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Submission for the AJEE Special Issue for the 18th Biennial AAEE Conference -- Sustainability: Smart Strategies for the 21st Century.
Questions and Historical Antecedents
We question: 'Are evocative images of children playing in nature and the dominance of nature experiences in early childhood curriculum enough to promote a sustainable future?' These critical reflections are drawn from our combined research and field experiences in early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS) over more than 30 years, where we have become challenged by this default mode of 'doing sustainability' (Young & Elliott, 2014). We suggest that early childhood educators often perceive experiences both in and about nature as sufficient to address the pressing challenges of sustainability (Elliott, 2012; Elliott & Davis, 2009). The potential benefits of children's play experiences in nature are strongly advocated (Chawla & Derr, 2012; Kellert, 2012; Munoz, 2009; Planet Ark, 2011; Townsend & Weerasuriya, 2010) and we do not refute these; however, we see benefits in revealing the deeper motivations for the prevalence of the 'nature aesthetic' as we grapple with the complexities of human-nature relationships in the 21st century. We also question whether engagement with nature is a tangible and easily accessible approach in early childhood education (ECE), promoting a 'nature by default paradigm' and potentially thwarting a fuller transformative engagement with sustainability. Default values and mechanisms can be articulated through the well-known practices employed in computer programming to make a device user friendly, whereby a common setting is typically assigned. Default thinking is automatic and simplified, and when faced with new problems, ideas or challenges, there is tendency to leverage solutions from the past. Are we simply drawing on past antecedents to rationalise play in nature without the necessary deeper diagnosis and critical reflection that is required to both envision and enact sustainable futures?
Taylor (2013) provokes insights and understandings of human-nature relationships and the 'nature by default paradigm' in ECE. She purports that the historical antecedents about play in and with nature, drawn from theorists including Froebel and Rousseau, have created pervasive romanticised images of children and nature as integral to ECE. These antecedents, along with positivist nature study stances, perpetuate nature-human dualisms such as culture/nature, male/female and human/animal, and are entwined with enlightenment ideals from the past that support early...