The Blue Car in the Forest: Exploring Children’s Experiences of Sustainability in a Canadian Forest

Abstract

An abandoned blue car from 1958 is a central figure of the qualitative exploration of sustainability pedagogies within a Canadian nature school. The mystery of the car and its entanglement within a densely-forested area where the preschool children play and learn is provocative. As part of a larger ethnographic case study of the nature school, eight young children (3-5-year-olds) and their two nature teachers’ critical engagement with the car is examined over the course of a year. The research approach for the data collection and analysis included photos, videos, participant-observations, educator journals, and children’s oral and written expressions of their ideas related to the project and sustainability. This small scale study offers a glimpse into the possibilities that emerge when we include children’s thinking, decisions, and actions within the more-than-human world to foster sustainability.

Early Childhood Educators' Professional Learning for Sustainability Through Action Research in Australian Immersive Nature Play Programmes

“…The complexities of the Earth we inhabit invite engagement with new pedagogies to challenge current humanist discourses of the default stewardship of nature. Harwood (2019) framed emphasis on relationality and entanglements between the human and the more-than-human world to challenge the centrism of humans within ECEfS. As such, posthumanist thinking has been recommended as an alternative view of human-nature relationships and as critical to Earth's survival (Wilson, 2019).…”