Conference Agenda

The Scandinavian and European approaches to teaching in forest schools is pedagogically diverse (Buchan 2015; Norðdahl & Jóhannesson 2015). For example, some countries follow prescriptive forest school practices that include specific and tailored teacher training, whereas others have few formalised pedagogical practices (Leather 2018; Waite & Goodenough 2018). In Australia, there is a tradition of learning in the outdoors and forest schools have been influential in the development of Australian nature kindergartens, often known as bush kinders (Christiansen et al. 2018). This type of early years’ outdoor learning gained momentum, predominantly stemming from one pilot bush kinder that began in 2011 in a major metropolitan city. Since then, bush kinder programs have rapidly increased in their number and popularity. As bush kinders in Australia continue to proliferate, our research into bush kinders has found that there are a range of pedagogical approaches that guides teachers’ practice with nature pedagogy. Important to this in Australia is the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) document (DEEWR, 2009) which provides a broad perspective on the benefits that learning in the outdoors has for children.

Bush kinder approaches and structures are emergent, depending on factors such as context, staffing and policy development. As this study illustrates, guidance provided to educators and bush kinder teaching approaches are not necessarily a focus in initial teacher education courses. Professional learning specifically for bush kinders is only just developing suggesting that experienced teachers are reliant on their own knowledge and experience of teaching in the outdoors (Campbell & Speldewinde 2018). This is important because the bush kinder context is one that presents a range of challenges that differ from the traditional classroom environment. Limited teacher education in this area provides early childhood professionals with a predicament as they determine their pedagogical approach without the backing of empirical research. There is growing but limited scholarship that often speaks to contexts that differ significantly from those that the individual teacher experience. This creates the dilemma of what is appropriate pedagogically for bush kinders. Our fieldwork led us to consider the research question: How does STEM teaching and learning occur in nature-based settings such as a bush kinder?

The fieldwork observations associated with this research project drew our attention to the different pedagogical approaches used by the teachers we observed. The ethnographic research method drawn on for this study (Speldewinde, 2022a), is one that allows for an emergent research design, drawing on the work from Stan and Humberstone (2011). We were able to focus our investigation of the field sites to the way educators were approaching teaching STEM in the bush kinder context (Speldewinde, 2022) and the types of pedagogical approaches educators were applying. This presentation examines those different pedagogical approaches in bush kinders using an ethnographic lens of how pedagogy translates into STEM teaching and learning practice in this early years learning context. Ethnography was valuable here because it enabled us to observe bush kinder teacher behaviour as it occurred (Speldewinde, 2022a). This is important as bush kinder pedagogies are currently evolving with more and more sites proliferating. Ethnography also allowed us to consider the potential and opportunities for bush kinder teaching as we were not limited to one ongoing event, but rather many events occurring simultaneously. As this was the case, we employed a number of ethnographic methods to gather data, which included listening, watching, and participating. ‘Being with people as they conducted their everyday duties’ both regularly and fleetingly (Forsey 2010, p. 569) lent itself to us considering ethnography as an appropriate methodology.

General description on research questions, objectives

Sustainability issues are characterized by a high degree of complexity and uncertainties, without obvious answers (Lönngren & Van Poeck, 2021) and researchers are investigating how to handle this in educational settings (Bascope, Perasso & Reiss, 2019). Sustainability problems often contain conflicting opinions concerning how to act, and to avoid normative teaching a teacher can stimulate questioning and critically assessing habits and what is taken for granted (Van Poeck, 2019). It is therefore important for preschool teachers to highlight different perspectives, values ​​and arguments in the teaching situation. A pluralistic teaching that links facts and values ​​can afford children to try different proposals for sustainable solutions (Hedefalk, Caiman & Ottander, 2022). Hence, the teacher needs to create learning situations where children listen to each other and challenge each other’s ideas with the common ambition to solve a sustainability problem (Englund 2006).

Researchers also suggest that the teacher needs to listen to children’s questions (Halvars, 2021) to understand their perspectives, to create teaching situations where agency is at a fore (Siry & Brendel, 2016). It appears to be a consensus among researchers that little attention is paid to children’s agency about sustainability issues (e.g. Borg & Pramling Samuelsson, 2022). Borg and Pramling Samuelsson (2022) have investigated agency in the Swedish curriculum for preschool. The result show that in the curriculum, children is described as competent to actively participate and influence their learning. In this study we investigate how the curriculum's goals is translated into actions in practice. Researchers mean that teachers often show an urge to take over the teaching content which hinder children's agency (Grindheim et al., 2019). Hence, for agency to arise, teacher’s actions seem to be important.

