Examining the Rhetoric: A Comparison of How Sustainability and Young Children's Participation and Agency are Framed in Australian and Swedish Early Childhood Education Curricula

Abstract

This

‘Nothing Goes to Waste’: A professional learning programme for early childhood centres

“…The Nothing Goes to Waste programme required all stakeholders, both within and external to the EC centres, to understand the need for responsible waste management. The programme was effective as all centres made significant changes to waste management practices, which contradicts past studies that have reported that staff are challenged by sustainable practices (Ärlemalm-Hagser & Davis, 2014; Bautista et al, 2018; Duhn, 2012; Pilling, 2017). The challenges that centres were confronted by were usually outside the centre’s power to change.…”

“…Studies have shown that EC educators need to learn more about sustainable practices. For example, a comparative study between Australian and Swedish EC centres identified that staff’s conceptual understandings of sustainability are vague and ambiguous (Ärlemalm-Hagser & Davis, 2014). Similarly, Duhn’s (2012) New Zealand study identified that educators had a lack of understanding regarding recycling; and an Australian study found that staff were confused about ‘recycling’ and ‘reusing’ and did not use different bins effectively for recycling (Pilling, 2017).…”

What about the Migrant Children? The State-Of-The-Art in Research Claiming Social Sustainability

“…Another important finding worth noting is that the issue of children's agency was recurring in many of the articles, and children as agents for change and the need to listen to children's voices was described both in relation to environmental aspects as well as social aspects of sustainability [47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58].…”

“…The social dimension of Education for Sustainability was, to some extent, present in the vast majority of the articles, very often described within the explanation of the three interdependent dimensions of sustainability and conceptualized or emphasized in various ways. Recurring topics related to the understandings of the social dimension in the articles were democracy and democratic values, children's rights, citizenship, children as active citizens, and as participating agents of change [49,50,[52][53][54]61,62,66,70,71].…”

Global Citizen Preparation: Enhancing Early Childhood Education through Indonesian Local Wisdom

“…Based on The World Economic Forum data from the Global Competitiveness Report, 2011 to 2012, Indonesia is ranked 46th in terms of its education quality [1]. The fact indicates that Indonesia has a lack of good human resources, which causes a lack of optimized education, especially in early education as the fundamental element needed [2].On the other hand, the dynamics of globalization in the era of the ever-accelerating fourth industrial revolution make it a necessity for all people around the world to respond to its development with their capacities and characters [3][4][5]. Accordingly, the quality of education affects the preparedness of global citizens and the development of education related to moral & character, cosmopolitan transformation, liberal learning, and metacognitive capacities [4] Indonesia is expected to have a modality to increase economic growth as it has such benefits of a demographic dividend, which means that there will be a large number of productive-aged citizens [6].…”