Conference Agenda

Education today is challenged to address the climate crisis, biodiversity loss and migration, intensifying shifting patterns of settlement and a growing diversity all over the globe. The words “sustainability” and “diversity,” in this context, had become standard public, organizational and policy injunctions and a normative call in academic research. The ubiquitous use of the terms “sustainability” and “diversity” signals also ways in which social heterogeneity and environmental changes are problematized and governed, especially in the Global North. In consequence, the terms of “sustainability” and “diversity” became increasingly flexible and plastic, besides becoming notions through which or in the name of which to govern, regulate and educate, “something that needs to be understood, managed, acted upon, celebrated, considered, rethought…” (Matejskova & Antonsich, 2015, p. 2.). This symposium seeks to highlight first, the flexibility and plasticity of these terms as they appear in various early childhood and continuing education curricula as well as in children’s understanding of the world, reproducing notions of the “other” and human exceptionalism. Second, we pay special attention to how these notions intersect with ideas of the nation, nature and childhood, highlighting the oddness, contradictoriness and de/politicization of these terms in policies, curricula and the prescribed practices they produce. In general, this symposium returns to the classical sociological question as to how current challenges, environmental and societal conditions, result in specific educational policies, ideas and processes (Weber, 1921; cf. Becker, 2019).

The three papers are tied together with their specific focus on the nation-state as the prime organizing political and social force (Gans 2003) and nationalism as an effort to create commonality in a group of people by promoting national subject formation and inculcating the aspirations of citizenship. A focus on the nation helps us to question current national education discourses in light of diversity and sustainability, levels of inclusiveness in society and how responses to these national discourses can and do occur, and how debates about diversity and exclusion take shape (first and second papers). It also helps us to highlight how intersections of nation and nature, on the one hand, contours national subject formation through nature, and how through the curricula attachments to the national land or ‘nature’ are being shaped. On the other hand, we show the contradictions between nature and nation discourses within the frames of sustainability and diversity (second and third papers).

Historically, the state’s interest in children and its citizens has always been about a nation’s future (Millei & Imre, 2016). Today, the multiple existential threats that we have brought upon ourselves question the very possibility of a future for humanity. This necessitates education to be reimagined and reconfigured beyond the nation and stewardship for nature (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020). The heterogeneous relations included in diversity needs to be expanded to include “more-than-human socialities” (Tsing, 2013). Social justice expanded to ecological social justice that pertains to ‘how we live in the world’ and ‘how to create conditions for life’ in an interdependent manner with other-than-human companions. Education enlivened with these kinds of worldly relation making entails “the recommunalizing, reconnecting, relocalizing, de-individualizing, in short, re-realizing ourselves otherwise” with this new politics of relationality (Escobar, 2021, p. 8). Agency in this politics of education radically reconfigures the nation as a more-than-human sociality, expands solidarity, and replaces exceptionalism – human or national – with terms of a radically inclusive and interdependent world.

International migration is, as argued by de Haas, Castles and Miller (2020) one of the most emotive issues of our times, raising intense feelings in relation to national identity and belonging, as well as security issues. Since long back, integration of newly arrived migrants has been a debated issue and courses for newly arrived adult migrants have been offered, most building on learning the language of the new country. However, since the beginning of the 21st century, courses with the aim of strengthening and transmitting the new countries’ norms and values have been increasingly introduced and has become one of the dominant migrant integration policies in Western Europe (Heinemann, 2017; Joppke, 2007). This paper aims to bring empirically based knowledge in this educational field, building on participant observations in civic orientation classes for newly arrived adult migrants in Sweden (see von Brömssen et al., 2022; Milani et al., 2021). This case study explores the overarching constructed discourse about the Other through language, pronoun patterns and the attribution of positive and negative judgements about society and ways of living and being (Statham, 2022). The overarching discourse constructs Sweden as a “success story” where most things are arranged and regulated (Hirdman, 2000) by the Swedish state and its welfare systems. We will present this overall structured nationalist discourse by drawing on examples from interactions about nature, religion and education in the civic orientation classes. This research is particularly relevant at this historical juncture because such educational initiatives have become tied to citizenship requirements (Borevi, Jensen & Mouritsen, 2017; Larin, 2020). This is also the case in Sweden where the neo-nationalist “Tidö-agreement” signed by the newly elected government states that civic orientation and knowledge of Swedish will become legal requirements for permanent residence and Swedish citizenship. We argue in this paper that civic orientation courses for newly arrived migrants reproduce an overarching discourse about the Other, which is embedded in nationalist and neo-nationalist sentiments and hardly can contribute to integration into the Swedish society.

