On one level, this chapter invites readers on an engaging cultural and geographic journey across the Americas, but more deeply it challenges our ways of facilitating early childhood teacher education for sustainability. There is no one right way to motivate teachers – both pre-service and in-service – to take on the challenges of sustainability; however, this chapter offers a range of possibilities. Harwood examines a Canadian pre-service ECEfS course of study with Indigenous and colonial perspectives interwoven; Carr focuses on the in-service experiences of educators participating in a centre transformation towards ECEfS at Arlitt Child Development Center; while Bascopé documents an in-service exploration of the role of Indigenous Chilean culture in ECEfS with teachers. Diversity and richness characterise this chapter.

In this chapter, the authors reiterate matters they consider essential for the future development of ECEfS. There are three key essentials proposed in this final chapter – communities of practice; teacher education; and curriculum policy review – to further progress and deepen systems thinking across the early childhood education field for sustainable futures.

In this chapter, these four co-authors emphasise the importance of sustainability for the future of people and planet, given that the case for all human and non-human inhabitants has never been clearer. Through an account of Mia’s doctoral study, they challenge readers to provide young children with meaningful opportunities to participate in conversations about the Earth’s future. More importantly, they argue for children’s concerns to be heard and their ideas acted upon. To this end, the chapter offers research-based strategies for early years educators, especially in the first years of schooling, given that the research was conducted with children aged from 6 to 8 years. They developed the 4C Pedagogical Framework for transformational early childhood education for sustainability as a valuable tool for this purpose.

This chapter expands reader horizons across four diverse Asian cultures – India, Japan, China and Singapore – and challenges predominant Western perspectives about sustainability. The concept of ‘glocal’ resonates in these Asian countries as a way to respond to both local and global environmental needs. These cultural contexts and the required border-crossings significantly enrich and deepen understandings for all about what it means to live sustainability.

In this chapter, the authors focus on connections between human health, environmental quality, climate change and sustainability. Taking planetary health and sustainable development perspectives, the authors track the rapidly changing ecology of childhood in the twenty-first century. They consider opportunities for early childhood educators to integrate health and environmental learning through positive educational responses that engage children in actions for change. The authors note that ‘whole-school approaches’ best support education for sustainability, health and fairness, as well as promoting healthy cognitive, physical and emotional development. They welcome stronger partnerships between health professionals and early childhood educators to create ‘green and healthy’ learning environments. In essence, the authors reiterate that living sustainably is not only good for the planet, but also vital for the health and wellbeing of children, families and communities.

In this chapter, the authors focus on working collaboratively with the wider community to engage in ECEfS values. They do this through discussing a story from the field from Korea, where children actively engaged in a project to protect local wildlife, and a collaboration in Australia between an early childhood university academic with an interest in participatory and arts-based approaches that support listening to children, and an environmental educator with the local council. Each project demonstrates the value of shared goals, openness and trust between partners. The Australian project was based at the Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve, a public environmental visitor centre situated in a popular rainforest reserve on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, and comprised partnerships between environmental education centre staff and volunteers, student teachers, early childhood practitioners and children aged from 3 to 10 years. The ripple effects of these projects led to powerful ways of thinking and doing ECEfS that enriched child, family and community connections, and strengthened individual, collective and organisational commitments to sustainability.

In this chapter, the authors reiterate how, in the face of the unprecedented impacts of climate change, early childhood leaders, children and their communities have been able to work towards living sustainably. This chapter presents positive actions undertaken by educational leaders implementing ECEfS, highlighting how to live more sustainably within early childhood education communities. Six case studies are presented that illustrate the power of transformative leadership to engage in sustainable practices.

This case study draws from work project-managing the research component and later following up researcher experiences of the multidisciplinary research study Imagining Autism. This brought drama practitioners and researchers together with an evaluation team from psychology. It exemplifies the borders of qualitative research where it meets with art, education, and therapy. While I was positioned within the evaluation team, I was very aware of similarities between the improvisational drama and my doctoral work with children. This case study also highlights the ways in which researchers reflect and position themselves in their research.

Context

Imagining Autism was a collaboration between a team of drama academics and practitioners and two teams of psychologists. The drama researchers had a long history of using improvised drama and puppetry with autistic children and children with other special educational needs. They had seen how their approach had a beneficial effect, increasing capacity for and willingness to engage in social interactions and imaginative play. They had heard from families and teachers about how their work ‘ameliorated’ some of the challenges the children faced day-to-day in allistic society. The two leads were both parents of autistic children and had personal reasons for their interest. However, they were unable to ‘prove’ in the scientific objective sense that what they did had an impact, or establish why. As drama academics they were used to using Practice-as-Research (Barrett and Bolt 2010) which is, rightly or wrongly, often not as highly regarded as other research approaches or methods within academia (Mårtensson et al 2016). They decided to collaborate with psychology researchers to evaluate the impact of a programme of improvised drama to ‘show’ that what they did was of benefit and had value. The study was designed to be systematic and rigorous, involving standardised tests of IQ, numeracy and literacy, momentary time sampled observations of the children in class and at play, and regular ADOS (autistic diagnostic observation schedule) tests. The study involved 27 children aged 7–12 years from three schools in the UK over 18 months to allow for improvements in testing due to developmental changes.

This case study of my work with the international WISC network exemplifies the borders of qualitative research with science and therapy. Integrating and using qualitative research methods – explicitly embodied, creative, and reflective research methods – with scientists and in a scientific context allowed us all the opportunity to reflect on the ways in which research approaches and dissemination are defined by disciplinary boundaries. My work with international Principal Investigators and research groups felt at times like either teaching or group therapy, and definitely required my full set of therapeutic skills and holding, particularly as the bulk of the work was undertaken online throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Context

In the very first chapter of this book, I shared the story of how I came to qualitative research after initially studying chemistry at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. That I ended up leaving science is unfortunately all too common. Women are marginalised in chemistry (Royal Society of Chemistry 2018), with the largest attrition occurring post-PhD (Royal Society of Chemistry 2019a). Although I left during a PhD and not after completion, I contribute to the statistics around the lack of retention for women and other marginalised groups. Those that choose to stay continue to have challenges. The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) recognised that women in the chemical sciences face barriers in publishing (Royal Society of Chemistry 2019b), which can be thought of as akin to microaggressions as defined by Sara Ahmed (2017). Even before the COVID-19 pandemic impacted women academics to a greater extent than men due to uneven loads of caring responsibilities and work distribution (Gabster et al 2020), the RSC stated that the rate of change meant gender parity would never be reached (Royal Society of Chemistry 2019a). The chemical sciences are not unique in this. The scientific community is not known for its diversity with respect to gender (Greider et al 2019), race (Makgoba 2020), sexuality (Smith 2020), or disability (CRAC 2020). Of course, the barriers that face an individual with a protected characteristic are intersectional (Crenshaw 1989) and compound.

The international WISC network was initially created to support a small group, before being scaled to build an intersectional sense of community supporting the retention and progression of women in the field.