Transnational Dialogues for sustainability research in early childhood education: A model for building capacity for ESD in universities?

1. Transnational Dialogues for sustainability research in
early childhood education: A model for building capacity
for ESD in universities?
Emery, Davis, Sageidet, Hirst, Boyd & Browder
Corresponding author: Sherridan Emery sherridan.emery@utas.edu.au

2. TransnationalDialoguesinEarlyChildhoodEducationforSustainability
● What is Early Childhood Education for Sustainability?
○ Establishing and growing a field of research
● Participants
○ international colleagues with an interest in research in ECEfS
○ Intergenerational scholars - research students to full professors
● Rationale
○ build capacity for research in ECEfS, focussed towards children as
agentic beings
○ create coalition of researchers to overcome isolation
○ contribute to building researcher ‘track’
○ enhance visibility of ECEfS to impact on policy and practice
● Conditions
○ No funding. Participants encouraged to find own sources
○ Leveraging upon major conferences
○ Focus on research collaborations and outputs

3. TNDinECEfS:Meetings1,2,3
TND 1: Stavanger, Norway 2010
TND 2: Brisbane,
Australia 2011
TND 3: Stavanger,
Norway, 2015

4. TND3inStavenger,2015

5. TND3.2:catchupofmembersatOMEPconference,KoreaJuly2016

6. HistoryoftheTND
○ Background: The field of ECEfS had a very small
research base (Davis, 2009)
○ 2010: Prof. Julie Davis, Australia, and Prof. Eva
Johansson, Norway, initiated the first meeting
○ Intentions: a forum for international researchers
to share multi-national, multi-cultural and multi
disciplinary perspectives and experiences
○ Goal: provoking interest and ideas for future
collaborative research, publications, scholarly
exchanges and mentoring
○ Initial outcomes: collaborative research proposals
and papers, a submission to the deliberations that
proceded the UN Rio+20 conference in 2012

7. ResearchProjectsEmergingfromTND3
● Children’s Webs of Connectedness in ECEfS
● ECEfS in Early Years Curriculum Frameworks
● ECEfS in Preservice Teacher Education

8. Linesofflight….
● Example of outcomes (England)
Dialogue from TND 3 has resulted in multiple ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1987)
○ Routledge text 2016:Boyd, Hirst & Siraj-Blatchford Understanding Sustainability in
Early Childhood Education across the UK
○ Embedding the EYFS into the Eco-schools Programme
○ Presentations OMEP UK (May 2016)
○ The Cambridge Primary Review London (Number 4 relates to Sustainability)
○ Embed sustainability and global citizenship in educational policy and practice,
giving practical meaning to the 2015 UN agenda of ESD.
○ Education for Sustainability within Early Childhood Studies; Higher Education as a
site for collaboration and Inquiry (October 2016)

9. Outcomes&futureplans
● Outcomes
○ Routledge text 2014: 30 authors; 10 countries
○ Translated into Korean (2015)
○ Numerous papers published
○ Numerous joint conference presentations
○ Thesis examiners
● Future Plans
○ Special edition International Journal of EC (2017)
○ TND4 to be held in Canada in 2017
○ Continue to expand loose membership in a controlled way

10. LessonsLearned?
● Lines of flight demonstrating the power of collaboration
as a transformative tool. Sue Elliott talked about
developing the ‘patches of green’(Davis & Elliott, 2015).
● From patches of green to weaving webs.
● How is this a model for building capacity for ESD in
universities?

11. references
Davis, J. and Elliot, S. (2014) Research in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability:
International perspectives and provocations. London: Routledge.
Deleuze, G and Guatarri, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia.
London: University of Minnesota Press.

12. ContactInformation
● Sherridan Emery (Australia)- sherridan.emery@utas.edu.au
● Julie M. Davis (Australia) - j.davis@qut.edu.au
● Barbara Maria Sageidet (Norway)- barbara.sageidet@uis.no
● Nicky Hirst (United Kingdom) - N.J.Hirst@ljmu.ac.uk
● Diane Boyd (United Kingdom) - D.J.Boyd@ljmu.ac.uk
● Jamison K. Browder (USA)- jkbrowder@hotmail.com