Literacy and sustainability education: considering children in emerging pedagogies

Environmentalists and sustainability educators suggest that the greatest concern for our youngest generation may be the environment and how to ensure sustainable use of the world's resources (Elliot & Davis, 2009) into the future. However we know very little about what young children know and understand about the environment, sustainability, and just sharing of resources, nor how they represent these understandings to themselves and others. This paper presents findings from a multi-site, international study which investigates the connections of and between literacy and sustainability across eight early childhood sites in two countries - Australia and Finland. In order to gain greater insight, we couple sustainability and literacy - two vital concerns of early childhood education in current times - to consider how language and children's worlds are connected. Our aim is to investigate how children name their worlds when asked to consider sustainability, and when place is foregrounded in the contexts in which they play and learn.