Conference Agenda

The state of work-related wellbeing of early childhood educators is alarming both internationally and in European context, a concern that has been extensively examined within early childhood education research (Li et al., 2024). One promising approach to address the issue is to strengthen work engagement (Schaufeli et al., 2002) by providing educators with working conditions that align with their needs (Yang et al., 2025). This study explores the work engagement experienced by educators who spend a substantial portion of their working hours outdoors in nature. In the other Nordic countries, comparable practices are often described as nature kindergartens (Alme & Reime, 2021). In Finland, however, usually only one or a few child groups within a daycare centre spend most of their daily activities outdoors, while the remaining groups operate in traditional settings indoors. Also, nature groups and indoor groups apply the same curriculum that is required in all Finnish ECE. For these reasons, the Finnish model is more accurately referred to in this text as nature groups rather than nature kindergartens. As educators in nature groups have often actively chosen these working conditions, this context provides a compelling example of a well-fitting work environment that may foster work engagement. Previous research suggests that outdoor activities can increase work engagement (Salonen et al., 2018), yet the underlying factors that explain the connection between working outdoors and work engagement remain unclear. This study aims to analyze educators' perceptions of their work engagement and to examine the phenomenon of outdoor teaching in relation to the experiences it provides. The research questions (RQ) guiding this study are: 

RQ1. What is the level of work engagement among early childhood educators in nature groups? (quantitative) 

RQ2. What characterizes high work engagement among early childhood educators in nature groups? (qualitative) 

In this research, early childhood educators’ wellbeing is conceptualized as a changing state influenced by individual and relational factors, the work environment, and socio-cultural-political contexts (Cumming & Wong, 2019). Work-related wellbeing is understood as part of the overall context in which it is experienced, and a holistic model is used to illustrate this, describing different environments and their connection to individual wellbeing. Factors related to work engagement are examined through the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, which seeks to explain the job resources and demands that influence wellbeing (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017). Work engagement refers to a persistent, positive emotional state related to work (Maslach et al., 2001), characterized by a generally positive attitude toward all aspects of work rather than specific tasks (Schaufeli et al., 2002). The study examines which factors associated with outdoor teaching contribute to work engagement, operationalized through three dimensions: vigor, dedication and absorption (Maslach et al., 2001). Vigor reflects high energy, resilience and willingness to invest effort in work, even under challenging conditions. Dedication involves perceiving work as meaningful and inspiring, feeling pride, and embracing challenges. Absorption refers to deep concentration and immersion in work, often accompanied by a sense of time passing quickly. Work engagement manifests as sustained work motivation and a positive attitude toward all aspects of work (Schaufeli et al., 2002).

This study investigates whether time spent in nature is associated with higher levels of work engagement among early childhood educators. In addition, we will investigate what exactly it is about the outdoor work environment that increases work engagement. By exploring this connection, the study aims to contribute to the scientific discussion by proposing that providing educators with work environments aligned with their preferences may enhance work engagement, thereby improving the attractiveness and retention within the field.

In the context of a global polycrisis characterised by armed conflicts, democratic crises, structural inequalities, and profound digital transformations, educational scholarship is increasingly called upon to critically interrogate its epistemic conditions and its public role. From this perspective, the present contribution argues that peace education constitutes a privileged field for examining the tension between the production of knowledge and the possibility of responsible educational action.

Peace is understood here not as a negative state defined by the absence of war, but as a positive, relational, and political process, oriented towards the transformation of forms of structural and cultural violence that permeate educational and social contexts (Galtung, 1969; 2014). This perspective is rooted in the tradition of critical and democratic pedagogy, which conceives education as a dialogical and cooperative practice (Dewey, 1916; Freire, 1970), and finds its normative foundation in the nexus between rights, democracy, and peace, as theorised by Kant and further developed by Bobbio. Without the recognition and protection of fundamental rights there can be no democracy, and without democracy the minimal conditions for the peaceful resolution of conflicts are undermined (Kant, 1795/2013; Bobbio, 1990).

Within this framework, peace is not merely a curricular content, but an orienting horizon for educational action, directly addressing the public responsibility of pedagogical knowledge. Arendt’s reflections on action, speech, and plurality allow educational contexts to be understood as public spaces in which peace is constructed through practices of mutual recognition, initiative, and nonviolent conflict management, thereby resisting a purely technical or procedural reduction of educational experience (Arendt, 1958/2002). Peace education thus becomes a space in which knowing and acting cannot be separated: educational knowledge is always situated, normative, and intrinsically action-oriented, as it takes shape within relationships among subjects who share a common world and are publicly accountable for it.

It is precisely from this inseparability between knowledge and action that peace education enables a critical interrogation of contemporary transformations in knowledge ecosystems. In a scenario marked by informational acceleration, discursive simplification, polarisation, and the spread of disinformation, peace education foregrounds the centrality of the public use of reason and of educational responsibility in sustaining practices of critical judgement, deliberation, and democratic coexistence (UNESCO, 2023). In this sense, peace education does not merely respond to ongoing transformations, but functions as an epistemic space in which the quality of educational knowledge itself, and its capacity to orient action in complex and conflictual contexts, is called into question.

