Transforming Learning Environments in Early Childhood Contexts Through the Arts: Responding to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

AbstractUNESCO’s Education for Sustainable Development Roadmap highlights the need to transform learning environments by integrating the 17 Sustainable Development Goals from United Nations Agenda 2030. This presents challenges for early childhood education in establishing a trajectory to transform the way young children see the world and themselves. These challenges include: reviewing adults’ views of children’s capabilities, developing strategies to support children’s resilience and ensuring that children have their say, and pushing back against narrow views of children’s learning. ECE supporting sustainability, global citizenship, human rights, and peace (see goals 4.2 and 4.7) can be underpinned by arts experiences that allow young children to engage with others’ lived experiences. This paper supports the notion that the arts can play a crucial role in supporting transformative education and addressing the challenges facing ECE for sustainability. Through an Arts Immersion approach to learning and teaching, the arts can be accessed as unique languages for inclusive learning and communicating. In support of this broader pedagogy, understandings of literacy and numeracy, physical development, social-emotional development, and learning that are presented in the SDGs 4.2 and 4.7 are critiqued. In considering challenges for ECE for sustainability and the role that the arts can play in transforming ECE, this paper argues that the languages of the arts can enable young children to understand issues relating to sustainability, to express this understanding more vividly, and to build their agency as global citizens in a more sustainable, just, and peaceful world.