Early Childhood Environmental Education Programs

Urban Environmental Education Review explores how environmental education can contribute to urban sustainability. Urban environmental education includes any practices that create learning opportunities to foster individual and community well-being and environmental quality in cities. It fosters novel educational approaches and helps debunk common assumptions that cities are ecologically barren and that city people don't care for, or need, urban nature or a healthy environment. Topics in Urban Environmental Education Review range from the urban context to theoretical underpinnings, educational settings, participants, and educational approaches in urban environmental education. Chapters integrate research and practice to help aspiring and practicing environmental educators, urban planners, and other environmental leaders achieve their goals in terms of education, youth and community development, and environmental quality in cities. The ten-essay series Urban EE Essays, excerpted from Urban Environmental Education Review, may be found here: naaee.org/eepro/resources/urban-ee-essays. These essays explore various perspectives on urban environmental education and may be reprinted/reproduced only with permission from Cornell University Press.

In an era in which environmental education has been described as one of the most pressing educational concerns of our time, further insights are needed to understand how best to approach the learning and teaching of environmental education in early childhood education. In this book we address this concern by identifying two principles for using play-based learning early childhood environmental education. The principles we identify are the result of research conducted with teachers and children using different types of play-based learning whilst engaged in environmental education. Such play-types connect with the historical use of play-based learning in early childhood education as a basis for pedagogy. In the book ‘Beyond Quality in ECE and Care’ authors Dahlberg, Moss and Pence implore readers to ask critical questions about commonly held images of how young children come to construct themselves within social institutions. In similar fashion, this little book problematizes the taken-for-grantedness of the childhood development project in service to the certain cultural narratives. Cutter-Mackenzie, Edwards, Moore and Boyd challenge traditional conceptions of play-based learning through the medium of environmental education. This book signals a turning point in social thought grounded in a relational view of (environmental) education as experiential, intergenerational, interspecies, embodied learning in the third space. As Barad says, such work is based in inter-actions that can account for the tangled spaces of agencies. Through the deceptive simplicity of children’s play, the book stimulates deliberation of the real purposes of pedagogy and of schooling. Paul Hart, University of Regina, Canada

Offer stories of ... emerging grassroots environmental stewardship, along with an interdisciplinary framework for understanding and studying it as a growing international phenomenon.--Back cover.

Environmental Education

The purpose of this publication is to establish a rationale for early childhood environmental education and to offer some guidelines and suggestions for planning and implementing developmentally appropriate environmental education programs for preschool children. This monograph is divided into four major sections. Part 1 outlines the rationale for early childhood environmental education and includes contributions from researchers both in the United States and the United Kingdom. Part 2 presents philosophical and research perspectives relating to environmental education for preschool children. It also outlines some of the major developmental characteristics of children during the early childhood years, especially in relation to cognitive and moral development. Part 3 provides specific guidelines and suggestions for developing and implementing environmental education programs at the early childhood level, thus establishing a framework for quality in such programs. Highlighted in Part 4 are existing programs offering environmental education for pre-school children. These programs include early childhood centers offering a nature-based curriculum and environmental education centers offering preschool programs. The final sections of this monograph offer information on efforts to establish international networking, an annotated list of selected resources, and biographical information on the contributors to the monograph. (JRH)