Transnational dialogues for sustainability research in early childhood education: a model for building capacity for ESD in universities?

Early childhood education (ECE) within tertiary education has proactively responded to calls to realign preservice teacher education towards more sustainable futures, with Early Childhood Education for Sustainability (ECEfS) developing rapidly as a field of research and practice. An international multi-university initiative that has been a key impetus for ECEfS since 2010 is the Transnational Dialogues in Research in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability (TND). The TND is an international group of experienced and early career researchers that fosters collaborations between individuals and groups of researchers, universities and ECE practitioners. In particular, the group aims to build researcher capacity for instigating projects that activate sustainability learning in ECE. This paper reports on three research projects emerging from the third TND and articulates strategies and processes for sustaining ongoing research dialogues in order to promulgate new fields of sustainability research through its collaborations. The authors believe that this kind of dialogic process offers other universities and disciplines a model for embedding sustainability into their processes and structures.