Agency is not something children “have”, it emerges in interactions (Caiman & Lundegård, 2014). We broadly defined agency as children’s ability to influence their own learning in a teaching situation, having your voice heard and your opinions respected (cf. Hedefalk, Caiman, Ottander, & Almqvist, 2020; Halvars, 2021). Houen (2016) discovered that teacher’s questions in line with “I wonder…” opened up for agency. Halvars and colleagues (2022) took another focus; how agency emerge when preschool teachers immerse themselves into children’s questions.

In this study we investigate what enables agency by analyzing preschool teachers’ actions in teaching situations. Research question: what actions result in agency in a teaching project for sustainable development?

Theoretical framework

To understand the meaning making process in a teaching situation, we use pragmatism (Dewey, 1938/1997). According to this action-oriented theory, meaning making is observable in actions and in a context. The context in this study is the location of a preschool where children participate in teaching situations with a focus to develop knowledge about sustainable consumption. The analysis of meaning making begins when these children encounter an urgent problem that occurs as the children's previous habits are challenged (c.f Van Poeck & Östman, 2020 p. 6). In this case, the teacher creates a problem as she questions the sustainability of the fruit these children are consuming. We use epistemological move analysis (EMA) to analyze how the teacher privileges certain actions and exclude others in the teaching situation. By privileging some things over others, meaning-making takes a certain direction and in this study we are interested in what actions privilege agency in teaching situations with the aim to develop knowledge about sustainable consumption. Previous research has found several moves, most common in science education is: confirming, reconstructing, instructive, generating and reorienting moves (Lidar, Lundqvist & Östman, 2006).

We live in peculiar times, a time where humans relationship to nature is high on the agenda and referred to in various ways: as Anthropocene (Crutzen, 2006; Steffen et al., 2007) as Capitalocene (Malm, 2019; Malm & Hornborg, 2014; Moore, 2016) and Chthulucene (Haraway, 2016) just to mention some. In this study the Anthropocene concept, originally a suggested name of a geological time period to mark humans’ substantial impact on planet earth (Steffen et al., 2007), is used as an underpinning to stress the need for studies concerning human/nature relations in this peculiar time. In Sweden “nature” can be seen as a part of preschools aim and practice in several ways. This is stemming from a long tradition of connecting children to nature through natural environments but also as a part of the educational system, articulated in the curricula connected to science education, sustainable development, health and wellbeing (Halldén, 2011; National Agency of Education, 2018). More than half a million children in Sweden attend preschool which is roughly 85 percent of all children in the age 1-5 and 95 percent of all children over 4 years (SKR, 2020). Preschool is today a significant part of childhood and preschool is not only situated in these challenging times, of Anthropocene, but education is often also seen as a part of the solution to rising challenges (Gilbert, 2022; Jickling & Sterling, 2017; Somerville & Williams, 2015; Wolff et al., 2020). With preschool now as a part of the Swedish educational system situated, in the time of Anthropocene, it becomes relevant to further investigate and understand nature’s role in preschool, how it is enacted and upheld, with children, preschool staff, materials, surroundings, organization, policy, ideas, and discourses.

In a literature review Sjögren (2020) looks at how the relationship between children and nature is described in articles with a focus on Anthropocene in early childhood education (ECE) and comes to the conclusion that the most common view of the child’s relationship to nature can be described as entangled. This entangled child is described in the articles as “interdependent”, “relational” and “connected”, and builds on the notion that it is impossible to separate culture from nature (Sjögren, 2020 s. 5-6). This review also shows that when a post human perspective is used to approach nature and ECE there seems to be a lack of power perspectives (Sjögren, 2020). With an actor-network theory (ANT) approach this PhD project takes an interest in not only that children are entangled but how these entanglements are created, enacted, and upheld, by whom and where. These aspects of ANT, developed by for instance Mol (1999, 2002, 2010) also says something about the power relations between the actors involved, which means all actors, between human actors as well as other-than human actors. With an ANT inspired ethnographic method, the idea with the present project is to understand how “nature” is made, upheld, and translated, in an organization as preschool, that has such a strong tie to nature both historically and in the present.