Borevi, K., Jensen, K. K. & Mouritsen, P. (2017). The civic turn of immigrant integration policies in the Scandinavian welfare states. Comparative Migration Studies, 5, 9. von Brömssen, K., Milani, T., Spehar, A. & Bauer, S. (2022). “Swedes’ relations to their government are based on trust.” Banal Nationalism in Civic Orientation Courses for Newly Arrived Adult Migrants in Sweden. Futures of Education, Culture and Nature - Learning to Become, 1(1), 71-88. de Haas, H., Castles, S. & Miller, M. J. (2020). The age of migration: International population movements in the modern world, 6th ed., Bloomsbury Academic. Heinemann, A. M. B. (2017) The making of ‘good citizens’: German courses for migrants and refugees, Studies in the Education of Adults, 49(2), 177-195. Hirdman, Y. (2000). Att lägga livet tillrätta: studier i svensk folkhemspolitik. Stockholm University, Sweden. Larin, S. J. (2020). Is it really about values? Civic nationalism and migrant integration, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46(1), 127-141. Milani, T., Bauer, S., Carlson, M., Spehar, A. & von Brömssen, K. (2021). Citizenship as status, habitus and acts: Language requirements and civic orientation in Sweden. Citizenship Studies, 25(6), 756-772. Statham, S. (2022). Critical Discourse Analysis. A Practical Introduction to Power in Language. Routledge.

Drawing on a project carried out by an international group of scholars, this presentation aims to discuss the ways in which childhood, nature and nation are entangled in early childhood education curricula in Australia, the Nordic countries (Sweden and Norway) and post-socialist countries experiencing the revival of nationalistic tendencies (Hungary, Poland). While the links between both children/childhood and nature, and children and nation have been long explored in research (Gullestad, 1997; Millei & Imre, 2016), we situated our analysis in the context of the multiple crises, foremost the climate crisis, that the planet now faces. The aim was to reflect on the question whether the conceptualizations of childhood, nature and nation entanglements in the curricula enable the recreation of education for societies experiencing multiple crises (CWRC, 2020), and to develop alternative imaginaries of naturecultures for early childhood education curricula where politics focuses on terra that sustains life on Earth. Several conceptualizations of linkages between children, nation and nature can be reconstructed in the curricula. Most of them uphold human exceptionalism and a notion of nature as homeland tied to patriotism and empty of life. These include: - nature directly linked to the nation, with children learning about their countries' natural environment, developing admiration for its beauty and engaging in activities carried out in nature that deem to constitute the national identity, which can be interpreted as instrumentalizing nature in the ‘pedagogy of nation’ (Millei, 2018); - nature as an object for children to learn about rather than learning with, which works to retain the nature/culture and learning subject/learnt-about-object binaries (CWRC, 2020; Malone, 2016); - nature as something to be protected through actions based on human-invented technologies, including by children posited as nature's carers who safeguard it, a conceptualization that limits the children-nature relationship to stewardship (Taylor, 2017); - children as connected with and belonging to nature, in a wider network of interconnected living organisms and abiotic environment, a conceptualization that potentially opens up the possibility to move beyond the human- and nation-centric approach to nature and start learning to become with the world (CWRC, 2020). We argue that in the context of the planetary environmental crisis, the narrow conceptualizations on nature within the national boundaries and as an outside object of children's learning and care that dominate in the curricula are untenable. For education to respond to the current situation, new ways of thinking about children and nature are required.

Common Worlds Research Collective (CWRC). (2020). Learning to become with the world: Education for future survival. Paper commissioned for the UNESCO Futures of Education report. Gullestad, M. (1997). A passion for boundaries. Reflections on connections between the everyday lives of children and discourses on the nation in contemporary Norway. Childhood, 4(1), 19–42. Malone, K. (2016). Posthumanist approaches to theorizing children’s human-nature relations. In K. Nairn & P. Kraftl (Eds.), Space, place, and environment (pp. 185–206). Springer. Millei, Z., & Imre, R. (Eds.). (2016). Childhood and nation: Interdisciplinary engagements. Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, A. (2017). Beyond stewardship: Common world pedagogies for the anthropocene. Environmental Education Research, 23(10), 1448–1461. 10.1080/13504622.2017.1325452

Early childhood / educational environmental imaginations transmit national, global and planetary views of the world through texts, visual representations and material objects. These representations produce politics, including nationalism and globalism, and play a part in policy making as well as in how children learn to view and relate to the world. Education, however, needs a new political attractor during anthropogenic climate change that differently orient political engagement with the world for education. We think with the four political attractors Latour (2018) describes: the national, global, planetary and Earth, and Cobb’s (1977) notion of the child’s primary relatedness to the world. We explore children’s environmental imagination in their drawings and associated stories to highlight the kinds of politics present in their views promoted by current imaginations. Then, we spin these stories further with speculative experiences of our own relation with the world together with Latour’s ideas and point to a new political object the Earth and Earthly politics for education.

Cobb, E. M. (1977). The ecology of imagination in childhood. Spring Publications Latour, B. (2018). Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Oxford UK: Polity Press.