Understanding ecosystems as complex systems requires learners to explain ecological phenomena by reasoning about indirect relationships and multi-step causal connections rather than relying solely on direct cause–effect explanations (Mehren et al., 2018; Mambrey et al., 2022). Research on science education has consistently demonstrated that middle school students tend to interpret food webs through monocausal or linear reasoning patterns, which limits their ability to recognize indirect effects and feedback-based population dynamics (Hogan, 2000; Grotzer & Basca, 2003; Hokayem & Gotwals, 2016). Such reasoning patterns often result in static and hierarchical conceptions of ecosystems, where interactions are reduced to isolated predator–prey relationships instead of dynamic system-level processes (Webb & Boltt, 1990; Griffiths & Grant, 1985). Reasoning about indirect ecological relationships, is closely associated with system modeling skills, as learners are expected to trace causal influences across multiple system components and trophic levels (Mehren et al., 2018; Ben-Zvi Assaraf & Orion, 2010). Mehren (2018) and Mambrey et al.(2020 ) state that system modeling probe students’ ability to reason about indirect, multi-step, and cross-level relationships, such as how a change in one species could affect another species that is not directly connected in the same food chain.Previous studies have emphasized that the ability to model indirect effects represents a critical threshold in the development of advanced systems thinking, marking a transition from localized explanations toward holistic understandings of ecosystem dynamics (Grotzer & Solis, 2015; Mambrey et al., 2020). Empirical evidence, however, suggests that many students struggle to construct such multi-step causal models, particularly when feedback mechanisms and non-adjacent interactions are involved (Hogan, 2000; Hokayem & Gotwals, 2016; Hokayem, Ma, & Jin 2015; Mambrey et al., 2022).

Based on this theoretical background, the present study focuses on students’ reasoning about indirect relationships within a single ecological system, namely a meadow food web, as a context for examining system modeling skills (Mehren et al., 2018; Mambrey et al., 2020; 2022; Sweeny & Sterman, 2007 ). In line with this focus, the study addresses the following research question: To what extent are students able to reason about indirect relationships within a single individual system (the meadow food web) and model multi-step causal connections?

It should be underlined here that the meadow food web diagram used in the study includes daisies as producers, caterpillars and snails as primary consumers, birds and mice as secondary consumers, and foxes as the top predator, with energy input provided by the sun. Although a directed feeding arrow from snails to birds is represented in the diagram, this depiction requires students not merely to identify a single-step relationship but to model indirect causal connections by considering multiple trophic pathways and system-level interactions within the food web (Mambrey et al., 2020).

Multiple international policy frameworks relating to the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development advocate for protecting the natural environment to build future resilience from individual to societal levels. These include the United Nations Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (United Nations, 2015), which promotes education as a mechanism for engendering ‘agency’ in young people with regards to building resilience in their communities. Despite this policy recognition of the role of education, recent insights from the field of practice by Benavot et al. (2024) reveal that new approaches are needed to capture the multiplicity of education for resilience initiatives’ (p.1). Another problem is that educational research on the topic of resilience to natural hazards tends to favour an instrumentalisation of education (Säfström, 2022)—i.e. focusing on ‘what’ should be learnt—as opposed to understanding the socialised processes and considerations of ‘how’ (Kitagawa, 2021) and ‘why’ (Biesta, 2025) education should be purposed.

Given the scale and unprecedented nature of recent technological, political, and socio-ecological change, there is a heightened ‘urgency for radical reimaginings of education’ (Yliniva et al., 2024) to inform policy and practice in Europe and beyond. In relation to natural hazards and associated disasters, education will inevitably involve facing new practical challenges of daily life resulting from the alteration of the individualised self relation to socialised forms of self that capture complex social, cultural, affective and cognitive processes (Illeris, 2018). The purpose of this study is to move the debate forwards through fresh understandings of what could constitute as moving towards more meaningful (and possibly transformative) educational approaches for this topic by considering the ‘how ‘and ‘why’ of education, particularly with regards to how socialised forms of education can inspire agency in learners with regards to recent considerations about how to think about community resilience (Stein et al., 2022). In considering these issues and gaps, we hope to promote an expanded educational purpose for this topic beyond standard instrumentalised, knowledge transmission approaches.

As a way to conceptualise other forms of education for this topic the study applies Biesta’s (2013) three distinctions between the functions of education: 1) ‘qualification’ (acquisition of skills and knowledge), 2) ‘socialisation’ (the process of integrating into societal, political and cultural norms and practices), and 3) ‘subjectification’ (appreciation of the subjectivity of the learner. In particular, an emphasis is placed on the ‘socialisation’ and ‘subjectification’ functions to progress ideas of what constitutes as ‘meaningful education.’ We also apply a relationality for educational encounters in the context of social paradigms of disaster through Paul Ricœur’s (1992) ethical philosophy of Oneself as Another as an ontological scaffold for Biesta’s conceptualisation of ‘socialised’ and ‘subjectification’ education domains. Oneself as Another invites an understanding of an ethically oriented and “participatory experience of a Self” when we become other than ourselves (Pellauer & Dauenhauer, 2022), which occurs epistemologically through enacting Ricoeur’s dialectical identity concept of sameness (ipse) and changeability or responsiveness (ipseity).

To summarise, the research seeks to reframe education on this topic through a deeper understanding of an ethically derived contribution to education that can be made by applying a Biesta’s three educational domains and Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another as a relational interpretive heuristic. Informed by Carol Bacchii’s (2016) ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be? approach, our research questions in relation to disaster resilience education consist of:

1. How can socialised and relational education theory and practice contribute to transformative styles of DRE?
2. How can educational design and practice for DRE be oriented through social and ethical frameworks?
3. How is DRE translated for socially transformative resilience across diverse socio-cultural contexts?