Doing, knowing, caring and feeling: exploring relations between nature-oriented teaching and preschool children's learning

Children's explorations of the concept of spinning in preschool: Science learning in mediated activity

“…Examples include adding more material for play with artifacts, or arranging activities that might enable children to experience the concept in new ways, as when children's fascination with spinning themselves is remodeled to a pedagogical activity in LA3. These observations follow well with the analysis of Klaar & Öhman (2014) where preschool children explore concepts with their actions and how teachers' promotion of actions can enable further learning opportunities. This is also somewhat valid in Larsson's (2013) results.…”

“…Such other means of explorative activities have been studied by Klaar & Öhman (2014) who point to the centrality of actions and bodily movement when children engage in nature, and how teacher actions may promote children's possibilities to further engagement in nature-oriented preschool activities. They highlight the interactions between individual and environment, in both teacher-planned and spontaneous activities, and how teacher instruction and confirmation of children's movement can guide learning in outdoor activities, sometimes blurring the distinction between education and care.…”

Early childhood education for sustainability: origins and inspirations in the work of John Dewey

“…They use a Deweyan transactional approach to explore the interplay between the learner, teacher and environment and the content and qualities of the learning. Their close analysis of a toddlers coordinating physical actions in natural surroundings on icy and clay slopes (Klaar and Öhman, 2012); and of interactions in everyday activities (drinking juice during a trip to the forest, planting strawberry plants in the garden, handling a stone, and tackling a slide in the playground (Klaar and Öhman, 2014) reveal the multi-faceted guidance strategies used by the teacher to support learning in nature. Mackey (2011) also observed interactions, with slightly older children, at a kindergarten with an environmental programme and noted the children's capacity to gain knowledge, to make decisions and to act in relation to environmental and social issues.…”

Opportunities for Education for Sustainability through multidimensional preschool science

“…We noted that the teachers intertwined science learning with fantasy, play, embodiment, empathy, aesthetic modes of expression, storytelling and systematic inquiry . This plurality and complexity, which is characteristic for preschool teaching, is captured by the term 'multidimensional teaching', where the teaching of science content is intertwined with multiple dimensions of children's lives, such as, emotions, play, and physical experiences (Klaar & Öhman, 2014;. Foreseeing that multidimensional science teaching can make way for the competencies advocated in contemporary EfS research and policy, we will, in this article, revisit our data with the aim to explore how science education may contribute to Education for Sustainability in preschool.…”