a gesture to their community’s changing resource base. In this chapter, we first consider the visionary capacities of arts–sustainability pedagogy in addressing the principle of envisioning better futures before discussing the Festival of Wood in greater detail (Fig. 6.1).

A Conversation on the Possibilities for Arts and Sustainability Education

How to open a book? We have spent much time thinking and rethinking about how we might begin a book that blends the ideas, passions, critiques, and voices of four authors from diverse backgrounds and scholarly traditions, as well as those of the many more educators and young people who have engaged in the creative projects we document here. It has been a daunting, enjoyable, and at times confronting process to stay open to wild thinking and sometimes uncomfortable critique. Central to our collective effort was a commitment to a spirit of inquiry and dialogue—a spirit made all the more necessary when, in the closing stages of the manuscript’s preparation, there was an arresting change in the dynamic of the world’s political leadership; a change with as yet unknown impacts that reach to the very heart of this text.